design activism

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.

Osocio (“Social advertising and non-profit campaigns from around the globe”) reports that they’ve made it onto a list of top 10 blogs about the intersection of design and activism. The list, compiled by Noah Scalin of the design group Another Limited Rebellion, appears to focus primarily on graphic design and includes some foreign language blogs as well. What’s great about a lot of these blogs is that they feature loads of very effective images from creative social marketing campaigns. They’re inspiring.

an example via Another Limited Rebellion

the text reads: “Don’t Ignore me. China has over 1,5 million underprivileged children. To help, call 020 82266673”
Advertiser: Unicef China
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Shanghai, China

Several organizations are attempting to help designers find activist opportunities — although none of the organizations call their opportunities “activist.” Sounds too political? There are a few different models, from online, searchable databases of designers and organizations in need, to organizations that themselves do the work and take on volunteers to help them.

Below are some examples of architecture and graphic design groups. I haven’t seen a matching service like this for product/industrial designers–if there is one please let me know.

Search designers or search organizations in need
As far as matching designers and good causes in the United States, there are at least two searchable databases, one for architecture and one for graphic design. More on matching designers to activist opportunities

Is it something about October? Or is activism really taking off in the design community?

Architectural Record offers a special issue on socially responsible design for October 2008, More on In the press

In this series I’ve tried to highlight a range of ethical issues that underpin design activism. At the start I referred you to my colleague, Tim Jordan. He says that whatever activist do, their underlying motivation is a sense of what is morally better than the status quo. Often activists even put forward a vision of what constitutes a “good” life, for example, a life without waste (Jordan 2002).

morally better: a life without waste…

Design activism, similarly, is based on a vision for what is morally better than the status quo. As we’ve seen, in design terms this might concern materials, production, program (in architectural terms), function, users and consumers. However, there are a number of tensions inherent in our ethical choices, and some of these have surfaced in the examples I’ve presented. Here are a few that come to mind: More on Ethics – what is better? (4/4)

In the past couple of days I’ve come across two new publications on the theme of design activism, and interestingly one comes from a product design perspective, Design for Social Impact, (namely IDEO with the Rockefeller Foundation) and the other comes from the architecture perspective, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (Metropolis books by way of Metropolis Magazine).

What makes IDEO’s handbook exciting is that it is the marks the Rockefeller Foundation’s move into the area of design as a potential contributor to social change. They say,

“With a new focus area on innovation, The Rockefeller Foundation is exploring new avenues for social change. One promising area is design and how the design industry can play a larger role in the social sector.  This How-to Guide and the accompanying Workbook are written for  design firms that are interested in joining in conversation.”

Design for Social Impact and its handbook are available to download as PDFs.  The publications are aimed at existing design firms (design consultancies) who are interested in learning how to go about doing design for social impact. The authors present a range of strategies from changing the way you work to changing the way your firm is organized. It’s great to see others arguing for a more strategic use of the economy, as I did in The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability.

Expanding Architecture is a volume published this month (I have not yet seen it) edited by Bryan Bell, of Design Corps   (who also brought us an earlier, useful volume called Good Deeds, Good Design) and Katie Wakeford. It looks to be a useful round up of cases where architecture is doing good. They say,

“editors Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford map an emerging geography of architectural activism that is rich in its diversity of approaches. More than thirty essays … present recent work from around the world that suggests the countless ways that design can address issues of social justice, allow individuals and communities to plan and celebrate their own lives, and serve a much larger percentage of the population than it has in the past.”

In March 2009 we can also look forward to Alastair Fuad Luke’s Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (from Earthscan). They say,

“Design activists, who comprise a diverse range of designers, teachers and other actors, are setting new ambitions for design. They seek to fundamentally challenge how, where and when design can catalyse positive impacts to address sustainability.”

Taken together these publications suggest that design activism is coming into its own, as a recognizable strand within design practice…and none too soon.

In previous posts in this series I’ve dealt with the ethics underlying design activism in terms of professional ethics and the ethics of production (labor, environment, consumer). In this post I’m looking at ethical issues associated with vulnerable populations. Since I’ve argued in part 1 that activism, for my purposes, typically results from an ethical failure and prompts activists to work on behalf of a neglected, wronged or excluded group, much activism is concerned with vulnerable populations.

People from vulnerable populations are mixed in throughout society, so on the one hand, designers deal with elements of vulnerable populations all the time. On the other hand, there are times when designers address the needs of specific populations, such as elderly people, children, victims of disasters or disease, prisoners, or people struggling in poverty.

It seems that there are at least 2 ethical aspects to this situation. First, the degree to which designers serve these populations. Simply put, do designers give enough of their time to those with special needs? Second, how designers determine what is good for any given vulnerable population.

More on Ethics – vulnerable population (3/4)