design activism

 Enabling Cards help pair
seniors with young lodgers

In this last part of the series on how designers are making use of card decks for social and environmental change, we look at a European case. Designers Francois Jegou and A. Bernagozzi collaborated with the Paris-based design school, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, on ways of cultivating promising social innovations.

Their project included “Enabling Cards” based on the Logement Intergénération (“Intergenerational Lodging”) initiative and realised by L. Bayon , M. Jaloux  and V. Willerval within the workshop “Scenarios building for a more sustainable everyday” held at the Paris design school in 2008 (all images courtesy of the design team). I’ve written about this project before, and they’ve written about it here. More on part 3 of 3: card decks & social innovation

 The Garden Suit: Asparagus

In this part of the series we look at a designer’s deck of cards aimed at cultivating a sense of place and at penetrating complexity of place. Jane Wolff’s Delta Primer Playing Cards are a companion to her book, Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta (William Stout Architectural Books, 2003). Wolff, a landscape architect currently based at the University of Toronto, uses the hand drawn cards to analyze and describe the competing interests among water, land and people in the delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet.

Although the Deck can be used to play games, it also offers a layered and unexpected view of the landscape as the cards are randomly accessed and juxtaposed. Instead of the conventional 4 suits, Wolff’s cards offer alternative suits: Machine, Garden, Toy and Wilderness. Toy includes items such as boats and names, whereas machine includes topics such as dredgers.

Other reviewers (John A. Loomis in Architectural Record, January 2005 and Mark Anderson in Places 16.2), have commented on the fact that the format of the card deck, combined with supplemental information in the book, serve to highlight a much broader range of information, capturing more complexity and layering, than would typically be available in a narrative of the California Delta.

The machine suit (left) and the toy suit (right)

The freeing of information from a narrative structure, combined with the visual and map documentation, brings the place alive in a dynamic, questioning way. The format also suggests an appeal to a wide range of stakeholders concerned with the ongoing struggles over the delta.

In the final part of this series we’ll look at an example where designers used a deck of cards to enable a community and we’ll reflect on the card deck format in terms of what these three examples have shown.

All Images of the Delta Primer Playing Cards courtesy of Jane Wolff and William Stout Publishers

Cultural Preservation Cards for Iraq

Sticking with the “game” theme (see the last post on computer games), This post starts a 3-part series on card decks and how design activists have been using them.

Designers have a history with card decks, and among the more prominent examples are the Eames’ House of Cards (“Play it again” in Metropolis Magazine, June 2005). Another well known design entry in the card deck form is IDEO’s Method Cards. IDEO’s human factors team developed the cards, and they say the cards, “show 51 of the methods we use to inspire great design and keep people at the center of our design process. Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it.”

But more recent applications of the card deck format qualify as design activism in the categories of cultural preservation, sense of place, and community capability. In this post I’ll look at cultural preservation.

More on Series: Card Decks

I’m showing my prejudice here, but computer and video games would ordinarily be the last place I would expect to find “socially responsible design.” Yet recent offerings prove me wrong. A range of new “serious games” (instructional, informational and educational) are tackling issues from obesity to climate change.

One example is Games for Change (G4C), a group that supports organizations using digital games for social change. I had a go with the game “Darfur is Dying” (note: this previous link loads the game.) In the game you assume the persona of a villager (I chose a young woman) and you have to go and forage for water amid threats from roving militias. More on Game designers as activists, no really

Like other reviewers, I really enjoyed Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (edited by Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford, Metropolis Books, 2008), and for many of the same reasons. It presents a wide range of informative, thought-provoking cases. However, unlike Fred Bernstein who reviewed the book in Architectural Record, I don’t believe that design activism is so diverse as to be “label defying” (Architectural Record, October 2008). The theme of Bernstein’s review is the notion that there’s no “single rubric” for the range of activities reported in the book.

On the contrary, I think Bell and Wakeford’s volume illustrates quite well the notion that activists draw from a relatively limited typology of actions. Observers of social movements from sociology, political science and history have long since identified a standard range of the “public actions” (i.e. “activism”) that activists deploy to make claims for change. Known as the “repertoire of action,” it includes approaches such as protest marches, candlelight vigils, sit-ins, boycotts, strikes and petitions, which are like a set of jazz standards that everyone knows, but that are improvised and combined in many different ways for different causes. More on Book review, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism

[addendum to this post: there was further discussion of this issue on a  discussion list focused on design research. I was prompted to write more about the national design policy in response to that discussion, from my social movement/activism perspective. The archive of the whole discussion is here. ]

On January 5th a group called “The US National Design Policy Initiative” launched a report called “Redesigning America’s Future: 10 Design Policy Proposals for the United States of America’s Economic Competitiveness and Democratic Governance.” The report is the result of the 2008 National Design Policy Summit held in Washington D.C. on November 11–12, 2008. The summit generated more than 60 policy proposals and over time the group aims to publish the rest of the proposals on its website, www.designpolicy.org.

The Praise
First, some praise. It’s great to see design groups working across disciplines to articulate the value of design in the public sector and in the marketplace. Good too to aim high (the report mentioned above is being sent to every member of congress as well as the incoming president and vice president). Some of the individual proposals hold promise, such as proposal 3 which mentions climate change and supports the 2030 challenge. Proposal 5 is my favorite exhorting “community empowerment in all designed aspects” of community life.

The Critique
But next, the criticisms, and I’m afraid I have a few. More on Comments on the US National Design Policy initiative

Greetings for 2009,

For those of you engaged in teaching various aspects of sustainable design, I want to let you to know about a new discussion list I’ve set up, SUSDESIGNTEACH (very elegant name, I know).

The list is open to anyone who is interested in discussing the challenges of teaching sustainable design. You can sign up to the discussion list here:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=susdesignteach

For a slightly longer introduction to the list, see my short article here:
http://www.designers-atlas.net/disclist.html

In addition, I’ve issued an update to the Teaching Guide for my book, The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, with 9 new briefs and exercises covering the following topics: chemicals, climate change, holistic health, small changes, deep ecology, shrinkage (versus growth), sustainable consumption, time (long termism), and aging.

As with the full Teaching Guide, many of the briefs and exercises in the addendum are supported by a range of case studies, most of which are available online.  More information and free download here:
http://www.designers-atlas.net/teachguide.html

Thanks to all those who voted for sustainable design as a “big idea for America” in the Change.org ideas competition. Although we fell fairly far short of the needed 900-odd votes, I was encouraged that 44 people turned up to vote in only 6 days between Christmas and New Year’s — arguably the worst time of year for this type of effort. Given a longer voting period and better timing, I’m convinced we could have collected a least a few hundred votes.

However, the Change.org ideas competition does not have to be the end of this idea…

Best wishes for the new year!

design as a way to “see” sustainability

Change.org has initiated “Ideas for Change in America” to generate great ideas for the incoming Obama Administration. Organized into a range of categories, the ideas cover a wide range of causes from government reform to fair trade and humanitarian aid. I’ve submitted an idea to use great design, across government, as a tool for sustainability. You can vote for it here. If you like the idea, spread the word–it has to collect 921 votes by December 31st, 2008 to advance into the second round of ideas.

Here is the text for the idea “Use great design as a tool for sustainability.”

The government is responsible for a great deal of design, not only physical artifacts such as government buildings, uniforms, roads, or equipment, but also policies and purchasing. We need an interdisciplinary, design-focused group to ensure that all these design decisions are leveraged for the benefit of sustainability.

Public agencies have suffered from fragmentation, where individual resources and concerns are managed in isolation. For example, one agency manages fish (and game) without managing water, or commerce and consumerism without solid waste, or climate without emissions. This approach perhaps made sense when the objective was purely to consume resources, but it doesn’t work for sustaining resources indefinitely.

Design is a powerful way to implement a vision that integrates a range of sustainability concerns in the practical way that public agencies need. For example, if we use product design as our lens, an integrated sustainability picture arises that cuts across raw materials, manufacturing, transport, energy use, commerce, consumerism, and solid waste. Each of these categories would traditionally be dealt with by a different public agency; the integrated picture would be hidden. Sustainable architecture and other forms of sustainable design (from graphics to lighting) capture equally integrated and practical approaches.

The federal government’s design programs at the National Endowment for the Arts or the General Services Administration (“Design Excellence” program) have shown that great design can emerge from well managed processes involving thoughtful, knowledgeable experts. The next step is for government to use great design as a tool for sustainability.

We don’t normally “see” it this way: the lifecycle of a designed product or building shows its connection to a range of sustainability issues: natural resources, waste, consumerism, trade, time and geographic scale.

Have a good idea of your own? submit it before 31st December in 250 words or less at Change.org, and vote on others.

Two (make that three, see update, below) “activist” design competition have hit the press recently, both with money attached.

Metropolis Magazine
Metropolis’s annual Next Generation competition has a theme this year of “fixing our energy addiction.” The deadline is 30 January 09 and the prize is $10,000.

They say, “Rising energy costs are the focus of the worldwide competition, which is open to all designers in practice for 10 years or less, as well as to students. the magazine seeks entries at all scales of design–urban, landscape, building, interior, object, communication–and for every aspect of the man-made environment.”

The Financial Times Climate Change Challenge
With the same deadline, a coalition in the UK made up of the Financial Times, Forum for the Future and HP are offering £75,000 for an innovative solution to climate change problems. The competition seeks products, services or even social innovations.

They say, “The key requirement is that the innovations will have moved off the drawing board and demonstrated their feasibility, but will not yet be commercially sucessful. They will have been piloted or prototyped and might have attracted seed financing or gained recognition locally. Entries must specify how they would use the prize money to develop and extend the product or service.”

Let me know of other activist competitions to post here. Thanks.

update 6 December 08 by way of Mason Curry on the Stanford Product Design Alum list (Thanks!):
The Greener Gadgets Conference is also running a design competition in association with Core77, entry deadline January 15th.

They say, “This design competition challenges established design firms, emerging designers, and design students to come up with new and innovative solutions to address the issues of energy, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, new materials, product lifecycle, and social development.” Top prize for this one is $3000, with two $1000 runner up prizes.

Interesting that both the Green Gadgets and the FT compeitions are using a significant component of public voting to decide the winners.