design activism

I read an interesting piece in the UC Berkeley Alumni magazine, California (yes I’m an alum) about how a single statistic can profoundly change our perspective on an issue—but only if we are presented with it in a certain way (“Numberstruck” by Pat Joseph). UC Berkeley’s Michael Ranney conducted research in which he asked […]

Previously I wrote about the notion of the economy as being made up of three sectors—public, private, and nonprofit. But recently I’ve seen a few references to “the fourth sector.” The term refers to enterprises, sometimes called social enterprises, that straddle the for-profit and nonprofit divide.

social enterprises seem to ask,
“how much is enough?”
As one organization, […]

Time to look at some case studies of design activism. Let’s start with a couple of recent projects dealing with the issue of migration between the US and Mexico.
Day Labor Station
The first project is a day laborer station devised by a nonprofit architecture studio in San Francisco, Public Architecture. Covered in an article by Kirstin […]

link to it over on the right side there, under the “pages” heading…

Some designers are activists, that is to say, they take action (typically within the context of a contentious issue) intended to bring about change on behalf of a wronged or excluded group. But once designers are out of the picture, have moved on to the next job, can artifacts in themselves be activists? Can buildings, […]