Category: Writing

Radical Futures: Designing for Fundamental Change

This article was originally published in Touchpoint Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 2, “Designing the Future” (October 2018). Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design is published by Service Design Network.

Designing for the future provides a chance to question the status quo and build a path towards equity. However, when we focus on solving problems within existing systems, it is difficult to challenge the system itself. Instead, what if we designed services for a future in which we believe differently?

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Participatory Speculation: Futures of Public Safety

This paper will be presented at the 2018 Participatory Design Conference in Hasselt & Genk, Belgium. The paper discusses an approach that combines participatory and speculative design practices to enable non-reformist reform. It explores how we might challenge the limits of the status quo by using speculative design’s intention of provocation, while engaging in a participatory process that includes the people who are most impacted by current oppressive systems. In a case study based in Ferguson, MO, community members imagined futures where neighborhoods are kept safe without policing. Speculative props were designed to materialize community members’ visions and to provoke conversation around our utopias and their negative implications. This work confronts challenges around public participation, collaborative visioning and the long process of enacting radical systemic change.

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Exploring Anthropological Imagination

We should explore what kinds of interventions the anthropological imagination discussed by Anusas and Harkness (2014) can envision that design could not. If anthropology is about understanding human cultures and societies, what if design anthropology was about creating new cultural elements? For example, design anthropologists could be tasked with developing renewed social protocols, gestures, ceremonies, rituals, folklore, and other cultural fragments that create meaning for a community. Continue reading →

The Shifting Boundaries of Design Imperialism

My internal anxiety around humanitarian design might have begun in Emily Pilloton’s Studio H exhibit in Portland where I stumbled upon a gallery tour full of PSU students. One of them referenced the conversation sparked by Bruce Nussbaum’s article and challenged the tour guide to a debate about how long you have to live somewhere in order to be an insider, and thus a legitimate candidate for making change. Since then it has become increasingly more complex, and this semester has only served to intensify and expand the constant worry. Continue reading →

Creating Space for Transformation

In Transdisciplinary design, we’re always talking about transformation. How can we change the way we record skills in higher education? How can we change our course towards a socially and ecologically unsustainable future? How can we change the way community organizations collaborate? These are big challenges, stuck in webs of complex systems, where the effect of any small change reverberates in unknown ways from one issue to the next. Sometimes we address this with prototyping, throwing an idea into the system and seeing what happens. But other times it feels like anything we create within the system will only promote the current state of affairs. We need a blank slate to try out something new. Continue reading →