design activism

Before getting down to business, a quick reminder that I would like to get your input on design activism, through the short survey found here:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/353304/your-interest-in-design-activism
(you can enter to win a drawing for an Amazon gift voucher.)

In this series of 3 posts, I explore the notion of a “Hippocratic oath” for designers. Recall that the Hippocratic oath requires medical doctors to practice ethically. I recently heard someone recite the Hippocratic oath and I wondered about adapting this sort of oath for designers. As I discussed previously in a series on ethics, activism turns on the notion of pursuing something morally better than what we have now.

It turns out many designers have rewritten the oath for designers, and for many disciplines of design. In this post I look at user experience design, landscape architecture, lighting design and graphic design. In the second post I look at product design, and in the third post, architecture.

First it may be useful to have a look at the contemporary version of the hippocratic oath. This one is from Nova’s (PBS) website:

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

(you can find more versions on wikipedia)

Let’s look at some of the adaptations for designers…

User Experience Design

Whitney Hess adapted it for User experience designers, and here’s an excerpt:

“I will remember that there is art to experience design as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the information architect’s taxonomies or the interaction designer’s wireframes…

I will remember that I do not treat a web form, a social networking site, but a vulnerable human being, whose one wrong click may affect the person’s friends and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the user.”

Landscape Architecture

The Garden Visit website offers up a version for landscape architects, although this adaptation is based on a more historic version of the oath. Because of that older version, the oath actually doesn’t change that much when updated for Landscape (the website holds both the original oath and the adaptation). Here’s an excerpt:

“I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my clients and the landscape, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. Into whatever places I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the landscape, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption.”

Lighting Design

The International Association of Lighting Designers just had a panel at their conference annual conference (Enlighten ’10) called “THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH FOR LIGHTING DESIGNERS” which is described on their website like this:

“First: do no harm. Should all lighting designers take the oath? Is that even possible in an industry whose practitioners struggle to keep up with emerging technologies, client wishes, deadlines and project budgets? What are the responsibilities of the lighting designer? Given environmental impacts and petro-politics, is there an intrinsic responsibility to society, the environment and future generations? These questions will be explored and will lead to a broader discussion on the larger roles of our industry.”

Visual Communication/Graphic Design

For visual communication designers, a blog called “The Hole in Graphic Design” offers an adapted version of the oath that mentions the “First things first manifesto” (I wrote about this manifesto and linked to it here) but urges a guide for governing the relationship between designer, client and user. The first three points in this oath read as follows:

- I swear by Schoeffer, the first art director, by Games, Tschichold, and Bass, and I take to witness all the great designers, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath and agreement:

- To hold the values of the society of designers and communicators to my heart, and to treat my fellow designers as my brothers and sisters.

- I will design for the users of my designs according to my best ability and my truest judgment and never create designs that knowingly brings harm to the world.

Next time…

The Hippocratic oath focuses on the interaction between individuals (doctor and patient), and most of these adaptations confront the fact that designers typically deal in one-to-many situations, rather than one-on-one settings. Yet for the most part these oaths stick to the general outlines of the Hippocratice oath, which, as we shall see in the next post, is perhaps not so well suited to the practice of design. Stay tuned, I’ll post the next in the series in a week’s time. Remember to respond to the design activism survey before the end of October.

And finally, please comment with any other adaptations of ethical oaths for designers that you’re aware of, and whether you think they’re useful.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been working on a big project to help designers understand and use design as activism. It’s harvest time for this project and I’m getting ready to share the juicy results, but I need your help. Would you answer seven questions for me? Your input could help make the project more useful to you. One lucky survey respondent (who chooses to register) will win a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.

You can find the survey here — it’s all on one page.

harvest time

The survey asks straightforward questions about your interests for example, in terms of:

- design disciplines (for example, more interested in architecture or graphics?)
- types of info (for example, prefer case studies or conceptual tools?),
- uses for the info (such as teaching or applying to design practice)

Go to the survey now and let me know what you think. I’ll be publishing the results here on the blog so the more people who respond, the more interesting the result will be–who’s in this online community? What portion of them are architects, versus fashion designers? What portion of them are practicing design, versus teaching or researching?

You can take the survey anonymously or you can register for a chance to win the gift certificate. At the end of the survey you can also sign on to hear from me when my project is ready for you.

Pass the link on to anyone else you know who’s interested in the topic of design as activism. The long form of the link looks like this:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/353304/your-interest-in-design-activism

And send me your responses before we get too far into October. (Yes, October starts on Friday…)

Thanks,
Ann

Have you been reading some of the interesting stuff about design for social impact? For example, The School for Visual Arts has recently finished up its summer workshop, “!mpact: Design for Social Change” which introduces participants to “the growing field of design for social advocacy.” One of the particularly interesting projects there was an effort by Claire Manibog, called Design:Effect, the outline of a tool that would help designers figure out the social return on investment (SROI) from their work. SROI includes all the benefits (“returns”) that typically are difficult to measure in monetary terms. (See for example this report from Demos, Measuring Social Value. I also have a section on these types of values in my book, The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability).

an image by Claire Manibog from her proposed SROI tool for design, read and see more at her blog

Meanwhile there’s an interview on Core77 with Mariana Amatullo of the Design Matters program at Art Center College , which is introducing a new concentration in art and design for social impact, whereas before they operated mainly by project. Core77 also carries a column by Cameron Tonkinwise at Parsons The New School for Design, about the political intricacy of design for social innovation. He’s spurred to address this question by his work with Desis (a project I’ve written about before here) and a Parsons’ Desis project called, “Amplifying Creative Communities.”

an image from the Amplifying Creative Communities project from their website, which contains information about their exhibition, interactive map, etc.

Tonkinwise makes the argument that designers might think they are avoiding politics by simply taking a “do good” ethical position, by creating positive social impact that works. But he makes a compelling argument that this type of apolitical ethical stance becomes a political one because without aiming to change broader systems, it accepts the status quo for everyone outside the scope of the project to hand. For example, he reasons that by using design to create social services (such as senior care) to replace shrinking government resources, then you are, by default, supporting “smaller government,” which may or may not have merits, but does constitute a political position. By not connecting to issues at the scale above the project, this kind of design work might enable the kind of status quo it aims to remedy with its project. He says, “In other words, being ethical, in order to avoid politics, is a political position.”

In this sense, designers working on social impact sometimes, and somewhat naturally, tend to focus on the project scale and see the users and clients as the targets, rather than thinking about their work in broader terms–for example, in terms of social movements for change. The field of design has adapted “change” and “social impact” agendas to fit within design’s traditional goals and orientations such as “human needs” or “usability.” This contrasts with conventional activist frameworks around rights, struggles, grievances and claims.

Activists are overtly political, and, as the term “activism” suggests, take public actions to call for broader change, typically targeting wide audiences and specific decisions makers. Effective activism occurs in ongoing campaigns that are strategically targeted and respond to countermoves by those maintaining the status quo (or worsening it).

So as Tonkinwise suggests, all design for social impact is political, and we might argue that whether consciously or not, it is activism. It calls for social change, but typically it is activism of a relatively weak or unstrategic kind. Tonkinwise suggests that design-based social innovation (read here design for social impact) should be connected to systems of lobbying for wider change, beyond just the project. In a sense he argues for the necessity of social impact designers becoming much more strategic activists, and I agree. I would add that designers would benefit from a closer study of how activism works, what tactics it uses and where its power comes from. We need a better understanding of design as activism.

This blog, DesignActivism.net, is part of a larger study where I’ve looked at this question of how design works as activism, as well as how conventional activists might understand design as a tool of activism. I’ve been sharing some of my insights with you through these posts, but soon I’ll be looking for some input from you on how you’d like me to share my “big picture” on how design works as activism. Look for this in the next post.

What motivates design activists? In the past few weeks I’ve come across a few cases that have made me think about motivations. Are some motivations better, or more authentic than others? Does the level of authenticity, if it could be measured, influence the nature of the activism or what it can accomplish? To what degree should we dismiss the activism of a well known, successful designer as less authentic?

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.

I recently visited the University of Manchester’s Architecture Research Centre (MARC) for a workshop on the Politics of Design. There were people at the workshop from all over the world and the program was provocative. In keeping with my previous geographic post, here I report on a few English initiatives that I came across at the conference that are relevant to the topic of design activism.

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.

On my recent visit to Seattle (prolonged by nine days thanks to Icelandic geology) I caught up with some of the interesting work of colleagues there working along the spectrum of sustainable design.

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.

Although the recent ash cloud has stranded me in the US, I wanted to report on a talk I heard before leaving the UK in March. Peter Head, the sustainability lead for Arup, a worldwide engineering, design, and planning firm, has been on a Brunel Lecture tour for the Institution of Civil Engineers, visiting 23 countries in 18 months to discuss the transition to an “ecological age.” His 83-page report is available from Arup. I heard him speak at University College London. Arup and Head himself are perhaps best known in sustainability circles for their work on Dong tang, an eco-city near Shanghai China (see for example this CSM news item).

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.

Alastair Fuad-Luke is a colleague of mine here in the UK and we sometimes end up speaking together or following in each other’s footsteps in one way or another. So I’m pleased to discuss here his recent book, Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for Sustainable World (hereafter referred to by the short title Design Activism) published in 2009 by Earthscan.

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.

It’s the time of year when I start getting asked frequently about how to find a job in sustainable design—or a related question, where you can find a role as a design activist.

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.

Happy new year to all. Sorry I’ve been away from the blog a little longer than usual in the transition to the new year. During this period I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of legitimate causes for activists to pursue. This is a question that concerns designers, but others as well.

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…