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… Continue Reading
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”… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
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),… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
In the previous post for this series on ethics I looked generally at how activism is typically triggered by ethical failures, and then examined professional duty of care as an area of ethical responsibility and the types of activism it typically generates. Here I’ll look at some of the ethical issues associated with the production… Continue Reading
I hope that, like me, you are on vacation during parts of this July and August, so you have not noticed the scarcity of my posts over the past few weeks. And now here is a post, and you may also be thinking, “oh no, ethics is too heavy for a holiday.” But at heart,… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
I recently learned about two resources that seem pertinent to design activism. The first is an upcoming conference called “A Better World by Design” to be held November 7-9th at Brown University in Providence RI (USA). What they say “A Better World by Design asks the question today’s designers, engineers, and economists should be asking.… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
A Recent post by John Thackara on Design Observer led me to consider the prospects of design activism gone wrong. Thackara suggests that recent efforts by Architecture for Humanity and AMD, to design and build community internet centers, have missed the boat, as have efforts to design $100 laptops. In his view, other mobile technologies… Continue Reading… Continue Reading