Hasta La Ideas

This is the first in a 3-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.

The United States is proud of its commitment to competitive markets as efficient ways of organizing society. But as we all know—from every time we catch a flight, or go to the doctor, or try to negotiate a new wireless or wifi contract—the United States is far from efficient, let alone filled with elegant human-centered experiences. This is especially the case in larger-scale or infrastructure-related contexts, like much of city-life.

This is also not a new complaint about the United States. King C. Gillette, before and after designing a way of shaving that required less skill (but that could only be affordable if disposable), was fed up with the inefficiencies that he felt arose from competition. The response he worked on tirelessly throughout the end of the 19th Century into the first decades of the 20th Century, pitching the idea to President Roosevelt and Henry Ford as well as the general public, was the establishment of a People’s World Corporation, a single company that would build the one metropolis needed to house the entire US population in identical towers of serviced apartments near its hydro-electric power-source, Niagara Falls.

King C. Gillette’s World Corporation

Perhaps our current problem is that we live in failed attempts to realize Gillette’s ambiguous utopian designs. Our cities comprise dense apartments poorly serviced by pseudo-monopolies. And perhaps this is why our current faith seems to be now on the opposite kind of design: not the modernist total design, but evolutionarily aggregated micro-designs.

For example, consider the number of attempts to ‘crowd-source’ city redesign just this year in New York City alone:

A. is for Amplifying Creative Communities
A Rockefeller Foundation funded 2-year project of the Parsons DESIS Lab [of which I am contributing researcher] exploring sustainable social innovations by communities around New York City, and how design could make those innovations more robust and more widely adopted.

B. is for By the City/For the City
A competition and festival produced by the Institute for Urban Design (also in part funded by Rockefeller Foundation) that solicited public ideas for improving public space in New York City.

C. is for Change by Us
A platform initially developed for the Bloomberg Administration in New York City by Local Projects, resourced by CEOs for Cities and the Rockefeller Foundation (the contemporary heirs to Gillette’s social vision?) that allows citizens to identify urban betterment needs that the platform then connects with appropriate government agencies and community groups.

These are, in addition to already existing platforms for co-re-designing cities, such as ioby.org (crowd resourcing platform for environmental improvement projects [I am on their Board]), kickstarter (here’s their page on urban redesign projects put together by the World Resources Institute), and openideo.com.

Stepping back to overview all this, it would appear that our urban problem is not lack of ideas. In a way that King C. Gillette would recognize, there is almost frustrating redundancy in not only what people think should be done, but places in which they can express these desires. The issue is rather how to realize all these ideas, or even just some of the good ones.

Compared to the first year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, which took place in the Lower East Side, this second year’s exhibition pays more attention to the stories of individuals who are fighting to materialize their innovations in Northwest Brooklyn (neighborhoods that include Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick). As Lara Penin, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Co-curator of the exhibition and its workshops this November, notes, the narratives of heroically creative people, if you can find and capture them, are inspirational, and more appropriate to the United States’ approach to social innovation.

What emerges from these stories is a rich picture of what it means to attempt change in dense urban contexts. They provide lessons for what a networked approach to social change demands, as opposed to Gillette’s total designs and the competitive market’s nondesigns:

There’s not much room /
There’s always space somewhere

There are lots of different kinds of cities, with different horizontal and vertical scales and densities, and within each of those cities are lots of different kinds of conditions. But in cities like New York, the number of people keen to be there means that nearly every square foot is programmed, usually with something expensive enough to deliver a growing return on investment to the owner. Further, what is there is invariably set in concrete, either literally, or, in the case of property rights, metaphorically. This means that urban change is difficult. Since there is no room to add onto the existing systems or structures, the task is one of ‘unbuilding cities’ (to use the nice title of a book), which is very difficult.

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As the human civilization continues to evolve, our world is only getting more dangerous, not less. Natural disasters—including but not limited to the earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes of recent memory—happen with surprising frequency and are in part due to our decaying climate. Meanwhile, man-made disasters from building collapse to nuclear meltdown will continue to become more complex and more fatal as the human ego desires taller towers and more powerful sources of energy. Lastly, acts of terror seem an almost commonplace part of everyday life in many parts of the world—and, grim though it may sound, they will not end any time soon. As these disasters grow and claim more lives, new methods of prevention, response and recovery will be required.

In first world countries, disasters are clearly distinct from the normal state of events. However, in developing countries, the distinction between events requiring disaster response and those requiring humanitarian assistance is less clear. Non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations are often at the front lines during disasters and are able to intervene in these situations where countries with more specialized disaster response resources are impeded by political affairs. The challenges presented by disaster response efforts include “four common operational problems: (1) difficulties in interagency communications, (2) ambiguity of authority, (3) poor utilization of special resources, and (4) unplanned media relations.” The need has arisen for a way to better coordinate cross-organizational and governmental response to disasters on the global scale.

The Role of the United Nations

In the international arena, disaster response systems have become increasingly difficult to maneuver as political rivalries dominate agendas and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) bear the largest burden of humanitarian assistance. As with many international situations, the United Nations—specifically, the Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA)—is intended to take charge during global catastrophes. The goal of OCHA is to “bring together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies.”

Commanded by the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, the OCHA includes divisions for Coordination and Response, Emergency Services, Communications and External Relations. Larger branches include the Surge Capacity Section (SCS), which manages massive influxes of responders, and the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG), which develops procedures for urban search and rescue.

Non-Governmental Organizations

The most prominent of the NGOs involved in disaster relief include the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The former consists of a series of distinct organizations that collaborate under the auspices of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which was founded in 1919, more than fifty years after the initial creation of the humanitarian group. Under international humanitarian law, which is composed of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the only body with authority to enforce the Conventions. As such, the various entities of the Red Cross are greatly respected as a do-gooder force around the world.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) was originally founded in 1933 as an American counterpart of a European disaster relief group. During World War II, the organization began focusing more on providing aid to refugees. The IRC maintains an Emergency Response Team, deployable within 72 hours, to assess the needs of a humanitarian crisis. Preparedness strategies include supplies pre-positioned around the world at hubs like Dubai’s International Humanitarian City and a roster of emergency personnel for short-notice deployment.

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First, Helvetica. Then, Objectified. Now, Urbanized. You might think Gary Hustwit, director of the recently completed trilogy of films on design had a deep involvement with the design world prior to making Helvetica. He didn’t. He worked in the music industry, made a few music films (including the acclaimed Wilco doc I am Trying to Break Your Heart), and tried his hand at designing a few typefaces. But, the trilogy simply grew out of a somewhat obsessive curiosity about design and how it happens, and a desire to reveal how it impacts our everyday.

Hustwit’s status as a (former) design outsider is precisely what is so great about his films. He views the processes behind things like the creation of the New York City Subway Map and the detailed decisions made in designing the iPod, as novel and exciting. He asks questions a designer wouldn’t, and tells the stories of design in a (somewhat) objective, journalistic way. His films reveal the processes and decisions made by designers, but most essentially, they show the impact that these decisions have on us.

While all three of his last films may seem very specific at first glance, Hustwit takes a democratic spin on design with all, remaining very cognizant of telling the story simply and to the largest audience that may be interested. He wanted to talk to designers about design, but he has no desire to make films that just speak to designers. Urbanized, the final film in his trilogy, focuses on the design of cities. Hustwit’s approach, emphasizing how design affects us all, comes across most clearly in this film. More importantly, he reveals how ordinary people can affect design.

Illuminating this is Hustwit’s response to the notion that a trilogy on design, starting with graphic and moving to industrial, would naturally move to architecture. In response, Hustwit explains, “I’ve always been interested in architecture, but there have been a lot of documentaries about architects and about architecture. But mostly I wanted to explore architecture in the context of the city rather than just looking at buildings. I was more interested in the public realm than the private realm of just buildings; and also, how those two interact.”

Hustwit continued, “I like the idea of showing how design affects our lives and then showing the people that are responsible for that design. In this case, that happens to be as much ordinary citizens as trained professionals.”

Detroit

Helvetica and Objectified are both composed of tons of great footage in design studios, showing sketching, modeling and manufacturing, interwoven with designers talking about their craft. The footage in Urbanized, shot beautifully again by Director of Photography Luke Geissbühler, is of public space—streets, sidewalks, parks, public transportation. The talking heads are architects and urban planners, yes, and also developers, politicians, activists, artists and typical citizens.

Urbanized, like Helvetica and Objectified, gives a brief history on the subject, touching on Jane Jacobs, and also talking to Oscar Niemeyer about the failed ideal of Brasília. The capital of Brazil, planned and developed in the 1950’s with Lucio Costa as principal planner and Niemeyer as principal architect, Brasília was designed from plan-view. Its buildings are solitary structures, with beautiful looping roads connecting them, but trying to walk anywhere takes hours.

“You can design whatever you want, whatever building or development or piece of the city that you wanted to do as a professional or a developer or city government; but, if people don’t use it and don’t adopt it and take ownership of it, it’s a failure. So, from that standpoint, ordinary citizens are a huge factor,” Hustwit said.

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Our friends behind the Design Museum Boston, Derek Cascio and Sam Aquillano, are trying to Kickstart a project called “Designing a Difference” to unite nonprofit organizations with teams of industrial designers. This isn’t the first time that Cascio and Aquillano have turned to Kickstarter for funding; we were glad to see their extremely successful “Retail: Retell. Recycle. Rethink.” exhibit come to fruition at the Prudential Center in Boston. Each project will culminate with an exhibit of the process behind the collaboration in order to educate the public about design and innovation.

“Designing a Difference” already has its first client: Smallbean, a nonprofit from Boston. Smallbean provides solar-powered computer labs to schools across Africa, allowing citizens to participate in this globally connected world. Additionally, Smallbean’s Citizen Archivist Project (CAP), developed with assistance from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches computer skills by having participants make a digital history of their communities through oral interviews, photographs, and video footage. In this two birds, one stone approach, Smallbean helps communities left behind in the wake of technology both adapt to the current state of the world and preserve their old world.

Cascio and Aquillano have assembled a team to help Smallbean’s computer labs generate revenue in order to keep them sustainable. This revenue takes the form of selling excess electricity generated by the solar-powered labs via rentable batteries. The technology and systems behind the ESCARGO, or Excess Solar as a Revenue Generation Option, program is being designed in conjunction with the Newton-Tanzania Collaborative. The Kickstarter funding will help the team purchase solar panels, batteries, and electronics to make ESCARGO a reality.

Interested in helping? Kickstart it here!

In fact, the designers were pleased to give Core77 an exclusive look at the sketching process behind the ESCARGO:

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In the past three years, BSR’s HERproject has reached over 100,000 women in the workplace worldwide. The program uses a peer-to-peer education methodology to bring health awareness and services to female farm- and factory- workers. Their 2010 report on their local and international programs gives an impressive breakdown of the impacts these programs have had in the workplace and in communities around the world—Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Last month BSR and Berkeley-based design consultancy Tomorrow Partners launched HERproject Toolbuilder, a web-based application to build training tools for health education.

Tomorrow Partners gives some insight into their process:

We worked with BSR to map out the graphics needed to cover all the curriculum topics. In the process, we learned that while women everywhere share some universal needs, in order for information to resonate with them personally, it is critical for images to be culturally specific. What the partners really needed was a library of illustrations that cover topics spanning from general, reproductive, maternal, and mental health to family planning, nutrition, and harassment for each country.

The talented and well-traveled storyboard artist Marc Ericksen joined our project team to create seven archetypical families, representative of the cultures in which HERproject currently operates. Every topic and every detail, from the design of a salwar kameez to the placement of a hand to the way a family stands together, was considered, extensively researched, and vetted with HERproject’s global partners. Marc used these families, along with his skill for capturing emotion and subtlety to build a relatable narrative.

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