Hasta La Ideas

Urban pedestrian traffic is all about flow, and those who interrupt the flow cause a ripple effect of irritation around them. Here in New York I’ve seen people board a subway car and stop just inside the door, despite the four behind them who’d also like to enter; have seen the same happen at the bottom of moving escalators; but by far the biggest offenders are the slow-moving texters staring into their phones, or the oblivious tourists walking four abreast on the sidewalk, moving about as fast as a crying child. I always want to ask them to interlock their arms and have the two on the ends hold their arms out to the side, making it totally impossible for anyone to get around them.

In this video undoubtedly bound for the YouTube stratosphere, one clever Tokyoite has discovered a way to clear a path without having to push anyone into an open manhole (the chief solution in my sidewalk fantasies):

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12/28/2011 – Updated to reflect clarification from designer Max Arlestig.

We were only half-joking when we suggested that Poler Stuff’s “Napsack” might be well-suited to Occupiers looking to hunker down for the winter. The international sociopolitical phenomenon recently crossed the three-month mark, and while the movement hasn’t made headlines lately, at least a couple of designers have drawn on Occupy for inspiration.

Max Arstig and Maximilian Gebhardt (a.k.a. Max and Max) are pleased to present “a design reflecting important and historically revolutionary things that are happening around us.” “In Case of Riot” is a coffee table that the Maxes have designed in “response to recent troubles in the world,” featuring a genuine riot shield atop a “welded square steel pipe frame base.”

Thus, the frame of the table might be seen as a sort of emergency shield rack, while the repurposed aegis takes on a new meaning as it occupies “a place where it could have a daily and normal use.”

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This is the second in a 4-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School’s Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability. Read the first piece, on The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism here.

Design beyond design—products, garments, buildings, graphics, interfaces, things—has a perpetual image problem. The kind of service systems facilitated by co-designing in contexts of social issues don’t photograph well. In the absence of shots of people rearranging fluoro post-it notes, social design must try to tell compelling stories. But, as was pointed out at the Winterhouse Symposium at the end of this past summer, the practice of social design now needs critical and conceptual clarity.

Social design is an absurd term that nonetheless circulates widely. It is absurd because it assumes that there is such a thing as asocial design. While there certainly is a lot of antisocial design (designs that do social harm to their producers or waste receivers, and sometimes even their users), the fact that any successful design is going be used by people makes it inherently social. This is why designers are constantly being lectured by ‘design thinkers’ to spend as much time studying people practicing everyday life in their natural (built) environments as designers usually spend crafting materials in blessed isolation.

When it tries to refer to a particular kind of designing, social design seems to refer to four distinct kinds of projects:

Design for/with the Other 90%
Thanks to the prominence of the recent Cooper Hewitt exhibitions (given added resonance for Occupy Wall Street’s use of percentages), there is a recognition that it tends to be only the wealthy who can commission designers to solve their problems—most of which are variations on ‘how can you make me another X that can make me more money.’ As a result, design work that focuses on non-commercial projects, or that services stakeholders who ordinarily do not have access to design expertise, tends to get called ‘social design.’ These could be underprivileged communities in developed nations, or communities in emerging economies.

“Kymmenykset” poster designed by Michell Laurence

Directing designers to these kinds of projects is not recent. To some extent its heyday was in the era of Alternative Technology after the ’70s Oil Crisis and developing economy inflation and defaults. Think of Victor Papanek’s promotion of the tithe: 10% of a designer’s time should be dedicated to social problems for which there are not yet paying clients (though as tweeters at the AIGA Pivot conference cheered, pro bono does not mean ‘for free,’ but ‘for good’—if only you could find some cause marketing corporate sponsor). The politics of these projects are necessarily difficult: Ivan Illich has reminded us of that, as well as the debate last year surrounding Bruce Nussbaum’s comments on design imperialism, to the shift that Cooper Hewitt felt was needed for the title of its sequel exhibition (presumably “Design BY the Other” will be the 3rd installment?). These kinds of social design projects tend to involve product or architectural designs, sometimes extending to systems: water carrying devices, modular emergency shelters, etc.

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This is the third post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. In The Messy Art of Saving the World, Lee will explore the role of design in international development.

One year after the devastating Indus Valley floods, Reboot traveled to Pakistan in 2011 to design a better way to distribute humanitarian aid. The disaster had killed over 1,700 people and left over 20 million more homeless. When we arrived, the formal refugee camps and aid organizations had long since packed up and left, but millions of people were still camped out in makeshift shelters next to the piles of rubble that had once been their homes.

The international community pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funding, but the majority of those we spoke with had gone without the aid they needed (some had never seen a dime). In order to create a better service model, we had to understand why.

What we uncovered was a strong example of how research and design can help the international development community not only solve pressing challenges, but discover and act on new opportunities.

We had been tasked with improving an aid program run by a global coalition of public- and private-sector partners, who distributed emergency funds through preloaded debit cards. The results had been mixed. On one hand, the debit card method promised a fast, easy and secure way to get aid to the people who needed it. It was ambitious and life-saving: Over US $230 million was disbursed to families in need in the first 70 days alone.

But on the other hand, the program was complex, involved multiple actors and was enacted in rural locations with poor infrastructure. Breakdowns were inevitable. We spoke with flood victims who waited in line for entire days only to discover that the ATM machines had stopped working and that their families would go hungry for yet another night. Opportunistic officials demanded hefty “handling fees” from textually or technologically illiterate families who needed help retrieving their aid funds. Some people qualified for aid but were denied because of glitches in the system; we met one such man who had walked 16 hours to Islamabad to plead his case with the government, unsuccessfully.

United Bank Limited (UBL), a leading Pakistani bank which had spearheaded the relief program, engaged Reboot to address these challenges. From the beginning, we understood that the root cause of many shortcomings was a lack of understanding: Corporate executives in Karachi and government officials in Islamabad had little knowledge of the rural, poor Pakistanis receiving aid and the contexts in which they lived. Without this understanding, it was impossible to design or deploy an effective system.

Thus, we began with an intensive design research process to better understand the flood victims—and the bank, too. (People don’t talk enough about empathy for your client, but it’s critical). We spoke with victims in 26 towns and villages, engaging with nearly 300 Pakistanis from all walks of life, from imams to street cleaners to loan sharks to vegetable merchants. Simultaneously, members of our team embedded within UBL to better understand its vision, needs and capacities. We spoke with staff of all levels and functional areas—everyone from the call center operators to the executives in charge—and we experienced first-hand how tough it is to run an aid program.

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In Part 3, we looked at how the US Military uses shared informational awareness to coordinate millions of troops through collaborative platforms. In this post, we’ll look at how mainstream technology—i.e.social media—is being adapted for disasters relief purposes.

Social Technologies for Disaster Response

Founded in 2008, Ushahidi was created as a website platform to track events in the wake of Kenya’s controversial presidential election by geolocating first-hand accounts of violence in Google Maps. Ushahidi made headlines after it was implemented during the Haiti Earthquakes to track emergencies, public health problems and other hazards. The platform represents a shift towards responders relying on on-the-ground, up-to-the-minute, crowd-sourced information.

Similarly, during July’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, residents in the city began circulating a Google Doc called “MumbaiHelp” that contained the “names, addresses, and phone numbers of residents who could offer their houses to stranded commuters.” Lastly, the virtual sense of community seen on websites like Facebook and Twitter can be applied to disasters, similar to what was recently seen during the mass protests in Egypt, where protesters organized and communicated via these websites.

The Evolving Role of Facebook

The benefits of using Facebook during disasters are largely about reaching a community, as “it’s not about the government helping the public; it’s about the public helping themselves… It’s peer-to-peer aid.” Facebook has recently hosted conference events with disaster relief agencies to “discuss the important role social media can play during crisis.”

Data from an American Red Cross survey showed that television, radio stations and social media are the main sources for information during an emergency, while Facebook was the “most commonly used channel for posting eyewitness information on an emergency.” The majority of respondents expect disaster response agencies to monitor and communicate through their social media sites so as to “respond promptly to any request for help posted there.” These expectations, though, are not likely to soon be met, as Red Cross faces an “enormous challenge to monitor the volume of social media traffic.”

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