Category: TransDesign Blog

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 →