One newspaper story I came across this week was about a young woman, fashion designer Tala Raassi, who as a teenager in Iran, had been punished with 40 lashes for wearing indecent clothing according to Islamic law. Upon emigration, her motivation to design swimwear and to turn her design work toward causes, grew directly from the experience (The Sunday Times front section, 29 August 2010). Her t-shirt line, lipstick revolution, pays tribute to women fighting for gender freedom and the name refers to the early years of the Islamic revolution in Iran when women wearing red lipstick was considered an insult to Islamic martyrs. That sounds authentic.

Tala Raassi, Photo Credit: Melissa Golden/Redux

In the style section of the same newspaper was an article by a celebrity jewelry designer, Laura Bailey, who tells of her experience creating a line of fair-trade jewelry with the company Made, at their workshops in at the slum Kibera in Kenya. Bailey didn’t seek out the chance to design for Made, rather, it was a challenge to her that came from Made via a mutual celebrity friend. Although Bailey was already active with some charities, responding to this request made an impact on her. She writes, “What I’ve seen today has changed the way I feel about shopping — I want to know that whoever makes my clothes, jewellery or bags has been properly respected and rewarded” (The Sunday Times Style section, 29 August 2010, p 28).

And what does Made accomplish? Made says,
“Established in 2005, the made brand unites designer fashion with the principles of Fair and Ethical Trading, as an alternative approach to conventional trade. Our goods are produced by independent artisans and small communities in Africa. We provide living wages and healthy working conditions along with information and business planning to help workers develop sustainable businesses.” That also sounds authentic.

Laura Bailey, photo Made

I also came across the story of Kate Cross, a deaf audiologist, who teamed up with a jewelry designer to create bejewelled hearing aids in an effort to reduce the stigma associated with them. The “hearrings” dissociate hearing aids from geriatric equipment, giving them potential as fashion accessories similar to eyeglasses. Hearing loss is on the rise yet people wait a very long time before admitting they need a hearing aid. This project addresses a growing health problem–again, it sounds authentic.

image from hearrings

Here we have three different motivations. In the first case, the designer is self-motivated to use her work to fight injustices that she herself suffered. In another case, a celebrity responds to a request to design on behalf of a fair-trade effort. She is motivated by others, by a client, but is then changed by the experience. In the third case, a person who is in a minority, in this case by being deaf, deploys the power of design in order to address the problems she and others in her minority experience. This is the case of a user directing design as activism.

Activist Rinku Sen, in her book “Stir It Up,” describes different types of activist work that might help us make sense of these cases. She characterizes activism in these five categories:

organizing: people doing it for themselves—people suffering from an abuse or injustice taking action themselves to correct it such as fighting for civil rights or access to decent housing, and this often leads to new organizations being formed. Community organizing involves the long term engagement and leadership of those who suffer most in current conditions.

services: providing services to those in need, historically services such as job training, legal aid and so forth.

advocacy: lobbying for and acting on behalf of a group in need, without much involvement from that group. An extreme case would be advocating for the environment where it has no means to advocate for itself, but degrees of advocacy exist for many different groups and issues in society.

mobilization: large scale show of concern, such as petition signing or marches, but without expectation of repeat or continued involvement of the participants.

solidarity: efforts to change the terms of cultural discourse, through opinion pieces, framing of the issues and so forth.

Sen notes that these are all legitimate approaches to social change, even though they have their own methods and, perhaps we might add, motivations. (Sen, Jossey Bass Publishers, 2003, p 25). Here we can see, perhaps, how different circumstances of motivation might lead to different types of change work. In turn we might observe that activists blend and move among these different types of “change” work–perhaps as motivations change. The question of authenticity in activism is much less clear when we consider this range of types, or even “degrees” of activism.

None of these types of work is “wrong” and arguably all accomplish something. Probably they accomplish more when they are working in tandem, across a movement. So I don’t think we can dismiss the efforts of large, successful design firms, for example when they get government contracts that end up allowing them to transform the nature of public buildings. Similarly I don’t think we can say that direct engagement of disadvantaged user groups is the only correct way to work for change. Rather, across the board we probably need to keep the notion of integrated strategy foremost.

If your thing is public engagement, then make sure it is synergistic with advocacy and solidarity efforts, and so on. If you’re an advocate, perhaps through the promotion of eco materials and technology, then mind the benefits you might gain from partnering or learning from organizers and mobilization. Recall that social change is a collective effort and there will always be many players on stage as well as different levels of influence. Authenticity of motivation is perhaps less important than what it leads to in these terms.

I’m interested to learn where your motivation, or interest, in design activism comes from–please comment with a few words about this. For the moment my work sits in the solidarity and perhaps advocacy category with opinion and research pieces like this one, but I have moved around in these categories in the past and hope to keep doing so.

MARC itself is interesting because it combines social sciences with architecture and design to “reveal the connections between built environments and societies.” The group has a number of impressive and ambitious research projects going, for example on climate science and urban design, eco-cities, multifaith spaces, radicalisation in the urban environment, and mapping architectural controversies.

In the case of radicalization (or radicalisation, if you’re in the UK), Ralf Brand’s “The Urban Environment: Mirror or Mediator of Radicalisation” (www.urbanpolarisation.org) took the case study cities of Belfast, Beirut, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The project looked at how the urban environment reflects and influences polarisation processes in cities. The project resulted in a very interesting “Charter for Spaces of Positive Encounters” available for perusal on the website. Elsewhere in the Architecture department at Manchester, the projects group aims to engage student work with life outside the university and an example of their work is “Sharing the City” (www.sharingthecity.org.uk).

Another interesting group that presented at the workshop came from the University of Sheffield. The School of Architecture there has an “Agency Research Centre” that focuses on “transformative research into architectural practice and education.” The group also publishes a journal called “field:” (www.field-journal.org) and volume 3, for example, covered agency and the praxis of activism.

One of the ongoing research projects is called “Spatial Agency” which looks beyond “the building” to consider wider practices of spatial production and how architects are both agents but also able to facilitate the involvement of others. The website contains a database of projects and people through which to explore the negotiation, deliberation, and contention that arises in this field of spatial agency, with examples ranging from community builders to known architect’s studios and from famed neighbourhoods to historical experiments. These examples map out the how-where-why of spatial agency. Although the website navigation is somewhat abstract at this stage, the project and its contents are worth a good look.

Meanwhile over at Loughborough University, the research project “Adaptable Futures” is exploring a different aspect of change in the built environment. The research aims to incorporate the dynamic of time into building design so that buildings can better adapt to change. Although this is in many ways a construction engineering project (it’s based in the Innovative Manufacturing & Construction Research Centre), anyone familiar with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn will find it provocative. This project, more than those mentioned above, is tied into the commercial realm with a focus on non-domestic buildings and partnerships with a number of large companies. This is perhaps why speakers from this project talked more about the politics of public agency negotiation. But it strikes me that the implications of the Adaptable Futures work could be far-reaching in activist terms.

example of Adaptable Futures building components

I stress that this is not a comprehensive summary of work going on in the United Kingdom, rather, it reflects some of the interesting work I encountered at this one workshop–particularly in areas north of London. As always, readers are welcome to add to this review through comments or contacting me directly.

rating sustainable communities
First was the STAR Community Index program, an effort to “transform the way local governments set priorities and implement policies and practices to improve their sustainability performance. It will become the definitive means by which local governments measure and ‘certify’ their achievements.” Taking many of its cues from the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system, the STAR rating system aims for transformation by means of a national, consensus based system.

a partnership between ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP)

In order to work out a national level system, the STAR group has already produced an interesting report  “A Comparative Analysis of Sustainable Community Frameworks” (download here) which looks at the diversity of sustainability rating systems from across the US. The report is useful in that it profiles a wide range of ratings approaches, from individual products to buildings to whole cities. It also discusses frameworks such as ecological footprint or genuine progress indicator.

Since ‘rating system’ is a common activist tactic among designers, this report makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read.

design activism from academia
The University of Washington (based in Seattle) may have been one of the first universities in the US to offer a course on design activism, thanks to associate professor Jeff Hou. Hou is currently the chair of the Landscape Architecture department, which maintains a webpage on the subject of design activism that profiles a range of the department’s urban ecological design projects that could be characterized as activist, such as humanitarian aid and urban revitalization.

More recently Hou has edited a book, Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (published by Routledge, 2010) which explicitly highlights activist notions of the making of public spaces.

sustainable design in schools
Finally I met up with Gilda Wheeler, the program manager for sustainability and science in public education for Washington state. Wheeler’s group is pioneering education for sustainability in Kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) and they’ve developed some great material. The highlight is their recent “Integrated Environment and Sustainability Learning Standards” (downloadable) which describe what students must know in the area of environment and sustainability. But rather than add a new layer of curriculum or coursework, the standards describe how the learning can be woven into existing curriculum activities. For example, the document describes how knowledge of “interdependency” can be drawn out in the existing science and social studies curriculum — on a grade by grade level (e.g. 2nd-3rd grade or 9th-12th grade).

This standard is particularly good to see, since in my experience one problem we encounter in teaching sustainable design at college level is that students are still entering college with little coherent knowledge of what sustainability means. It seems that Washington may be the only state with this type of learning standard, so let me know if there are others, or encourage their adoption if there aren’t.

Wheeler’s group has also developed a “sustainable design project” that any teacher can use and adapt to their own K-12 needs. There is a teacher manual available and the goal of the project is to “bring industry, business, and higher education partners together with K-12 classrooms to design sustainable solutions to real world challenges.” The website has a video from one of the sustainable design projects that has already been done, as well as the teacher manual and the conceptual plan for the project.

Head made a distinction between what was needed in “high income” countries versus what is needed in “low income” countries. Low income countries need to use sustainable urban design in new development to achieve better living standards. In high income countries he noted that renovating and retrofitting existing urban areas and built stock is the largest task on hand in “high income” countries, and that this work is far more important than optimizing and testing new technologies in new development. He acknowledged that retrofitting existing areas is arguably harder than making new, sustainable developments.

Some other highlights included the pictures he painted for how we will retrofit existing urban areas. There will be few, if any cars in cities, which will densify and incorporate hydroponic greenhouses for food growth. Head speculates that we will use soil-based agriculture less frequently in the future. In Head’s report, he addresses three policy areas, one of which is “justice.” He notes, “as sustainability is the criterion for scale, justice is the criterion for distribution to ensure that there is fairness across society and globally.”

What also interested me was that he noted that “the market will not do it” and this is one of the reasons that Arup, along with some other corporate, government and nonprofit sponsors are “taking action” and have created the Thames Gateway Institute for Sustainability (see who’s involved here). Head emphasized that the aim of the institute was to get built examples on the ground rapidly as a means of developing and supporting best practice while steering regeneration in the direction of long term sustainability. The institute says, “Our initial focus within Thames Gateway, Europe’s largest regeneration area, not only provides us with a huge test-bed for research activity, but also a ready market for the solutions we are helping to develop.” The implication for the institute, and perhaps Arup as well, seems to be that rapid demonstration will lead to policies that reshape the market.

For example, one of the projects concerns eco-retrofits for both social and private housing, that will lead to a “total community retrofit” that addresses social as well as economic and technical performance. A related project concerns green roofs and includes plans to install green roofs on 4000 homes in the gateway area.

In an earlier post I talked about how different sectors of the economy — public, private and nonprofit — all have a role in activism. Arup and its partners’ activism in the Institute for Sustainability is an interesting development. Some of the Institute’s efforts are going to directly engage designers, and this is perhaps one of the avenues along which design work can travel to reach more activist opportunities.

Design Activism’s main strength is its wide-ranging nature, and this is frequently a benefit of Fuad-Luke’s work, for example, with his Thames and Hudson publications, The Eco-Design Handbook (2009) and The Eco-travel Handbook (2009). In the first section of Design Activism, Fuad-Luke covers the activist territory very broadly, offering not only a chapter on the historical origins of design activism, but also providing a variety of frameworks for thinking about design activism followed by a broad range of contemporary examples. The final chapters of the book hone in on a particular process for participatory design known as “co-design.”

Fuad-Luke’s review of the history of design activism stretches back to 1750, taking in arts and crafts, modernism and other design movements. Most activism in these movements, he concludes, primarily targeted designers and in his view had little effect outside the boundaries of design culture. In some senses he sees the history of design activism as one of designers talking to themselves. Fuad-Luke doesn’t explicitly investigate the tension between the potentially conflicting roles of designers as “citizen activists” on the one hand and “professional experts” on the other. I suspect that designers’ roles as professional experts partly explain why they “talk to themselves” in an effort to change design culture toward more socially beneficial ends.

Diagramming the terrain
In the sense of diagramming design activist terrain, Fuad Luke has produced a very good initial reference from which to explore many dimensions of design activism. The book offers many frameworks for thinking about activism. For example Fuad-Luke presents the “five capitals” model of sustainability as a way to identify the range of causes, or issue areas, that activists might address, and he includes six separate diagrams (the five capitals plus other capitals) to show the dimensions that lie within each form of capital. He also diagrams various forms of eco-design and, more broadly, lists design approaches (some issue-led such as “gender” and some not, such as “design research”) and maps them on to contemporary activist causes (such as “participation and democracy” or “environment”). He offers a checklist for characterizing design activism, but also suggests a triangulation of design work among practice, exploration, and studies. And these are just a few of the many frameworks that appear on the pages of the book to explain not only the design and the design activist situation, but also to explain some of the causes (or issues) themselves, such as climate stability, ecological capacity, and over-consumption versus under-consumption.

Design Activism also looks at examples of practice, and these are broadly organized into activism that addresses over-consumption and activism that addresses under-consumption. In the over-consumption section Fuad-Luke addresses awareness-raising/behavior change, alternative methods of production, eco-efficiency, “contesting the meaning of consumption,” and social cohesion/community. For activism targeting under-consumption he covers shelter/water/food, education, and health. Here again we find a useful range of categories with which to consider design activism.

But as the previous paragraph probably begins to suggest, Design Activism struggles a bit under the weight of so many frameworks. At times the reader wonders how to make sense of them, or which of them might fit together into a coherent, bigger picture. For example, having presented a number of frameworks early on in the book (five capitals model, design approaches, issue areas) for understanding design activism, Fuad-Luke doesn’t use any of those frameworks to organize his contemporary cases. I’d be the first to agree that there are no “right” answers when it comes to trying to categorize activism and the issues that activists address, and it is important to understand that there are a number of ways to look at this emerging field of work and study. However I do look forward to the next step of streamlining the large number of lists and diagrams down into a few more central frameworks for describing the range of activism and how it works .

Co-Design
The last section of the book deals with co-design, a form of participatory design. This section details the history of the co-design approach with respect to open source models and other related models (for example meta design, slow design, social and inclusive design) and offers a good process model for co-design. There is a chapter devoted to co-design tools such as social software for distributed collaboration and co-design events. Fuad-Luke links co-design explicitly to activism by proposing that, “participation emancipates people by making them active contributors rather than passive recipients. It is therefore a form of design humanism aimed at reducing domination.” Yet there is a slightly jarring contrast between the book’s first section of wide-ranging exploration and this sudden focus on one design process.

In many ways, it feels to me as though this second section deserved to be longer, or to be its own book. In such a short overview, Fuad-luke has little space to offer a critical examination of the strengths and weaknesses of participatory processes, nor can he fully explore the spectrum of uses for participatory and collaborative design, from commercial, non-activist projects to what I would characterize as activist. For me this section of the book leaves us with a provocative question about whether and how it may be appropriate to view activism, such as co-design processes, as a tool of design rather than positioning design as a tool of activism.

The participatory discussions also emphasize, more than other elements, the strangely apolitical nature of the book. Although it’s true that in broader civil society activism is arguably becoming more cultural (for example dealing with issues of identity, rather than issues of civil rights), activism’s core is still highly political. I sense that Fuad-Luke, like others in design culture, is more comfortable within the confines of design’s traditional organizing principles such as client service, usability, the design “project,” human needs, or “doing good by design.” These concepts contrast fairly sharply with more conventional activists’ language that deals in rights, struggles, grievances and claims. This gap suggests to me we still have a way to go until we really understand design as activism.

Strangeness in the title
The reader must continue to the end to find out about the book’s unusual subtitle. Fuad-Luke comments that conventional notions of beauty are those that align with financial profitability, a profitability that is ultimately destructive in social and environmental terms. He argues that instead, “we need new visions of beauty—we could call this beauty, ‘beautiful strangeness’, a beauty that is not quite familiar, tinged with newness, ambiguity and intrigue, which appeals to our innate sense of curiosity,” a beauty that, rather than stemming from profits, stems from resilience. Positioning of the goal of activism—its destination—in aesthetic terms is important for a design audience, but selection of the word “strangeness” strikes me as unfortunate given the weight of negative connotations that terms such as “activism” and “sustainability” already confront. We are in need of more resonant rallying cries, and the book does offer these within its pages.

I recommend Design Activism as a useful overview of activism within design culture. The book covers a valuable range of conceptual and case material and represents an important step on the way to rethinking design practice.

working with a purpose

Obviously there are no easy answers to these questions, but I have written a few relatively “timeless” posts on these challenges. In the past I’ve outlined two main strategies that involve, broadly, converting a conventional design job into a sustainable design job, (I covered this in two posts here and here) or converting a conventional sustainable development job into a sustainable design job (I covered that here).

I think these two broad strategies apply to the question of finding a role as a design activist as well. In other words, you can try to take a conventional design job and make room for more activist work, or you can go for a more traditional activist job (such as community organizer or environmental advocate) and work your design skills in to it.

In terms of how you might bend an existing, conventional design job into one that allows more time for activist work, perhaps in a pro bono context, I’ve profiled a few organizations that attempt to match design service providers (pro bono or reduced rate) with clients in need, so this might be a starting point for convincing an employer that there are worthy local projects. One of these organizations, The 1% also offers guidance and rules of thumb for pro bono work from an architecture perspective.

Given the recent economic climate, another consideration besides simply “providing services” might be “providing skills” through the design process, something I wrote about in my post “unemployment.”

I wish I could say that finding this kind of job isn’t that hard to do, but it is. It requires persistence, patience and a whole lot of strategy. Estimates are that it can take 9 months to a year to find the right job, and finding the right job can be like a full time job in itself. You also have to pay attention to all conventional job search requirements, so I recommend using a job hunting guidebook or advice service as well, so that you can adapt those job finding strategies to your particular search. I wish all sustainable design and design activist job seekers the best of luck. If you have any good stories about finding or creating these kinds of jobs, please do share them.

From my reading, a number of designers seem to position design activism, or design for social change, on the “humanitarian aid” end of the spectrum of potential causes. And there’s no argument against these as central and legitimate causes. One need only gesture to Haiti’s earthquake and similar natural disasters, with weather-related disasters likely to increase. Housing for underserved populations, humanitarian technologies such as Project H’s life straw for clean drinking water, are other good examples.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the other end of the spectrum. What about those “causes” that essentially concern the problems of overconsumption? The problem of making sustainable consumption palatable, or at least viable, to “wealthy” westerners (here I mean average inhabitants of North American and European countries)? Ultimately these patterns not only cause us to overshoot natural limits, but also pave a cultural path that many want to follow. These are also the patterns that I live in and struggle to navigate. I recently happened upon an article in the Bangladeshi Financial Express pointing out that although “overconsumption” is thought of as a problem of western countries, increasingly the wealthy in all the world’s cities are getting on the consumption treadmill.

beyond “reduce” to “reverse”?

Recently I attended a meeting of a nascent De-growth Network here in London, with speakers from many major European “de-growth” groups. One speaker in particular, Leida Rijnhout, ANPED (Belgium) , pointed out that sustainability is traditionally conceived as “three pillars”— economic, ecological, and social— that need to be kept “in balance.” But she contends this is a real fallacy, since the economic “pillar” is already way out of balance with respect to the other two.

I’ve written before about the challenges for designers of working toward sustainable consumption, and I continue to be concerned about the question of how we make the necessary and most probably drastic changes in lifestyle that are required. The recent financial crisis hasn’t served as the obvious turning point for dealing with the problems of economic growth — what will?

As yet there seem to be few consolidated efforts to delve in to design’s potential roles in sustainable consumption, either in products or architecture. The main efforts that I’m aware of  — certainly there must be more — are concerned with the broad categories of sustainable cities, service design, and social innovation, for example the Desis network (see for example Desis USA at Parsons) on design for social innovation and sustainability. In the UK we’ve recently had the Urban Buzz project. And the Young Foundation also does social innovation work in the UK.

But it’s not clear to me that these initiatives are explicitly acknowledging the need for de-growth. Maybe it’s taboo to say so. In a recent article on “common wealth” economist Richard Norgaard says, “rather than talking about market failure we’re talking about how to work within the market and make it better. If you are on the wrong path, optimizing doesn’t help a lot.” Also, in some of these initiatives it doesn’t always feel as though design or architecture has clearly articulated a role for itself. Perhaps this represents the tension between “design thinking” as applied across all sorts of endeavours, versus old fashioned design-as-formgiving. Or perhaps it just presents too much of a fundamental, even existential, conflict with what design is perceived to do—make more and better stuff.

more and better stuff

What’s your view? what are the substantive efforts underway to position design activism in the overconsumption, de-growth area? Is it a legitimate “cause” and if so how do we frame it? At this point I don’t have answers (will I ever?) I only have questions…

Chemicals have a been a theme for me over the past few weeks. First I had a reader inquiry challenging the idea that there could be any health risks from plastics in food and drink packaging. Then, I had a run-in with my son’s school over a new, portable classroom that wasn’t properly aired before his class started using it, making the indoor air of very questionable quality.

Plastics–are they OK?

A reader of my Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability wrote to challenge the idea that plasticizers and other chemical additives in plastic could cause a health hazard. She argued that with today’s strict regulations there is no risk of harm from plastic food packaging.

In the book I talk about about a range of issues concerning plastics and more generally, chemicals. For example, I discuss downcycling and suggest that plastic drink bottles remade into textiles contain chemicals that aren’t intended for contact with skin. I also note that there are nearly 100,000 chemicals in use, few of which have been tested, and given the way our eco-sphere works, these all end up back in the environment in one place (such as our bodies) or another.

In responding to this query I noted that recent research (reported in the Guardian Newspaper) adds to the evidence that substances contained in many common plastics, including rubber used to make clogs, are absorbed through skin contact. (The Guardian Newspaper also produced a special report called “Chemical World” a few years back that is still relevant).

However, the main problem with the chemicals is that not enough of them have been properly tested for health effects, and the result is that we only regulate chemicals that we know about. A classic example is BPA, a chemical additive found in bottled water containers, baby bottles and the like. Last year mounting evidence about adverse health effects from BPA caused it to be withdrawn from the market.

The long term solution to this problem is hatching in the Green Chemistry movement, which is aiming to put the burden of proof of safe chemicals on the manufacturers. Currently a chemical is innocent until proven guilty, however, there are simply too many chemicals and, based on the evidence we do have, no reason to assume their innocence. Proposed green chemistry policies also recognize that health problems might arise for interactive, multiple exposures.

Schools and chemicals

In confronting the school I also had some evidence to hand. Children are more susceptible to environmental contaminants because they breath more, relatively, than adults and they behave in ways that put them in closer contact with their surroundings (crawling on the floor, putting fingers in mouths etc.). Poor indoor air quality can result from a combination of factors, such as poor ventilation, chemical emissions from new construction and finishing materials, mold (particularly in carpets) and so forth.

Increasingly research is showing a positive link between good indoor air quality and better student health, behavior, attendance, and academic performance. More broadly, sustainable design in schools is showing similar benefits (particularly air quality in association with daylighting). For example, recently completed, sustainably designed high schools in Oregon (by Boora Architects) are showing these benefits.

In addition, there are several organizations concerned with school design, and not only indoor air quality. The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) has a good report on indoor air quality on its website, along with other resources. Together with the state of California, CHPS tested a number of materials for off-gassing of chemicals, and the findings are also available on the CHPS website in the Low Emitting Materials Table. In the UK there is a similar oganization, the CIBSE schools design group.

Another group concerned about schools, environmental contaminants, and health is the Children’s Environmental Health Network. Their report “ABCs of Healthy Schools” details many areas of concern for new school building as well as finding and eliminating problems in existing settings. The American Architectural Foundation also hosts the “Great Schools by Design” program that publishes a number of reports on their findings.

An Activist Challenge

With chemicals the main challenge is what we don’t know. There are some things we do know, such as some of the air quality or platicizer issues mentioned above, and where possible we can aim to make those problems and solutions more widely visible, and to disrupt routine practices that make use of bad chemicals. The struggle in this regard is that many of these bad chemicals are still legal, and many of the practices, such as putting children in an improperly ventilated new classroom, is also within regulations. My son’s school is “looking into” the issue, but it comes back to the point that as long as it meets regulation, there is little justification for remediation.

Here it makes sense to join up with groups, such as those mentioned above, that are already working on these issues. I’m reminded of a quotation from architect Teddy Cruz who, working on an affordable housing project with a nonprofit housing group, noted that part of the design process was explicitly political–to find a way to change regulation, “the project became a political instrument to change code” and the construction became a political framework.* But this kind of work is not contained within a single project. Cruz comments that although he has built a number of buildings, it takes time to build a political position.

For the many problems we don’t know about, we may need to consider more old fashioned collective action. For example, if you are a member of a professional design association (even if you’re not), urge your association to support green chemistry legislation so that individual consumers and designers are not stuck trying to find research to determine the safety of any given chemical.

* (see Journal of Architectural Education 2007, 60(4), “Introduction” and page 8 )

I’ve been thinking about employment, skills, and unemployment for a while now. The labor movement was one of the “old” social movements (along with civil rights and womens’ suffrage). The labor movement achieved success in many ways, but then became institutionalized and arguably, lost its way while being battered by a number of global forces affecting labor. Despite an increasingly dire employment landscape, labor union membership is in decline and labor unions seem to be scoffed at as much as, if not more than, respected.

New issues concerning labor, and more particularly “skills,” that have caught my attention are several:

- a number of recent reports on what types of skills are required to develop and maintain sustainable communities (see for example: research council initiative on “skills and knowledge for sustainable communities”, the BRASS paper “Understanding the Role of Skills, Learning and Knowledge for Sustainable Communities” see working papers, The U.K. Government’s Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities, and Arup’s Mind the Skills Gap, and two more in an addendum at bottom).

- recent investigations into how skills related to sustainability can be integrated into professions, including architecture, see for example the network on professional practice for sustainable development and Building Sustainable Communities: developing the skills we need by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

- questions regarding what types of skills are needed for social entrepreneurship (article in the Stanford Social Innovation review, “not just anyone can make breakthrough change”) and how cities can encourage social innovation (Breakthrough Cities report).

At the same time, as I review a number of cases of design activism, I see many examples where being involved in a design process helps people (non designers) acquire and apply new skills. But I also come across critiques of how contemporary design, by simplifying everything down to the touch of a button, or requiring disposal/demolition rather than allowing repair/rennovation, actually takes away many of the skills people used to possess (see for example this paper by Ezio Manzini).

So on the one hand designed artefacts may be taking skills away from people, but on the other hand participatory or co-design processes might be able to help people acquire new skills. In the rest of this discussion I leave behind the issue of artefacts that designers create, except to note that there is an obvious gap between designers acquiring skills relevant to sustainability and opportunities to apply them. For example, many students that study sustainable design can’t find jobs through which to apply these skills, something I’ve written about before here (on how to find a job in sustainable design) and here (on the future of sustainable design education).

Seen through the lens of activism, can design processes address unemployment and employable skills? My sense is that in most instances of participatory design, the goals for participation center on an artefact, such as a landscape (park), building, or object. Little structured thought is given to what skills may result from participation. Yet in presenting the design results, the design teams often comment on the personal development of the participants as an added side benefit, alongside the central goal of creating an artefact such as a beautiful park or effective school.

What if designers joined up with labor activists, neighborhood regeneration groups and others to look more specifically at how design processes have a role in re-skilling the labor force? Although this may be more common in the developing world context, where I know of a few examples (see the BaSiC initiative’s work in Mexico), I’m less familiar with this kind of approach in North America or Europe. I’ve heard more about designers mentoring young, inner city designers (for example the Reciprocity Foundation’s proof of concept program), or creating design-focused high schools and the like.

Although I don’t have a perfect example of something like this (I’d love to hear about more) there is one example that exemplifies some of this thinking. It’s a project that architect Will Alsop did with British nonprofit Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) to redesign the concept of “prison.” McGray, writing in Metropolis (August 2006) commented, “As he spent more time with the men, Alsop began to feel that prison was molding them to prison life, not the life they would one day lead beyond the prison walls.” And this led him to consider the social cost to bad prison design. A better prison design, which Alsop developed with the inmates, included a less sprawling building that left room for gardens that prisoners could tend and learn to maintain, and other sites for training including a small restaurant, barbershop, radio station, and construction workshop. Prisoners also proposed a small hotel for family visitors.

In this prison example the inmates arguably gained experience in design thinking and gained a sense of possibility through envisioning the types of training and skills they would like to have. I’m sure many of us are familiar with community design projects during which participants learn to garden, build, or gain experience making models and drawings. But have we thought explicitly about what skills participants gain, skills the projects might later deliver (such as some that were proposed for the prison redesign) and how that portfolio of skills might be applied in the community? In addition to trade skills, such as construction or landscaping, are there also skills related to organization, leadership, public speaking, teamwork, negotiation? what about other forms of media or computer skills associated with collaborative projects? How would people present evidence of these skills?

As much as designers may be worried about their own employment these days, there does seem to be a productive, perhaps even activist, role for them in worrying about other people’s employment and skills as well.

addendum 16 November 09

Two more reports on skills and the built environment now out:
The Future’s Green: Jobs and the UK Low-carbon Transition from the Institute of Public Policy Research
Grey to Green: How we shift funding and skills to green our cities which focuses particularly on landscape architecture, by CABE

 In the first case, and on a professional level, a good place to start is gaining basic climate literacy (perhaps as part of gaining eco-literacy, so much the better). One could do worse than to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Other sources on the basics include the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, or the Climate Literacy Network. On a personal level you can also calculate your ecological or carbon footprint (at bioregional, wattzon, or the Carbon Trust) and start figuring out ways to reduce it. This challenge is a good way to bring the issue “to life” in your design practice.

In the second case, you’re already active on climate change. Perhaps you are looking at energy efficient design, dematerialization, or reconfiguring transport. In my recent readings of some new books on climate change, such as Giddens’ The Politics of Climate Change and Mark Diesendorf’s Climate Action: A Campaign Manual for Greenhouse Solutions, I’m struck by the fact that the design of the built environment and manufactured objects is rarely mentioned explicitly.

Of course in policy proposals that deal with efficiency and transition, design is everywhere implied. Consider some of the following proposed policy directions for achieving climate stability:

- set regulations and standards for energy efficiency
- allocate personal carbon budgets
- foster a socially just transition to a steady state economy

But typically these policy initiatives are high level abstractions that don’t discuss what it means in design terms. Some design groups  join in on the policy level, for example Architecture 2030 and the American Institute of Architects have adopted policies for carbon neutral new and renovated buildings by 2030. The policy has subsequently been taken up by both the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the national Association of Governors. This policy starts to make a more explicit connection to design, but 2030 is a long way off. What about today?

How can designers make more explicit and purposeful connections with these broader policy-driven aspects of the climate stabilization movement? There might be several ways.

1. designers are in a position to help people imagine appealing, or at least workable, “if…then” scenarios. For example, if we each have a carbon budget of X then here are some attractive, or simply feasible, lifestyle choices and tools. I’ve seen a number of interesting design concepts for making energy “visible” in the home with glowing electrical cords, energy monitors, or this Danish project that lets you create an energy “cap” for your home and share energy rations among your appliances. But none of the concepts I’ve seen so far are explicitly linked to the idea of a personal carbon budget.

2. design can materially demonstrate the future in the present. For example, there are currently a number of building projects struggling to get to “carbon neutral” status. Interesting examples are Yale’s new Kroon Hall (School of Forestry and Enviro Studies) and the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. These and other projects suggest a range of opportunities and challenges that show there is still room for radical thinking to get right down to carbon neutral, to cut the building’s energy load. My guess is that some of the change will involve social and not just technical approaches. What are we willing to live with, and without? In addition, product designers should think about their role in various carbon neutral building scenarios — what if it means smaller buildings? new social arrangements? different appliance systems?

Carbon neutral…The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. Photo: Mark Heffron/The Kubala Washatko Architects

3. design is increasingly being recognized as a tool around which to build social infrastructure. A large task in the policy goal of “fostering transition” involves developing resilient and just social fabric, that is, reconnecting people and places outside of commercially driven contexts. Transition Towns (Totnes being the first one) have been good at this and bear further study. Another interesting group here in the UK, Glass House, has a good model for participatory design processes that fundamentally change communities, arguably preparing them to take on bigger “transition” tasks.

The important thing is to think about how to link explicitly to broader climate stability movements, rather than running along “in parallel” or worse, running in a different direction. Connecting with organizations in these movements may involve some convincing that design has an important role right now beyond the educational graphics that most social change groups might first think about. I note that there are many fantastic graphic design projects dealing with climate change and we need more of these as well. But designers working outside of graphics have the challenge of helping Climate activists to see ways to link abstract policy initiatives to actual spaces and lifestyles.

What are your thoughts on making this link?

A couple of other resources:
S. Peake and J. Smith, Climate Change: From Science to Citizenship. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Stephen Hale, The new politics of climate change: why we are failing and how we will succeed. downloadable here.