design activism

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.

 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