design activism

Health Care … a timely topic. This post features some of the health related projects I’ve come across in my research on design activism. Designers surely can’t affect the health insurance situation—or can they, service designers?—but the projects below show some of the other categories where designers are trying to improve health outcomes and experiences of health care.

Massachusetts General Hospital’s rooftop healing garden

Things
Designers have been working on a range of things, or products, to improve health “performance.” One example is a range of new pill bottles that are easier to read, that talk, or that will call and remind you when to take their pills (Metropolis article here). Similar interventions are occurring in child-friendly medical devices, such as the IV tricycle that lets children drive their IV around with them. The tricycle was a project of student Jetske Verdonk at the Design Academy Eindohoven.

Tricycle IV by Jetske Verdonk at the Design Academy Eindohoven

Interior architecture
A number of practitioners are taking aim at the interior construction and finishes in hospitals and health clinics. Not only are designers realizing that ecological design is good for human health, but they’re also starting to look at health more holistically.

One example is an Italian clinic that started with the human being at the center, rather than starting with a web of regulations for hygiene, efficiency and technology. Designer Giannantonio Vannetti took a holistic approach that encompassed daylight, color, art, and gardens. (Metropolis report here.) For example blue has a calming quality and yellow has a quality that soothes pain. A mounting body of research shows that patients recover more quickly when exposed (even if only through a view) to nature.

Research in the UK has also highlighted the general mediocrity in hospital design. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Royal College of Nursing published a report on radical improvements in hospital design addressing similar holistic issues.

Landscape
I noted above that nature, either being in it or seeing it, helps patients recover better, and some hospitals are starting to pick up on this finding. Two particular manifestations occur in labyrinths and healing gardens. The first labyrinth was installed in a California hospital in 1997. The labyrinth project has documented many more since then. The group also has an article on labyrinths in hospital/healing settings.

Labyrinth by Labyrinth Enterprises installed at West Clinic in Memphis TN

Massachusetts General Hospital offers an example of a rooftop healing garden which provides therapeutic benefits as well as energy savings. The garden was designed by Cambridge Seven Associates and Halvorson Design Partnership, who focused on the user experience. The soil layer of the garden acts as effective insulation.

Reform versus transformation
The above examples are all in the vein (pardon the pun) of health care reform. That is they each suggest reforming the equipment, the interiors and the landscapes of our health care environment.

But there are also designers thinking about transformation of the way we address health. One example of a transformative approach comes from a public health doctor. Dr. Richard Jackson argues that our car-dependent suburban life is so unhealthy that it may be killing us. His book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health (with Frumkin and Frank) details these arguments. For example, instead of using drugs to treat depression, high blood pressure, or obesity, doctors should be politically and socially fighting for communities that do not rely on us sitting in cars for hours each day. Similar arguments and research stem from groups such as Active Living by Design, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Adding to the transformative way we look at health, recent work at University College London makes explicit the links between health and climate change. The UCL team focused on key areas: patterns of disease and mortality, food security, water and sanitation, shelter and human settlements, extreme events, and population migration.

A final example of transformative ways of thinking about health care emerges from work of the Design Council in the UK. Their research looked at the notion of “co-creating” health through expert patient forums and other systems approaches, often supported by networked communities. I keep a copy of this report on my website here. Further work stemming from Design Council program Design of the Times (DOTT) also addressed design interventions in health care (sexually transmitted diseases, dementia and “cyborg” implications for health).

— — —

Are these the best ways for designers to engage in health care? How could they play a bigger and more effective role in the debate, given that the role of design is necessary, but not sufficient, to solve the problems…

P.S. Change.org’s blog on social entrepreneurship also published a post on health today, looking at the social determinants of health (eg working conditions, physical environments, income etc.) and highlighting a board game that aims to teach players about these social determinants. Another transformative approach?

This review is from an online newsletter on lifecycle design issues (covering LCA design tools and related teaching tools such as powerpoint slides) over at The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability.

Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff (Rosenfeld Media 2009)

There is much to like in Nathan Shedroff’s new book, Design is the Problem, which is a survey of sustainable design approaches that can be applied across the lifecycle of products. Shedroff also provides contextual and background information about sustainable design in a business context. The book succeeds at covering a wide range of concepts relevant to a designer or business person who wants to learn about sustainable design. In reviewing the book I noticed three main things about it:

– It’s a really useful survey of methods and approaches.
– The style of the book may affect how you can use it.
– Regarding activism, there’s an interesting tension running under the surface.

In this review I look at these three aspects more closely.

Good Survey

In looking at both approaches to sustainability generally (for example, what it is, how it’s measured) and at methods (such as design for efficiency, buying local, or design for disassembly) Shedroff usefully goes further than the norm. For example, he goes beyond environmental concerns to look at social and economic indicators for sustainability. From an activist standpoint, Shedroff includes a remarkably interesting list of criteria used in social investment screening, noting that all of the issues “become the focus of protest at some point.” Here is yet another angle on the value of activism to design!

Shedroff also goes beyond the “three Rs” (reduce, reuse and recycle) to consider “Restore” in which he discusses systems. He closes with a section on “Process” which also starts to weave together and support some of the previous, more check-listy sections, by looking at innovation, development, and corporate reporting of results. Another good aspect of the book is Shedroff’s frank, conversational tone, reminding readers that there are no easy answers to difficult challenges. His range of examples also covers many different kinds of products, such as tools, garments, electronics, vehicles, food, luggage and so forth.

Where he succeeds best is in encouraging readers to step back and see systems, bigger questions and contexts, while tying these ideas to relevant user/customer experiences.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

The Style of the book

The book’s tone and content clearly make it the writing equivalent to “business casual” attire. Perhaps the author and publisher thought this stance would be compromised by detailed notes and references, but for whatever reason, sources for many of the book’s assertions are weak and potentially compromise the book’s usefulness. As an author myself I know how difficult it is to balance “notation” with the flow of reading, to decide which assertions require notation, and to manage and accurately credit sources. In the end it is always difficult to get the balance right and ultimately it depends on the readers.

A few examples illustrate this issue. Consider the section on usability, where the author presents a diagram on the levels of meaning and follows it with a list of the 15 core meaning attributes. No source for these is given. In discussing product take-back programs, Shedroff asserts, “the packaging redesign (and material savings) that was necessary under these conditions [in Germany] was duplicated in places even without the same taxes and laws.” But there is no source to indicate what “places” these might be. In the disassembly section there is a list of techniques but no sources for any of them or for the general topic of disassembly. A list of general resources at the end of the book, though useful, doesn’t correspond to chapters (such as “disassembly”) in a way that would help the reader further explore the topic.

For readers seeking general inspiration, the lack of notes and sources is not an issue. But the problem is that the book will serve most readers as a “reference.” If I’m a practicing designer and I want to investigate the packaging or disassembly further, I have to start from scratch. Yet surely Shedroff had sources that he used to develop these sections of the book. Why not share them? If there aren’t many sources (which I suspect is sometimes the case) then it’s also helpful for the reader to know. Similarly if I’m teaching or if I’m a student, I’d like to have more evidence with which to follow up the various claims and methods described in the book. As Shedroff himself acknowledges, there is still lot of debate around sustainability and that makes evidence more important.

The index is also weak for a book that is meant to serve as a reference. For example, although watches are mentioned, “watch” is not in the index. Similarly snap-fit and snap-on issues are mentioned, but “snap” is not in the index. The searchable, PDF version of the book solves the problem and is included with the purchase of the paperback…but you have to be at your computer to use it.

On the good side the book has short “chapters” presented in a clear, well-organized table of contents that make the methods and approaches themselves easy to find.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

Interesting tension

From an activist perspective, Shedroff’s book is perhaps most interesting for how it tries to navigate the tension between what businesses can do and what actually needs to be done. Businesses can be activists in the way they use design. But there is a gap where the capacity (and willingness?) of businesses to advocate or act on sustainability ends and the interests and mechanisms (democracy, social movements, etc.) of wider society are necessary.

This tension manifests itself in the book, particularly in the contrast between the beginning and ending, which are by turns alarmist and revolutionary, and the central core of the book. At the beginning we find community resiliency compared with terrorism and rhetorical questions about reducing the world’s population in any socially acceptable way. Yet the core of the book carries the message: “we must change—but not too much.” Shedroff comments that, “getting too far [ahead] of your customers or the market can be more disastrous than being too far behind.”

Case studies such as Cliff Bar and Apple Computer highlight how the companies undertake sustainability work, but covertly, to avoid “castigation from environmental groups.” In a BP case study Shedroff presents the lesson as “be ready to offer more information,” a recommendation quite far from the transparency that most public agencies and activists would prefer (consider the green chemistry movement).

The book also resists investigating lifestyle changes even when they are quite obvious—do without a certain material, don’t eat a certain food. In these cases Shedroff tries to stick with the science of the comparison rather than stepping back to the societal level. For example in a discussion of buying locally, he presents the case of lamb and the counterintuitive result that “lamb grown in New Zealand and shipped to England had a lower environmental footprint than lamb raised in England.” What about not eating lamb?

In laying out the scope of problems and the systems view, Shedroff seems to argue for transformation. He wants to see business, and designers within business, as central change agents, but the “stop short” nature of the book, which counsels reform, shows how limited businesses ultimately are. Emerging “social” elements (such as lifestyle changes, social enterprise, social innovation, and social movements) will probably ultimately drive transformation and outpace what business alone can do.

Positive Recommendation

I like Shedroff’s book as a very useful collection of information in one place. I wish he had been bolder with respect to the business context and more thorough in his notation. But perhaps we can see the book as trying to meet people where they are and take them forward. That’s a good step.

I’ve heard a lot recently about how those of us working on social change issues, from climate change to health care, should avoid trying to scare people into change. We shouldn’t be fear mongers.

Object Orange, a Detroit group highlights abandoned, often
crime ridden houses by painting them orange

But a couple of recent episodes of “direct action” social protest have gotten me thinking about the fact that I rarely hear anyone, least of all designers, talk about how scary, even dangerous, it can be to engage in protest and confrontation, even in their mildest forms. And I’m inclined to think that the fear, risk, and danger of social protest deter designers perhaps even more than others.

First consider these recent episodes:

1. the conviction of 22 UK climate activists who obstructed a coal train.
George Monbiot, writing in the UK’s Guardian newspaper notes that scientists and journalist can “bang on about the climate crash until everyone has died of boredom” but direct action like the coal train obstruction makes the issue real in an entirely different way. He also reports that research suggests that, “the greater the personal cost of the action you take, the more likely other people are to respect and follow your cause.”

2. pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran.
Sociologist Jeffrey Goodwin, considering the recent protests after the Iranian elections, asked why, for example, people in the US didn’t take to the streets protesting the flawed 2000 election between Bush and Gore. He notes that a flawed election has to “generate such outrage, such rancor, such disgust, that people are willing to bear the costs of protest, up to and including, in many cases, facing truncheons and bullets.” (emphasis added)

Protest and direct action are powerful, but also risky and potentially dangerous. By contrast, personal change–drive less, eat organic food–is relatively safe and “easy.” As Derrick Jensen argues, writing in Orion magazine, personal change doesn’t equal political change:

“Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Is design activism ever protest?

River Glow by architects David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, indicates
water quality with green or red floating lights.

Where does design activism sit on the spectrum from “safe” personal change to risky social protest? Most “design activism” is not too confrontational and designers typically put their artifacts on the line rather than themselves. For example, two New York architects created “River Glow”, a floating and highly visible monitor that glows green when water quality is OK and glows red when water quality is too low. A designer created tree “houses” for protesters occupying a forest. In the project Object Orange, shown above, designers and artists painted condemned houses bright orange to shame the local government into demolition as a step toward improving blighted neighborhoods. “Critical” artifacts (also called “discursive design” in this article), such as a vase made out of a gun or a voting ballot on a french fries carton, are often the subject of exhibitions rather than street protest.

Occupy a forest in style–tree tents by Dutch designer Dré Wapenaar

These examples show that designers engage in protest, but it strikes me that their work may often be both less strategic and less sustained than it could be.

Confrontation…why not?

Returning to Jenson’s Orion article, with examples of powerful industries and systems such as industiral agriculture, petrochemicals, energy and transportation, he notes that, “the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.”

He acknowledges that confrontation is scary for any number of reasons. Below are some of the reasons I think designers might be deterred by the risks and dangers in protest:

• designers live under the pressure of appearing cool–how they look, the places they see and in which they are seen, the artifacts they produce. Protest does not typically support a “cool” persona. It is in varying degrees messy, unpredictable and dangerous. Can any amount of “rebranding” change that?
• designers are trained to serve clients and users in a business context, a context in which “protest” is not comfortable. When design gets involved in protest it often starts to be called “public art.”
• designers routinely take creative risks, and it may be that a person has an overall risk threshold beyond which they can’t emotionally go. Perhaps designers bump up against this threshold more than others.
• most designers are from the privileged classes, so they have something to loose.
• the way design measures success is heavily invested in existing power structures — starchitects work for the wealthy, after all.

For any activist there seems to be a problem of finding the balance between maintaining social acceptance on some level and provoking change. I begin to wonder if it’s the case that activist groups need to know more about design and how to deploy it, or if it’s the case that designers need to become better activists. Perhaps both.

What do you think? Let me know of interesting cases where designed artifacts or designers have been involved in social protest.

Occasionally I get notes from readers who are working on interesting projects. From time to time I’d like to present short “round ups” of the news I’m getting. Here’s the first:

Wired Unplugged

Are printed magazines dead? Should they be, from an environmental standpoint? Antonio Scarponi, in Zurich, sent me this set of instructions for how to make something new out of your old copy of Wired magazine. You can make a DVD sleeve, an envelope, a wallet, and so forth.

The project was part of WIRED’s launch in the UK and Italy and one may ask, is it really activism? Although it may not be radical or new (I recall seeing folded wallets made out of the currencies of fallen dictators), and the audience for WIRED is hardly downtrodden, the project does engage people in issues of materials and reuse. As I wrote in my sustainable consumption article, instructions rather than things, and doing rather than having, are probably central to a “low product” economy.

Bronx River Crossing

Alexander Levi, of Schachter & Levi, SLO Architecture in New York, sent me information about Bronx River Crossing an outreach project that he is working on with his colleague, Amanda Schachter, along the Bronx River.

The two architects are currently Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellows, and the project involves working with Bronx high school students and teachers, as well as others in the community, to collaboratively design and build a large, floating model of the Lower Bronx River Watershed which was then floated across the river. The aim of the project is to “physically activate and recast” the Watershed as “the ecological and social spine of the borough.”

The model towed along the river

The floating model is made of
“3,000 used MetroCards, 30 broken umbrellas, 2,000 plastic bottles, 300 sycamore burrs, and 50 PVC window frames hauled off a demolition site”

close-up of the model

The project parallels Levi and Schachter’s design of the Bronx River Community Charter School that will be located near the Bronx River. The school plans to make the river a main line of the curriculum emphasizing ecology and community activism.

This project brings to mind the bioregional quiz, “Where You At?” developed by Charles et. al. (1981) and which I include in my book. The quiz as well as the project suggest we should all know things such as where our drinking water originates, where our waste goes, the identities of our native plants and animals and their seasons, and a number of other aspects of our regional ecologies. It suggests, in essence, that ecological literacy is fundamental to design as well as to cities. Bronx River Crossing engages people dynamically in these issues.

THE WRANGELKIEZ COLLECTION. A social design project

Kathi Stertzig alerted me to a project in Berlin addressing design’s role in collaborative, open innovation. The project, which ran in June, was part of the International Design Festival Berlin, and sought to bring a group of international designers to a community to study, interact and collaborate. The designers proposed ways to leverage existing skills, facilities, and relations to improve communication and relations within the community.

The neighbourhood around the Wrangelstrasse in Kreuzberg has been through difficult social and economic times but has seen more creative professionals coming to the area recently and wanting to contribute on the terms of the pre-existing community.

I’m looking forward to finding out what the designers proposed and how the community responded. This model of “co-design” seems to be on the rise, and often as a political as much as creative action, but it would be useful to see more results.

Dialogue through Design

Kara Pecknold, of Vancouver Canada emailed me about her project in Rwanda on Visual Coversations. She said, “The reality is, in Africa particularly, one more product isn’t going to do what people might imagine it could.” Her work involved helping a cooperative of weavers with their graphic identity and a website, although the weavers had no access to computers or internet. Realizing that a shared language and assumed technologies were not present, Pecknold worked with visual design approaches that created a shared process. Pecknold used portions of IDEO’s “Human Centered Design Toolkit” (about which she’s quoted in FAST company here) and created this 7 minute video that provides an overview of the project.

The “field desk” in action

Pecknold’s project engages with the increasing awareness that “developed” countries have gotten plenty of things wrong whereas developing countries may in fact have approaches or models that might benefit developed countries. As I noted in a previous post along these lines, both industrialized and developing countries need new development paths and those paths could come from anywhere. As Pecknold suggests, the question of what “languages” we use to share these paths is critical.

More?
Have any comments on these projects? your own interesting project? get in touch or leave a comment.

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), now going through congress. Should my letters to congressional representatives be for or against? At the same time, last Thursday I attended “Sustainable Lives? The challenges of low-carbon living in a changing economic climate” a conference in London by the RESOLVE research group. I’m interested in their “lifestyles” strand looking at sustainable consumption.

The RESOLVE conference didn’t explicitly consider design, but it did offer up some design-relevant thoughts regarding the issue of climate change. The overriding theme at the conference was “contradiction,” a theme introduced by Tony Giddens (that’s renowned British sociologist Lord Sir Anthony Giddens to most of us).

On the one hand, he argued that we need a return to utopianism, and that messages of climatic catastrophe will not inspire people to change. We need to concentrate on positive future visions. On the other hand, he suggested that some degree of climate catastrophe will most likely occur–it’s too late to prevent effects from climate change– and that we need to seriously rethink adaptation strategies.

For Giddens these two contradictory strands are united in the need for a general “return to planning,” a key mechanism for developing a politics of the long term. He suggested that planning fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s, but that it was time to resuscitate it. He also urged us to position climate change outside the environmental movement and outside party politics, noting that few countries have the essential cross party consensus to act on climate change (see Giddens’ new book, The Politics of Climate Change).

Philosopher Kate Soper captured the contradictory utopianism-in-catastrophe idea in a different way, suggesting that we need to recognize people’s concern about sustainable lifestyles being of low quality. We must articulate the nature of what will be lost in the transition to low-carbon lifestyles and describe the high quality of what will replace it. For both commentators, the problem is the abstract, long term and invisible nature of climate change and the lack of strong, obvious benefits for taking action to prevent/lessen it.

Design activists are already intervening along this planning and visioning path, looking at both adaptation and alternative positive visions.

Adaptation
One example comes from landscape architect Chris Bodle of the Watermarks Project in Bristol, which aimed to facilitate real discussion of adaptation. The team marked predicted flood lines onto buildings around the city, helping people to “imagine the depth and extent of this potential future flooding – allowing us to measure the possible future water levels against ourselves in familiar environments.” The project relied on U.K. government-estimated flood predictions and looked at future dates such as 2017 and 2047.

Other examples of design exploring adaptation to high water levels include Dutch designs for amphibian houses and an architect-designed flood levee that expands or contracts depending on water levels– the alluvial sponge comb.

Quality of context
Ezio Manzini and Francois Jegou have done a fair amount of work on the topic of improving our lifestyle quality while at the same time reducing materialism (see their “sustainable everyday” project and the book of the same name). I also recently wrote about the “low product” scenario and the implication for design of “non purchase” solutions, civic places and co-design processes, that begin to suggest a satisfying new low consumption “social language.”

Kate Soper pointed to public art and gave as an example Anish Kapoor’s Chicago Cloud Gate as a public installation that captures people’s imaginations and offers an activity that counters shopping or otherwise material consumption.

A few last contradictory thoughts

As these examples show, and several speakers at the RESOLVE meeting also highlighted in different ways, the climate challenge requires new conceptualizations of what is “normal” and ways of moving people to this new “normal.”

Tim Jackson closed the conference with the observation that the moment of transformation–perhaps the moment between the “old normal” and the “new normal”– is a moment of pure contradiction, essentially a moment of breakdown. This is the moment of creative destruction, from which change arises. It may be useful for designers to consider this moment of breakdown as they negotiate climate politics and climate-oriented change.

As for Waxman Markey — my letters will be for, encouraging passage of the bill with improvements and added strength.

Architect Michael Herrman’s Nomadic Prayer Space,
one of the projects he uses to explore “the architecture
of displacement” in his new book, Hypercontextuality
(Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, 2008)

This month I’ve published a feature article on Core77 (the industrial design online magazine), on the topic of sustainable consumption. The article has lots of images and starts like this…

“Will “no product” become the new brand? John Hockenberry provocatively suggests that given the global economic crisis, “no product” is now plausible. But how plausible given our society organized around economic growth? I’m talking here about consumerism as both the primary purpose of growth, and its principal driver—the high product context.

Reliance on continuous growth makes the economy unstable (it must grow or it collapses) as well as unsustainable (it strives for infinite growth on finite planetary resources). Tim Jackson provides a very accessible overview of this situation in his great new report, “Prosperity without Growth?,” in which he also proposes an alternative—a steady state economy. Enter the “low product” context. Enter the Nomadic Prayer Space, knitfitti and the floating swimming pool. Before getting to the examples and the implications for design of a steady state economy, let’s explore “growth” a bit more.”

read the full article on Core77. I know you readers here aren’t big into commenting, but if you have an opinion please leave a comment there.

New post here next week.

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.

technical infrastructure as a platform for social participation. The Lionakis-designed water intake structure on the Sacramento River. Image John Swain.

In its less political dimension, participation might simply mean involving people in a supply chain with your new, ecologically preferable material and how to handle or form it. Going through the process, people in the supply chain emerge on the other side of “status quo” with knowledge and ability to use a more ecologically favorable material. Consumers may not really notice that much of a difference. Classic examples would be biodegradable plastic or the famous DesignTex fabric.

Architecture, landscape architecture and product design also all have methods for user participation. Examples include watching how people use things, asking people to make simple clay models, having people test a prototype, or involving users in assembly or construction.

A number of people are now struggling not just with how to involve people in the design process, but how to design processes and services that cultivate ongoing participation. Participation breaks the old status quo of isolation, individualism or even consumerism. This new flavor to participatory design may be partly due to digital networks, but also partly due to the rising interest in social innovation (see the Young Foundation, this report and this report on social innovation).

What is social innovation?
An example of social innovation come from transportation. While we may need some new and different vehicles, mainly we need people to use vehicles differently: ride bikes more often, share cars, etc. An example of social innovation in this regard is the Pink Ladies car club in the north of England. Rather than a taxi service, two concerned mothers organized an all female car club where members own the cars and hire female drivers when they need a ride.

Similarly, the urban hitchhiking project in Belgium, by the Sustainable Everyday group (images and description in French here), investigated what could happen if “hitchhiking” were formalized within a city, where people join a hitchhiking club with an agreement to pick up people when they can and hitch at other times. In both cases we have the same vehicles but different social relationships that facilitate new uses.

Platforms for participation
Tim Brown of IDEO has recently posted to his blog, “how might we design a participatory system?”. Implicit in social innovation terms is the notion of “community” rather than just participating individually in an activity or process.

From an activist perspective I don’t agree with Tim’s assertion that “any participatory offering must make effective use of the internet,” since smaller, physical participatory systems have great value as well. But I do agree that a central element is a platform through which people participate. I see design activists using a few different platforms:

Virtual platforms:
The NY Chapter of the American Institute of Architects offers
The Public Information Exchange, a web-based platform that allows architects and developers to post their project where community groups and enthusiasts can comment directly on the project as it develops, thus taking participation out of the formal planning and approval meetings. Interestingly some projects on PIE have thousands of comments, where others have few.

Physical platforms:
An example of new physical platforms for participation include recent efforts to find social services in previously technical facilities (water intake, water treatment). In this way a new waste recycling facility in Madrid, designed by Abalos & Herreros, becomes a popular family outing and a water intake structure (shown above) on the Sacramento River, by Lionakis Architects, becomes a destination waterfront park.

Nightseeing Map produced by the Illuminating Engineering
Society of New York. Graphic design Catherine Bontempo

Instructional platforms:
Examples in this category typically unveil something, or a way of doing things, that wasn’t seen before, enabling people to engage with it collectively. For instance, the “nightseeing” map for New York City designed with the Illuminating Engineering Society of New York, provides people with a new way to experience the civic nightscape, bringing out different cultural and social meanings in the process.

What are some of the best platforms for ongoing participation that you’ve observed?

Dear Readers,
I’ve been away from the blog for about a month now due to a few large projects on deadline. In that time I’ve reflected on the role and purpose of this blog.

I assume that many of you, like me, scan some of the mainstream design and perhaps even sustainability blogs. It doesn’t then seem useful for me to use this blog merely to point to or repost those interesting bits here.

Rather I see my role here as taking a closer, and on some occasions broader look at how these bits and pieces tell us about issues surrounding design as activism. This approach leads to posts that are hard to produce on the recommended blogging schedule of three times per week. I’m finding it more realistic to reverse that posting rule so that I post once every three weeks or so.

Some of the posts in preparation include these topics:

• participatory design as activism
• design structured as social enterprise
• change through movement: portability
• graduating activists, what next?
• 2 book reviews

I welcome input from readers, either in comments or by email, on what use you get out of this blog and its role relative to the many other blogs on design out there.

I’ll try to give you a “content” post next week, then I’ll be back again in mid June.
Thanks for reading,
Ann Thorpe

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 past are a common challenge for design activists. Memorials often become a spatial element of social protest, where the memorial, like the crosswalk shown, serves both as a physical remembrance of those who were lost while at the same time carrying forward a message of protest, “this should not happen again.”

Recent events, particularly the 9/11 terrorist bombings, have put a spotlight on the question of how we memorialize. Karrie Jacobs provides an interesting contemplation on this question in her article, The Power of Inadvertent Design (Metropolis, February 2004).

I’ve also tried to present this challenge in the form of a design brief for design students, which you can find in the teaching guide for The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability. The brief includes links to other article about memorial design.

P.S. I apologize to anyone who looked at this site during the past couple of weeks when the home page was inadvertently replaced with a different and only partial homepage for another site. The limits of my technical web management skills are exposed…

Today is Ada Lovelace day and I’m reporting to you from Iceland, where I’ve come to give a talk on “Clothing and Conscience” at the Nordic Fashion biennale and to talk about design activism at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.

I have signed on to a pledge, through pledge bank, to write a blog post about admirable women working in technological fields. The actual pledge read like this:

‘I, Suw Charman-Anderson, will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.’

Pledge bank itself is an interesting new way of enabling “collective action” and Suw was successful; she got about 1500 people to sign on. At the pledgebank page for Ada Lovelace Day, Suw explains that its purpose is to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Further, she gives a brief background on Ada:

“Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.”

Not content to write about just one woman, today I’m going to briefly profile three women that I’ve learned about through my research on design activism.

Landscape Architect Julie Bargmann

I first learned about Bargmann in an article in Metropolis (“Industrial Strength” by Melissa Milgrom, May 2003). Bargmann’s milieu is degraded and often dangerous, abandoned industrial sites such as old mines, dumps and superfund sites. Bargmann finds beauty in these old sites but also in the process by which they can be healed. The process is partly technical — how to remove toxins — but it is also partly cultural.

It is the cultural element that most remediation processes leave out and it is the real benefit this woman in technology offers. She can clean up the site, but notes that these old sites must again serve their communities and that involves a way of acknowledging the sites’ industrial pasts. She says, “this process is a culturally significant act, which is completely foreign to the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency].”

Space Architect Constance Adams

An article in I.D. magazine (“Look Homeward, Adams” by Jessie Scanlon) was my introduction to Adams, who, after years of designing life sustaining technologies for astronauts in outer space, became frustrated at how we squandered life sustaining resources on earth. The frustration ultimately led her to create a new project, Water for Two Worlds. The goal is “to deliver water without pipes, and sanitation without sewers.” Ultimately these are closed loop systems, without waste, and they’re the focus of much NASA work.

The first step in the project is to look across space technologies for viable earth-based systems, as those are identified, Adams will step in as architect and put a human context on the technologies in question. She says, “I’ll be looking at the specific community needs, locally available materials nearby manufacturers…and making sure the every system is easy to use in an everyday fashion.”

Industrial Designer Natalie Jeremijenko

I learned about Jeremijenko’s work in an article also in I.D. magazine (“The Long and Winding Road” by Jess Ashlock, December 2006). Back in the late 1990s at Yale She initiated the course, How Stuff is Made, in which industrial design students have to produce a comprehensive visual essay on how a particular consumer product is manufactured, including not only its technological components, but also its social, political and environmental implications. She developed the course because she was troubled by the fact that most designers learn little or nothing about the real world processes through which everyday items are made.

The project has been very compelling for the students as well as other educators. The format has been adopted by a number of design and engineering schools, and has resulted in a public wiki that visualizes a variety of manufacturing processes.

Jeremijenko currently directs the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU’s School for the Culture, Education and Human Development.

Women in Design Activism

My research is suggesting that women tend to be design activists in a slightly higher proportion than their representation in design professions. So far I find that about 28% of design activist projects have women as either the lead or a significant partner, whereas various studies put women at about 15% of professionally practicing product designers and architects. For example, of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s 3,300 members, only 9% are women. Estimates of women in architecture range from about 12 – 15%.

There are of course many possible reasons for women’s higher representation in design activism. One possibility is that socially or environmentally responsible clients tend to be progressive and thus discriminate less against female designers. I read recently that supreme court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, despite sterling credentials, went into public law because no private firms would hire her. We hope that times have changed since the 1950s, but gender discrimination has not been eliminated.

On the other hand, research shows that women routinely earn less than men for similar jobs, and further that women typically undervalue themselves and are less likely to ask for as much as a man will. Perhaps women, either knowingly or unknowingly, are charging less than men and therefore are more affordable to typically low budget “good causes.”

Another possibility is that public and nonprofit clients may be more tolerant of flexible working and other arrangements that accommodate the fact that many women who manage design studios also manage households. Is it also possible that the de facto role that woman still fill as primary family carers, even when they work full time, makes women more sensitive to social and environmental causes? Or does the fact that many of us professional women/mothers choose to go “part time” leave us with leeway to pursue causes more easily than we would as sole “breadwinners”?

Whatever the answers, suffice it to say that women have a strong and growing role not only in design, but also in design activism.