design activism

Making potential climate change flooding visible and enabling us to discuss adaptation. The Watermarks Project of Bristol, all images courtesy of Chris Bodle and the Watermarks Project As a U.S. citizen I’m trying to decide my own position on climate legislation “The American Clean Energy and Security Act,” aka the Waxman-Markey bill (pros/cons via Worldchanging), [...]

Activism is all about taking action to bring about change. It is, ultimately, about disrupting the status quo. There are many ways to create the disruption, but when we start looking at how designers do it, one approach is to involve people in a process. It strikes me that “process” has a few different dimensions. [...]

An interesting Portugese campaign (via Osocio and social design notes) used crosswalk stripes made out of the names of pedestrians killed in car accidents to at once remember those lost as well as call attention to pedestrian safety. The curb message says,”One quarter of the victims of auto accidents are pedestrians.” Memorials and remembering the [...]

 Enabling Cards help pair seniors with young lodgers In this last part of the series on how designers are making use of card decks for social and environmental change, we look at a European case. Designers Francois Jegou and A. Bernagozzi collaborated with the Paris-based design school, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, on ways [...]

 The Garden Suit: Asparagus In this part of the series we look at a designer’s deck of cards aimed at cultivating a sense of place and at penetrating complexity of place. Jane Wolff’s Delta Primer Playing Cards are a companion to her book, Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta (William Stout Architectural [...]

Cultural Preservation Cards for Iraq Sticking with the “game” theme (see the last post on computer games), This post starts a 3-part series on card decks and how design activists have been using them. Designers have a history with card decks, and among the more prominent examples are the Eames’ House of Cards (“Play it again” [...]

I’m showing my prejudice here, but computer and video games would ordinarily be the last place I would expect to find “socially responsible design.” Yet recent offerings prove me wrong. A range of new “serious games” (instructional, informational and educational) are tackling issues from obesity to climate change. One example is Games for Change (G4C), [...]

Several organizations are attempting to help designers find activist opportunities — although none of the organizations call their opportunities “activist.” Sounds too political? There are a few different models, from online, searchable databases of designers and organizations in need, to organizations that themselves do the work and take on volunteers to help them. Below are [...]

In this series I’ve tried to highlight a range of ethical issues that underpin design activism. At the start I referred you to my colleague, Tim Jordan. He says that whatever activist do, their underlying motivation is a sense of what is morally better than the status quo. Often activists even put forward a vision [...]

In previous posts in this series I’ve dealt with the ethics underlying design activism in terms of professional ethics and the ethics of production (labor, environment, consumer). In this post I’m looking at ethical issues associated with vulnerable populations. Since I’ve argued in part 1 that activism, for my purposes, typically results from an ethical [...]