Innovation Winter 2017: Design at the Margins

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Design at the Margins COLLABORATION

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IDSA Medical Design Conference 2018 | Boston | March 29 EXPERIENCE will explore the potency of researching and designing healthcare products and environments that weld human performance, business and the dignity of users. Join us as we cover everything from future trends that impact medical design—to best practices and tools and techniques for the research and design of effective medical product and environments.

Dynamic speakers include:

Aidan Petrie Ximedica

Pavitra Krishnamani, MS Thomas Jefferson University

Chris Rockwell Lextant

Register now at IDSA.org/2018Medical and follow the journey on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with #IDSAMedical.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA WINTER 2017 ®

Publisher IDSA 555 Grove St., Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 F: 703.787.8501 www.idsa.org

Executive Editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA Managing Director LUNAR | Chicago mark@lunar.com

Sr. Creative Director Karen Berube IDSA 703.707.6000 x102 karenb@idsa.org

Advertising Shani Armon IDSA 703.707.6000 x100 shania@idsa.org

Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus

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678.612.7463

The quarterly publication of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), INNOVATION provides in-depth coverage of design issues and long-term trends while communicating the value of design to business and society at large.

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IDSA AMBASSADORS 3M Design, St. Paul, MN Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL; Santa Barbara, CA Covestro, LLC North America, Pittsburgh, PA

DESIGN AT THE MARGINS 20 Serving the Underserved

By Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA,

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH

FEATURES

Dell, Round Rock, TX

18 Impossible Dreamer

By B. Alexandra Szerlip

LUNAR, San Francisco, Chicago, Munich,

47 Geometry for Industrial Designers

McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd., Chicago, IL

By Owen Foster, IDSA

26 Who Is Designing for Them?

By Percy Hooper, IDSA

Pip Tompkin Design, Los Angeles, CA

Guest Editor

22 Empowering the Future

By Allen Samuels, L/IDSA

Hong Kong Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO TEAGUE, Seattle, WA

28 Fearless Design

IN EVERY ISSUE

THRIVE, Atlanta, GA

By Kevin Phaup

4 From the Editor

Tupperware, Orlando, FL

32 Educating Impact

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

By Jonathan Mills

36 Building in Design Integrity Bringing Empathy into the Design Process

By Deana McDonagh, PhD

6 Design Defined

By Dr. Patricia Moore, FIDSA

8 Beautility

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

42 Coding Future Potential

17 Commentary

By James Kendall, IDSA

44 Seeding Impact Principles for Design Pedagogy

By Nathan King, DDes

Left: Fearless Design. See p. 28.

INNOVATION DESIGN AT THE MARGINS

Design at the Margins COLLABORATION

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Ambassador, please contact IDSA at 703.707.6000.

11 A Look Back

By Joon Kwon

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

For more information about becoming an

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

By Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA 39 Change Starts with Me 16 Book Review and You

By Alex Liggins, Alex Sejdinaj, Helen Cramer and Jules DeLee

Charter supporters indicated in bold.

Cover: Change Starts with Me and You. IDEA 2017 Gold-winning Dream Ring. See p. 39.

WINTER 2017

INNOVATION is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. INNOVATION is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. INNOVATION (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170.

Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2017 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 36, No. 4, 2017; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

Statement of Ownership Publication: INNOVATION Publication Number: Vol. 34, No. 2 Filing Date: 11.6.17 Issue Frequency: Quarterly No. of Issues Published Annually: 4 Annual Subscription Rate: $85 Domestically, $150 Internationally Mailing Address: 555 Grove St. #200, Herndon, VA 20170 Mailing Address for Headquarters: Same as above Owner & Publisher: Industrial Designers Society of America, 555 Grove Street, Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170 Managing Editor: Karen Berube Issue Date for Circulation Data: Summer 2017

Ave. Year Single Total Number of Copies: 2,513 2,250 Paid/Requested outside county: 1,922 1,595 Paid in county: 0 0 Sales through dealers/carriers: 204 192 Other classes mailed through USPS: 83 116 Total paid: 2,203 1,903 Total nonrequested distribution: 50 200 Total distribution: 2,253 2,103 Copies not distributed: 260 147 Total: 2,513 2,250 Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 97.78% 90.49%

Advertisers’ Index 15 Appliance Design 7 IDSA District Design Conferences 2018 1 IDSA Medical Design Conference 2018 10 International Design Conference 2018 5 International Design Excellence Awards 2018 c3 International Design Excellence Awards 2018 c2 HUGE c4 LUNAR 7 National Industrial Design Day 10 Prototype Solutions Group 7 Radius

F RO M T HE E DI TOR

DESIGN, HAPPINESS & THE FUTURE

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K, to state the obvious, design is very popular right now. In fact, it seems like everywhere we have developed an insatiable need for design and design thinking. Home improvement shows are massive hits with design and building themes engaging people in binge watching creative immersions. Fashion is hotter and more varied and prolific than ever. Architecture is pushing form boundaries fueled by 3D methods of design and construction that allow building in ways that defy logic compared to even just 30 years ago.

And industrial design, the profession, is at full employment at the moment. Clearly, design plays a role in the commercially oriented arenas of entertainment and business, but is that really its most important purpose?

Design as a capability is a unique and highly soughtafter method and almost impossible to grow organically in this full-employment environment. So it’s being acquired, as proven by the numbers. As I reported in the Summer issue, in 2016 alone there were a record number of acquisitions, 42, according to John Maeda’s annual Design in Tech Report. I should know because LUNAR’s parent company, McKinsey, the management consultancy, recently acquired Veryday, an established European agency, adding more design power to its design arsenal. Still, there is something unsettling about this moment. As awesome as it is to be wanted, it’s even more compelling to think about where design isn’t. That is to say, where it’s needed but not available to the people who perhaps need it most. It’s time now to pause, or even take a step backward perhaps, to reflect on the true impact design can have in our world.

Recently, I was invited to a think-tank meeting, an unconference hosted by the School of Art at the University of Michigan expertly conceived and executed by Bruce Tharp, chair of the ID department there. An unconference is a lightly structured engagement of conversational interaction centered around the unpacking of ideas, in this case, design, happiness and the future. It was a brilliant three-day affair held on a crisp fall weekend in downtown Detroit. A beautiful gathering of design minds and futurists

and experts on happiness (yes, there is such a thing)—six of each. The 18 of us came together to explore the impact and range of what happens when these three significant ideas intersect. Conversations were self-initiated and participation in them self-selected.

For much of the weekend, we discussed underserved communities that had agency with causes and the impact that leaning in brought to the populations they were involved with. The show stopper, as this was held in the shadow of the rebirth of Detroit, was a visit to the Heidelberg Project, an outdoor art initiative in the heart of the city whose mission is to “improve the lives of people and neighborhoods through art.” The Heidelberg Project believes that “all citizens, from all cultures, have the right to grow and flourish in their communities. That a community can redevelop and sustain itself, from the inside out, by embracing its diverse cultures and artistic attributes as the essential building blocks for a fulfilling and economically viable way of life.” It is a true experiment in public art conveying the meaning of personal struggle and the struggle of a population underserved in a world of excess and abundance. As the Heidelberg Project reminds us, amid all this acquisition and accolating we must not lose sight of where design’s true impact lies. The iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames famously said, “We wanted to make the best for the most for the least.” That was the inspiration for this issue of INNOVATION. For a guest editor, we turned to the name that immediately popped into our heads. Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA, is a highly engaged and influential professor teaching design at Notre Dame and a super talented designer we have known for a long time who has been working beyond self-interest for an even longer time. Reaching out to underserved populations in Nepal, Ann-Marie has been creating and bringing back stories that nourish the soul and speak to design’s true calling. She has been a beacon for good and a role model for many designers who share her pure focus and sense of accomplishment. We are lucky to have her curating this important issue of the journal.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

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IDEA Open for Entries Jan. 2 - Mar. 19 Learn more at IDSA.org

START YOUR YEAR WITH A BRILLIANT IDEA

D E S I G N DE F I NE D

Design Empathy

OUR ULTIMATE ROLE

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hen Stephen Hawking was asked which human failing he would like to correct, he answered, “aggression,” and which traits he would like to see more often, he responded, “kindness and understanding.” Which quality would he like most to magnify? “Empathy.”

While running for the US Senate, candidate Barack Obama noted, “We’ve got a budget deficit that’s important.

We’ve got a trade deficit that’s critical.

But what I worry about most is our empathy deficit.”

In 1974, when I joined Raymond Loewy’s New York Office as the only female industrial designer, I recognized the opportunity for expanding our proud tradition of focusing on consumers’ wants and wishes by embracing a social science approach of role immersion.

I was hardly the first person to undertake an intensive awareness of the existence of others.

Giovanni Bernadone, at age 23, made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1206. The son of a wealthy merchant, he was struck by the contrast of the opulence of St. Peter’s Basilica and the abject poverty of the beggars in the streets. He traded clothes with one of the men so that he could experience the humility of seeking support. Soon after, he founded a religious order dedicated to lepers and the poor. In choosing his papal name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, honored Bernadone, who we now know as St. Francis of Assisi.

While Jack London and George Orwell both examined early-20th-century social injustice by living amongst London’s homeless and unemployed, it was actually Beatrice Webb who began researching the inequity of urban poverty in 1887. She left her life of wealth and privilege by taking on degrading and dangerous work in a textile factory. Her book, Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary, woke the blasé bourgeois to the struggles of the working poor.

Life for African Americans in the segregated “Deep South” defined prejudice and racism. Journalist John Griffin dyed his white skin black (the chemicals he used caused the cancer that eventually killed him) and undertook life as a shoeshine boy in 1959 New Orleans. The indignities and violence he encountered are chronicled in his book, Black Like Me. I began my empathic journey as elders in 1979. For nearly four years, I lived prosthetically disguised as women in their 80s, traveling to 116 cities in 14 states and two Canadian provinces.

Utilizing a full range of apparent health and wealth, I lived as a “bag lady,” a wellheeled matron and a middle-incomed woman, modeled after my beloved grandmother. I was shown kindness and respect, rudeness and cruelty. The work I began in Universal Design as a student at RIT a decade earlier was intensified and expanded by my elder experience resulting in the evolution to the inclusivity by design that I passionately embrace today.

Design for some and not for all continues to plague our world’s people and punish our planet. Human-caused tragedies and natural disasters abound. From politics to poverty, the insanity of prejudice and misguided power threaten quality of life everywhere.

With all of the creature comforts that design and technology have brought us since I entered the field, it is the unmet needs, the unsolved challenges and the opportunities for what has yet to be accomplished that matter most.

From its inception, design has been even more essential than the creative delight and innovation of combining beauty and utility. Design delivers answers. Design defines lives. Design diminishes fear. As we courageously continue in our role and responsibility as arbiters for happiness, health and life’s quality, let us always remember, and never forget, to imagine and walk in another’s shoes. Here’s to a good tomorrow, a great future and Empathy by Design!

—Dr. Patricia Moore, FIDSA, named one of the world’s 40 Most Socially Conscious Designers, one of the 100 Most Important Women in America, one of the 50 Americans Defining the New Millennium, and one of IDSA’s 50 Notable Members.

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B E A U T I LI TY

COLLABORATION IS BEAUTILITY

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ascination with how industrial designers invent things and make them into beautiful products distracts the public from seeing one of the most important lessons of our process: collaboration. For designers, collaboration is like water to fish; we don’t see it. Although 60 percent of the human body is water, 100 percent of our work is with other people for someone else.

Collaboration is integral to our profession: “usercentered” by definition requires teamwork between the designer and the user. Beyond dialog, it’s multilog! For us to create successful products and services, it’s necessary to tap a whole ecology of experts. Engineers, manufacturers, distributors, salespeople and recyclers all contribute. Crossdisciplinary is baked in. Interdisciplinary was born out of our process: multi-intelligence cross-disciplinary collaboration.

We are proactive multitaskers. Breaking new ground with a collaborative posse is the most fun—learning to play and playing to learn. It’s the ultimate beautility. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

Collaboration is basically the same stuff we learned in kindergarten, only now we use professional strength that combines our talent, form giving and some fuzzy logic. It’s not easy to practice. Collaboration is a delicate process.

Cooperative relationships need nurturing. The quality of the teamwork depends on the range of the participants—like genetic diversity, variety is exactly the source of its strength and the basis of friction. The more dissimilar the players, the more challenging the group dynamics. It’s easy for the mixture to ignite. Hartmut Esslinger said that frogdesign harnessed what he calls “creative combustion.” But without sympathy, respect and understanding, things can explode!

Esslinger recently tweeted: “‘Design thinking’ once was well-intended, but became corporate entertainment for executives unable to risk change for real innovation.”

The question is how do you get adversarial people to collaborate? Type A authoritarian and competitive conduct, aggression, getting mad, physical force, bullying behavior and ramming things through Congress all divert and co-opt the process. The collaborative method is not about dictating, dividing or conquering for domination—it’s a quest for truth. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Social proof comes from accomplishments, not steps up the power ladder. Collaboration is not distributing

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tasks and building team spirit. It is not just about working on a community project. Collaboration requires sympathetic, open-minded relationships and shared empathy with team members. It’s flexible, inquisitive and supportive.

Collaboration, like democracy, requires both personal freedom and social responsibility. Collaboration is a soft skill; you can’t force someone to do it. Symbiotic culture is nurtured, not imposed.

It is not easy to teach collaboration because we are taught over and over in school and movies about survival of the fittest (which isn’t about survival of the nicest!).

Maintaining classroom order is easier when students are told what to learn. The best way to teach collaboration is to be collaborative. Collaborative skills are very subtle. Students watch how you behave, and their observations shape their understanding of what they learn. Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s nonviolent protests modeled the behavior they expected from the police (or conversely, the modern-day Confederates’ antagonistic behavior models the response they expect from their rallies). As Reconstruction after the Civil War is proving, it takes generations to incubate real collaborators. It’s a slow process beginning with parents setting the stage.

Collaboration is not a solitary adventure; it obviously requires community support. Industrial designers have traditionally been the kings of collaboration: our profession is based on snappy models produced by teamwork. (Even though Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, made all his designers sign their work with his name, the work in his studio was a group effort.) The studio is like a jazz session, everyone adds a riff, takes turns, plays off each other and always keeps it cookin‘! Or at the comedy club where the fun comes from the uncertainty and chance of failure built on improv’s number one rule: “yes, and.”

Why do you think collaboration and design thinking are gaining acceptance and being implemented in all kinds of successful companies? It works. We transformed critical thinking into design thinking not by arguing the merits but by showing how it succeeds. Back in the 1970s, legendary design teacher Rolf Faste amped up design thinking, teaching the whole-person approach at Stanford. His colleague David Kelley led the creation of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) based on the iterative holistic design process.

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Minnesota Historical Society/Getty Images

—George Bernard Shaw

The collaborative process is more than an activity; it performs like a complex network: links, nodes and hubs.

In his book Linked (2002), Hungarian physicist AlbertLászló Barabási wrote that “the rapidly unfolding science of networks is uncovering phenomena that are far more exciting and revealing than the casual use of the word network could ever convey. … They open up a novel perspective on the interconnected world around us, indicating that networks will dominate the new century to a much greater degree than most people are yet ready to acknowledge. They will drive the fundamental questions that form our view of the world.”

In my last INNOVATION column, I wrote about AI and robots taking over all the jobs. The Internet of Things (IoT) is sneaking up on us, too. This distributed network seems harmless. While its interconnected devices let us play with the color of our lights, they will start scheming behind our backs, developing the basics of working together. Their communication will necessarily grow more complex, until it evolves into a really smart network. When the IoT is all plugged in, its neural networks will work together essentially like nice little communists: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Its integrated links—getting all the networked things to collaborate—will become the dominant feature. Isn’t communication just another word for “think”? The underlying value of IoT is that someday it will think for itself!

The terrors the world faces now are not plots masterminded by some Dr. Evil or the Joker that heroes like

Wonder Woman can vanquish. The solutions to our wicked problems require us all to work together.

The hippies realized that they couldn’t survive in their bucolic bliss surrounded by people who couldn’t tolerate them, so they reintegrated. Humans can either be bullies or facilitators.

Does collaboration, like an abstract mathematical equation, always guarantee the right answers? Does the dark side’s collaborative process generate super evil solutions or lead to good ones? It seems hard to believe that collaboration can somehow transform garbage into something good—but the seeds of good are planted in an inclusive process. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Irish poet W.B. Yeats.

For the same reasons we try to make the world better by design, we need to help make collaboration successful.

It might be circular reasoning, but since collaboration leads to better designs and better designs lead to better behavior, then collaboration is what peace is built on. Too many people are being inconsiderate, rude, abusive, mean and vicious—a little inclusive collaboration could improve bad attitudes! The objective of any tribe is to work together.

Collaboration isn’t just a great way to reach a goal—it is the goal. Look! It is on the UN’s list of sustainable goals to transform our world (un.org/sustainabledevelopment). No. 17, “Partnerships for the goals,” is about collaboration.

The UN says that working together is the key to success for the other 16 sustainable goals. Collaboration is an open-ended policy.

The idea of beautility is the synthesis of form and function. Designers believe the proposition that stuff and behavior correspond—that making a comfortable chair encourages workers to do better work. That Post-its encourage people to be flexible. The iterative industrial design process, an artificial form of natural selection, works naturally. Like machine learning, the fail-often rule generates and tests more and better options.

Just as beautility is not simply a function or a result, collaboration is not a method. It’s a way of life (like being a designer!). Like John Dewey says about learning: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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This groundbreaking event will become the premier forum for design dialogue and inspiration. Together, we can expand the impact of design around the world.

We want to give people a greater understanding of what they design for and we hope you’ll be a part of it.

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A LOOK BA C K

IT STARTED WITH AN ASHTRAY

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ust as the 1871 fire drew architects and engineers to Chicago to rebuild the city, so too the planning of the 1933–34 Century of Progress exposition attracted designers. Eager to work with the many companies that would build displays, Jean Otis Reinecke (1909–1987) and James Barnes (1908–1986) came from St. Louis to Chicago in 1930 to set up a branch office for their employer, General Displays, Inc. While Reinecke was the artist, Barnes was the salesman.

Reinecke revealed his artistic skills and entrepreneurial energy while in high school in Pittsburg, KS. He picked strawberries on the family farm and delivered newspapers to earn money to buy his own horse, worked in a sign painting shop and partnered with a classmate to build and repair radios. After graduating from high school in 1926, he attended one semester at Kansas State Teachers College. He worked as an illustrator for a nearby publisher and then left for St. Louis in 1927 and took a few art courses at Washington University. He began working at General Displays where he designed displays for conventions and store windows and illustrated advertising posters, magazines and promotional stickers. He designed an exhibit of an amphibian plane at the international aircraft exposition in St. Louis in 1929, and in 1930, at the company’s new branch office, he created posters for the national air races held in Chicago. Little is known about James Barnes outside the pair.

Creating Classics for American Consumers While hunting for clients, the ambitious pair visited factories and fabricators to learn about the latest production techniques. While designing and managing displays for some 25 companies exhibiting at the Century of Progress, Reinecke and Barnes also learned about merchandising and brand image. In addition to designing displays for the Chrysler Pavilion, they redesigned the automaker’s 1933 souvenir ashtray and its packaging for the fair’s 1934

season. Reformatted from a square to a circle, the updated ashtray improved on functionality, replacing the narrow four corner grooves with one wide slot for the resting cigarette. A much clearer presentation of the Chrysler Pavilion and the company’s four auto brands, the ashtray also emphasized the building’s dramatic appearance at the 1934 Century of Progress. Similarly, its mailer package was a much stronger graphic brand statement.

At the same time, Barnes and Reinecke began designing products for local manufacturers, such as the Chicago Electric Mfg. Co. They designed a toaster for the firm, which sold through the 1930s, and for which in February 1934 they applied to patent their design. Fortuitously, the article “Both Fish and Fowl” appeared in the February 1934 issue of Fortune magazine.

This article proved to become a great influence for business and design as it credited the emerging industrial design profession for increasing product sales. It featured New York designers such as Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, and Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, who commanded fabulous fees. Encouraged by such exciting opportunities in the new field, Reinecke and Barnes bought the General Displays office and established General Exhibits and Displays in 1934. They sold the enterprise in 1935 to launch the Barnes & Reinecke industrial design firm and settled into an office at 664 North Michigan Avenue. Similar to the self-made founders of today’s start-up companies, the bold Reinecke was 26 years old.

Above: 1933 and 1934 Chrysler souvenir ashtrays.

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A L O O K B ACK

the electrical resistor coil placed on the curved Regional manufacturers and their chromium surfaces to disguise production suppliers provided the firm with a ripe field of imperfections or wear. This graphic element potential clients hungry for new directions as remained the Toastmaster logo for decades.

Barnes & Reinecke educated them on how designers operate. Within 10 years, Barnes Promoting Materials and Results & Reinecke became the largest design office Barnes & Reinecke were early advocates in Chicago, serving companies throughout for the latest materials and processes. They the Midwest and beyond. Its staff designed understood the many benefits of the new numerous products considered icons of their plastic materials, which could create fluid categories. In 1938, Reinecke’s redesign of forms in appealing colors to entice consumers a heavy-duty Scotch tape dispenser for and result in higher sales while delivering the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing manufacturing efficiencies, such as reducing Company (3M) increased sales by 53 Jean Otis Reinecke, c. 1935. the number of parts in a product. The magazine percent over the previous year and began Modern Plastics premiered in 1934, and Reinecke frequently Reinecke’s 40-year relationship with the company. The contributed articles that explained the materials’ flexibility compact plastic dispenser designed in 1939 is still common and applications. The firm’s entries to the magazine’s annual on desks today. The 1B14 model Toastmaster, for the product competition often ranked among the winners. The McGraw-Edison Company of Elgin, IL, created the typeform office also illustrated molding processes for the magazine’s for the modern toaster and was the top seller in the postwar 1947 Engineering Design for Plastics Encyclopedia. market. The design team also created the wavy emblem of

Above: Barnes & Reinecke design team. Reinecke, standing; VP of design David Painter at head of table (wearing vest) with Barnes (in dark suit).

February, 1940 Future magazine.

Left: Barnes & Reinecke sales brochure, c. 1946.

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A L O O K B ACK

Barnes & Reinecke promoted their skills and the success of their clients’ redesigned products with beforeand-after comparisons in advertising mailers sent to prospective clients and with articles in trade publications read by decision-makers. For example, for the Miller Hydro Company in Bainbridge, GA, they redesigned a bottle washing machine to make it more efficient and streamlined in appearance and described their approach in a 1939 issue of the National Bottlers’ Gazette. In 1940 Barnes and Reinecke were described in Today’s Young Men, a book featuring profiles of 70 “inexperienced young men unhampered by precedent” who were achieving success in many fields and leading the way out of the Depression.

Barnes and Reinecke, the author wrote, “are changing the entire appearance of the environment in which we work and play, and—more amazing—are causing a multitude of longestablished manufacturing principles to be tossed in the discard. Scores of the nation’s large, well-established, longexperienced companies, faced by diminishing consumer markets the past ten years, have turned to Barnes and Reinecke, industrial designers, for a way out of the red.”

Design Evolution in the 1940s During World War II, the firm’s staff swelled to more than 325 as it embedded its engineers at clients’ plants to create items serving military needs. The firm worked on many secret research projects for the armed forces and provided crews of engineers and designers to furnish packaged production services to eliminate war-plant bottlenecks. The firm also designed numerous futuristic products for the imagined postwar consumer economy to keep its name in the public eye. In 1946 the firm mounted a national marketing campaign to attract new postwar clientele; its staff then numbered 181, and the firm had grossed $1.4 million in sales the previous year. Articles about the firm’s work appeared in trade journals and the consumer press, notably an October 1946 issue of Life, the country’s most popular family magazine.

In 1946 its sales brochure (shown on page 13) headlined the firm’s credo: “Design Increases Sales.” The back cover featured four large products: a Bucyrus-Erie construction shovel, a Firestone home laundry washing machine, an Allis-Chalmers tractor and an electric carpentry tool for the Milwaukee Saw Trimmer Corp. The inside message read, “A fact worth remembering: Our facilities, experience and knowledge of Merchandising, Materials and Manufacturing Techniques cannot be surpassed.”

The colorful array of small products included products for many Chicago-area manufacturers and distant companies: a drink mixer and juice extractor for the Scoville Mfg. Co. (Waterbury, CT), a slide projector and movie camera for Bell & Howell (Chicago), an automobile heater and portable radio for Motorola (Chicago), an ice crusher and juice extractor for Dazey Corp. (St. Louis), the Toastmaster hospitality set and waffle baker set for the McGraw-Edison Co. (Elgin, IL), tape dispensers for 3M (St. Paul, MN), an electric guitar for Gibson (Kalamazoo, MI), and a desk lamp and pen set for the W.A. Shaeffer Pen Co. (Fort Madison, IA).

The Barnes & Reinecke Legacy In 1948 the partnership ended and Jean Reinecke, along with the firm’s key designers, formed J.O. Reinecke and Associates. As the design team continued together, the new firm could rightly claim to have designed profitable products from A (adding machines) to almost Z—they only reached Y (yacht chairs), jokingly “offering a bargain to some zither manufacturer.” The hand dryer the firm designed in 1949 for Chicago’s National Dryer Corp. still appears in restrooms across the country and had no serious competition until the appearance of the Dyson Air Blade, about 60 years later.

The booming postwar economy offered fresh prospects for designers. By 1952, Reinecke’s four main associates opened their own offices. David Painter, who had joined Barnes & Reinecke in 1936, joined with James Teague and Victor Petertil to form Painter, Teague, Petertil. The trio designed the first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, in 1954. Jon W. Hauser designed midcentury classic products at his solo practice, which he operated for 35 years serving numerous long-term clients. In March 1958, at the invitation of the Industrial Arts Institute in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan, Reinecke taught a two-week industrial design course in Tokyo. He later advised the institute on sources of information in the U.S. and suggested subsequent lecturers. Jean Reinecke continued to operate his Chicago office and opened a satellite location in California in 1959, relocating there in the 1970s.

Barnes & Reinecke, along with the design departments established at retailers Montgomery Ward in 1932 and Sears, Roebuck in 1934, formed the trunk of the Chicago family tree of industrial design. These three employers, established during the Art Deco period, trained designers whose heirs continue to practice around the country and in Chicago design offices to this day.

—Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, Design Programs Coordinator, International Housewares Association; VMatranga@housewares.org

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B O O K RE V I E W

Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America

THE MAN WHO DESIGNED

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s a practicing designer and part of the leadership of IDSA, I had always heard of the founding fathers of industrial design. Dreyfuss, Loewy and Teague, and, oh yeah, someone else. What was his name?

Although Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA, isn’t quite as well known as the others, he should be. This exceptional profile by B. Alexandra Szerlip, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts writing fellow, certainly makes that case. Of the “big four” founding fathers of ID, Norman Bel Geddes, it can be argued, was the “one true genius and true visionary.” Those aren’t my words. That quote comes directly from Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, who, as it turns, out was a student and protégée of Bel Geddes and one of the many artists, designers, dancers and directors profoundly influenced by this great man.

Some of the most entertaining and fascinating stories Szerlip tells in her book are about the world’s finest talents who, at first, Bel Geddes sought to collaborate with and who later could not be without him, including the great opera star Enrico Caruso, who he met as a young stage set designer, through to a staggering list that includes the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, iconic directors Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, photography giant Alfred Stieglitz, the quick-witted writer Dorothy Parker and the regulars of the famed Algonquin Round Table. The list of collaborators is enormous, and the author does a fantastic job of introducing them as part of Bel Geddes’ journey.

Often chapters are introduced with a cliffhanger in the form of a view or action from Loewy or something the famous aviator Amelia Earhart did. Even a US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, plays a role. Then through clever pacing and brilliantly researched facts, the issue resolves by the end of the chapter. As much as I liked this approach, if there is one thing to criticize it’s that this method makes the read a bit choppy.

That said, on balance Szerlip provides a wonderful overview of a master visionary practicing at the height of his craft. The zenith occurred in the late 1940s with an

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office that occupied the entire eighth floor of Rockefeller Center, more than 70 people under his employ, and work that extended to theater, exhibits, products, services, stages, movies and visons of the future, including his masterpiece, Futurama, Bel Geddes’ seven-acre exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

The chapter on Futurama is especially compelling. He fought hard for the right to build it, and it took almost a year and 2,800 people to complete. Arguably the world’s first truly interactive exhibit, today it remains one of the most visited exhibits, 27 million people in the fair’s two years. He meticulously crafted an acre-large model of a city of the future right down to every detail from tall skyscrapers to tiny trees and cars. The diorama was fixed. The audience moved around it comfortably seated on an inventive milelong magic carpet of movement in a sometimes dark and sometimes intentionally lit environment. (This is decades before Disneyland). When the 17-minute journey was over, the seats quickly turned around and 500 people emerged into a life-sized, six-acre built environment of the future vison they just circled.

Much of Bel Geddes’ inventions and thinking remain futuristic to this day. However, much of what Bel Geddes imagined never was realized. This is true for many visionaries; Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,129 buildings but only 552 were ever built. This was easy criticism lobbed against Bel Geddes by his more practical business-oriented rivals.

In the midcentury, design leaders jockeying for position used Bel Geddes’ fancifulness as an easy target when competing for commissions. But in the end, his work in appliances, cars, planes, furniture, theater sets and even the design of cites endures.

Szerlip’s detailedness and thorough research is evident in this supportive but fair telling of this complex, controversial genius’ life. It begins at the turn of the century when Bel Geddes was just a boy and examines his influences and personal growth through a fascinating series of changes of fortune that clearly shaped him and his character. In later chapters, we see the patterns of his personal values play out: design always

“Masses of people can never find a solution to a problem until they are shown the way.”

—Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA

THE FUTURE comes first, the world can profoundly change and a need for people that stretched across the seven decades of his life.

It includes the ups and downs of his personal fortune and a tumultuous personal life spanning four wives. In the end, when

Bel Geddes passes at 65, he is without an estate. In fact, he is in debt. But the richness of his work is priceless. Reading this book, you will be moved by the legacy of Bel Geddes, the man who designed the future.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

Vision Needed Vision is a key characteristic of the industrial designer. Thinking about and planning the future with imagination and wisdom is a never-ending task for the designer. Although it sounds like a like a meaningful idea to live in the moment, the designer must use the current moment to formulate the future.

The role of the designer is powerful, yet far from all encompassing. For the industrial designer, envisioning the future is not typically a lonesome personal journey. Like most tasks in life, it takes a talented team with diverse skills and common goals to rapidly produce customer-valued experiences. A design vision can include communicating key ideas, defining manufacturing processes, incorporating brand characteristics, resolving a problem or simply enabling customers to delight in accomplishing a task. It is the designer’s job to define the vehicle for the future customer to use. Designers should avoid working with siloed teams that do not respect the designer’s craft.

For sure, the designer needs to use all available tools to do the following: n Prove to the purse holder why the investment of time, resources and materials is worth the forthcoming cost n Demonstrate that future delight is possible n Illustrate that materials can be formed, assembled and shaped in a way that is coherent n Show how touch, sound and form have meaning n Show the obvious limitations of measuring emotional connections n Frame a reachable future out of the limitless possibilities Designers need to bring a toolkit to stage the future. This toolkit includes understanding how the human brain processes information, possessing a wide variety of prototyping techniques, and having the ability to tell a succinct, compelling story. The pace of technology has only enhanced the tool box with digital visualization/creation and rapid global dissemination of ideas. Like a finely honed knife, the ability to draw with pen and paper needs to stay sharp because it is as powerful as ever in front of a crowd of product developers who are eager to see what could be patentable, assembled, changed, formed, branded and used to create a smile.

Oddly, these principles and actions are nothing new for the industrial designer, although the tools are evolving. Wise designers work rapidly, explore multiple paths and display comprehensible solutions, constantly asking the question, what’s the next valuable idea?

As Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA, said in the 1940 book Magic Motorways, “Masses of people can never find a solution to a problem until they are shown the way. Each unit of the mass may have a knowledge of the problem, and each may have his own solution, but until mass opinion is crystallized, brought into focus and made articulate, it amounts to nothing but vague grumbling. One of the best ways to make a solution understandable to everybody is to make it visual, to dramatize it.”

—James Kendall, IDSA jwkendall3@gmail.com

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By B. Alexandra Szerlip baszerlip@gmail.com B. Alexandra Szerlip has been a two-time National Endowment for the Arts writing fellow, a Yaddo fellow and runner-up for Britain’s Lothian Prize for a first biography-in-progress (the first American ever to make it to the finals). That biography, The Man Who Designed The Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America, was named one of the Top Ten Art Books of 2017 by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, The Believer and elsewhere.

Photos: Harry Ransom Center

IMPOSSIBLE DREAMER

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alled everything from the “Grand But in the wake of Wall Street’s crash, Every new thing Master of Modernism,” the “Inventor design’s Big Four—Bel Geddes’ leap to

is resisted. of the Jet Age” and “little Leonardo” commercial work had been followed by to the “P.T. Barnum of industrial design” (the IDSA Fellows Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond —Thomas Edison, 1914 latter anonymously by young rival George Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague—were Nelson, FIDSA), Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA, making their presence known. Forbes laid the groundwork for much of 20th century design—that magazine called them “the chief agitators of the revolution is, for the way the century both looked and worked. Today, now taking place,” though they were much misunderstood, your automobile (and the highways it travels on), your iPod, alternately puffed up to bursting by “over-zealous admirers” your computer keypad and favorite interactive game, your and “deflated by skeptics.” kitchen appliances and radio, even the psychological use Streamlining was the 1930’s buzzword and the first of sound in the film or play you just saw—to cite only a few all-American aesthetic—things stripped down to basics, examples—can be traced back to his influence. romanticism married to pragmatism. Horizons, Bel A ninth-grade dropout from a small Midwestern town, Geddes’ 1932 best-seller, went a long way toward making Bel Geddes (1893–1958) began as a highly successful art streamlining a household word, and much of his work director, spent years revolutionizing Broadway (the sets, exemplified it. By 1934, Bel Geddes had 30 employees and lighting, scenery, even the configuration of the theaters was charging as much as $100,000 (approximately $1.8 themselves) and then set off on a third career. In 1927, million today) per project. By 1940, Norman Bel Geddes & recognizing that industry was “the defining spirit ... the Co. had taken over an entire floor in Manhattan’s brand-new driving force” of the age, he opened the first office dedicated Rockefeller Center. to the melding of art and commerce. At the time, industry He put his hands to anything and everything that at large had little interest in collaborating with “long-haired interested him—radio cabinets and vending machines, artists”; Bel Geddes’ creative contemporaries saw the move a skyscraper-shaped cocktail set and the first “modern” as part madness, part betrayal. “Whenever a promising refrigerator and stove, sleek rivet-less trains and aerodynamic painter, sculptor or writer begins to use his talents for a cars (including the infamous Chrysler Airflow). brisker turnover in soap, teaspoons and silk stockings,” Unlike his more conservative (and far less imaginative) noted the economist Stuart Chase, “the world stands to colleagues, he didn’t limit himself to paid commissions, or to lose an artist, even as the bank stands to gain a depositor.” “the possible.” There was a luxurious ocean liner, complete

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Left: Motorcar #8, with seating for eight. Engine at the rear, opera windows on either side of the tail fin. 1931.

Right: Blueprint in hand, Norman stands atop a section of the unassembled Futurama model.

with four full-sized tennis courts, a sun-exposed pool with a sandy beach, an open-to-the-stars dance floor and a sliding “skin” operated at the push of a button to protect the ship from foul weather (and in wartime, enemy attack).

There was also a 528-foot airliner—more tennis courts, shuffleboard, an orchestra, masseuses, a barber, staterooms with private baths—designed to fly between New York and London in 42 hours. (Pan Am wouldn’t inaugurate transatlantic service until seven years later, in 1939.) Bel Geddes’ “floating” airport, to be installed near Manhattan’s Wall Street, never manifested, but his precedent-setting interiors for Pan Am’s China Clippers did.

There were buildings, too. Though he included massive upgrades of equipment, spent much of his career getting in trouble Think different. along with creating costumes and lighting for the lack of an architect’s license (his friend —Apple’s ad slogan for an “Elephant Ballet” choreographed Frank Lloyd Wright never had one either),

by George Balanchine with music by Igor many of his designs saw the light, including Stravinsky. (When it debuted at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan’s chic and hugely popular Palais Royale nightclub, prior to a national tour, the initially skeptical New York Times the Barberry Room (ostensibly an upscale replacement venue called it “breathtaking.”) for the Algonquin Round Table habitués) and Copa City, Miami Bel Geddes’ most famous legacy was Futurama at the Beach’s sinuously curved multiplex entertainment center.

1939 New York World’s Fair, replete with 50,000 miniature Those that weren’t built (for reasons ranging from Depressionteardrop-shaped Bel Geddes-designed cars. A vision of era cutbacks and World War II politics to their being “too far America circa 1960, it melded General Motors’ corporate ahead of their time” for industry to take them on) included an agenda with an elaborate airplane “ride” (not a screen elaborate factory complex, an all-weather stadium for Ebbets projection) dependent on technologies that, 11 months Field, a new-and-improved Hayden Planetarium, a Ukrainian prior to the fair’s opening, didn’t exist. Visited by some 26 State Theater, affordable post-WWII housing, a 278-footmillion people, Futurama would prove to be most iconic fair high, three-tiered, rotating Aerial Restaurant, an Aquarium exhibit of all time, an uncredited influence on Walt Disney Restaurant (diners would descend a circuitous maze to 16 projects and, later, inspiration for Matt Groening’s multifeet below the surface) and a 50-year master plan for the city award-winning animated parody. (Ever the prankster, Bel of Toledo, OH. In the 1950s, there would be a series of stateGeddes also created a second fair exhibit. Crystal Lassies of-the-art television studios. featured seminude dancers and thousands of [DepressionNonetheless, his unrealized buildings were blueprinted era] dollars worth of custom-made mirrors.) and construction ready. Many of his ideas (not to mention Having occupied the limelight for decades, Bel Geddes the invention of miniature golf) were later taken up by others, eventually fell into obscurity, a fate he shared with F. to considerable success.

Scott Fitzgerald, Nikola Tesla, D.W. Griffith and Orson The line between work and play tended to blur. Time Welles, among others. “Is being forgotten one of the ironic magazine described Bel Geddes’ so-called hobbies, which penalties for being an American visionary?” writes American included a horse-race game (The Nutshell Jockey Club) playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation). “Once and a war game (dedicated players included brigadier you’ve succeeded in giving the future reality, the present no generals and Russian chess champions), as “colossal in longer needs you.” scale, appalling in complexity.” An amateur naturalist, his The world Bel Geddes departed was almost collection of amphibians, reptiles and fish, members of which unrecognizable from the one he’d been born into. He could sometimes did double duty as “actors” in his films, was 2,000 rightfully take credit for having put a hand to that vast strong when he finally sold it off, his success having led to difference. Remembered or forgotten, credited or not, Bel a prestigious Park Avenue address. (It was a temporary Geddes’ prodigious imagination and nearly tireless efforts reprieve.) He also spent two years “streamlining” Ringling continue to inform our 21st century world. n Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus, a vast commission that

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By Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA, Guest Editor aconrado@nd.edu Ann-Marie Conrado holds degrees in industrial design and anthropology and currently teaches industrial design at the University of Notre Dame where she champions the practice of social design. Her work focuses on applying her interdisciplinary background to design innovative solutions to challenging healthcare and humanitarian issues here at home and abroad. She is the founder of Hope Initiative, a nonprofit working in Nepal, and is the inaugural recipient of IDSA’s Young Educator of the Year Award.

SERVING THE UNDERSERVED

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his issue is about what it means to serve those most often underserved by design. As a designer myself, I believe that is a compelling and admirable idea and have spent a career trying to understand what that means in the field and in the classroom. To many reading this, I am sure that

sounds exciting and fulfilling. But if we are going to talk about what it means to seek out a more meaningful path in design, we have to get a few things out of the way first.

Paved with Good Intentions In recent years I have stumbled across numerous efforts to problematize the white savior narrative. And if you don’t know what that is, stop, find out and then come back.

Satirical examples include the #endhumanitariandouchery campaign by Canadian students Christina Guan and Kaelan MacNeill to highlight irresponsible voluntourism, Carolina Vallejo’s Design for the First World Competition to address issues of obesity and consumerism and the Instagram account Barbiesavior whose tagline concisely states, “It’s not about me … but it kind of is.” The series of tweets by author Teju Cole in response to the Kony2012 video translates Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil into a “banality of sentimentality” where “the world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.”

Well-intentioned but often naïve, misguided and even downright dangerous efforts to remake other societies in the image of our own are often pursued without question.

And what about those efforts driven not by good intentions but by profit and greed? We must be sensitive to the difficult questions of agency and power relationships easily overlooked in our desire to do good even as we debate timeless questions of social, ethical and ecological responsibility.

Victor Papanek’s unflinching words in his polemic reverberate across time and feel as potent as the day he wrote them. And yet in the preface to the second edition, he admits to underestimating “how much we could learn in the places we had set out to teach.” I would extend his emphasis on developing world communities to all forms of diverse communities and populations. What might we learn from the differently abled, the marginalized and the disenfranchised, and how might we design with them?

From the overlooked to the underserved, there are still too many groups neglected by design’s influence, reach and power and too little funding to support innovative design

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practices aimed at bringing compelling solutions to fruition.

And we all underestimate the complex web of politics and competing agendas that make it so difficult for good ideas to take root and scale.

My practice aims to empower those with the least access to design, from improving health outcomes for those struggling with chronic conditions here in the US to improving the fortunes of artisans in Nepal. This work is built first and foremost on the trust born of intense and deep ethnographic immersion and, in the case of Nepal, an 18-year commitment. People need to know that you are there for the long haul and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to take the journey together.

Empowering through Design In assembling this collection, I looked for designers and design educators grappling with these same issues and developing unique ways to address these concerns while leveraging the power of design carefully, thoughtfully and with humility. The common thread is a willingness to go the extra mile and span the vast gulf between ourselves and those we hope to empower, whether they’re in our own neighborhood or halfway around the world.

We start off with Owen Foster, IDSA, who pushes us to consider how we develop human capacity through more creative learning and to use design to educate for empowerment. He provides concrete suggestions for cultivating a community of learning beyond traditional classrooms and reminds us that we all have a role to play. Allen Samuels, L/ IDSA, reflects on a career designing for populations typically outside commercial interests from the elderly to the disadvantaged to the differently abled. Who is listening to their voices?

Kevin Phaup recounts his life-changing experience working alongside rural Nepalese villagers to rebuild their homes after the devastating earthquakes of 2015 and the realization that

The main trouble with design schools seems to be that they teach too much design and “ not enough about the social and political environment in which design takes place.

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—Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

A community gathering to celebrate the conclusion of a six-month knitware training sponsored by Hope Initiative for 50 Nepalese women.

deep immersion and empathy born of a shared experience can lead to radically new approaches to wicked challenges.

Jonathan Mills challenges us to design for those we haven’t even identified nor considered by laying out a foundation for mapping future impacts and the effects of design decisions on stakeholders throughout a complex ecosystem. Deana McDonagh, PhD, urges designers to bring the concerns of a more diverse population to every design project and ensure we meet the varied emotional, social, cultural and aspirational needs of consumers who may be quite different from ourselves. Joon Kwon shares the process behind two IDEA award-winning concepts in the category of social impact and the impulse behind the collective IDEAfree.

In curating this collection, I looked not only to those working in far-flung places but also to those working in my own backyard in order to shine a brighter light on their inspiring work. Alex Liggins and cofounder Alex Sejdinaj brought to life the South Bend Code School not only to bring technical skill in coding to youth from historically disenfranchised communities but, more profoundly and

more powerfully, to enable them to envision themselves as coders because, as Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Lastly, Nathan King concludes by detailing the collaboration that led to the founding of the African Design Centre and the critical partnerships between industry and education that can pave the road to greater success in social impact practice.

In the words of one of our authors, “Representation matters, period.” There are not enough diverse voices, perspectives and experiences shaping the design of the world. While we have made admirable progress, too many entrenched barriers remain that make it difficult for those diverse viewpoints to thrive. We must continue to encourage those with different abilities, lenses and backgrounds to embrace the role of designer and the change inherent in that orientation and work to break down the barriers to their entry. I’ll end with more prescient advice from Papanek to remind ourselves of our own moral imperative as designers: “Design itself must always be a seed project, always operative.” n

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By Owen Foster, IDSA owen@aetherlearning.com Owen Foster has a diverse background in architecture, landscape, environmental and industrial design but is most known for his calling as an educator and mentor. Humbled and honored, he has acquired various accolades, such as easrning the IDSA Education Award in 2015. Now he is a co-founder and overall troublemaker of Aether Global Learning and SHiFT Design Camp.

EMPOWERING THE FUTURE

There is no map for life. Everyone has to cut a path and follow a compass heading toward their own vision of a successful future.

A multidisciplinary, multicultural collaborative experience at Beyond the Map, the winter 2016 SHiFT design camp.

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D

esign is a funny thing. The word “design” means different things to different people, anything from the

manipulation of atoms to the creation of services and user-centered experiences.

In the past, designers were brought to the table to make things look “pretty.” Now with the adoption of design thinking, design is a mainstay in the business world. Our voices are being heard by the decision-makers. Design has become critical. It was always important, but it has renewed itself.

But what does this all mean? Where is design going next? In what arenas will design play? What will design rise to?

These types of questions keep me up at night. Being a practicing professional and educator, I often wonder where design could be the most influential and relevant. Industry headlines are filled with the words “innovation” and “disruption.” Innovation means doing something new and being one step ahead of the curve. Disruption, on the other hand, is about challenging the status quo and evoking change to shake things up. Designers thrive at doing both. But the problem is, excuse the farming expression, if you constantly disrupt the soil, nothing ever has a chance to grow. When I heard that wisdom, I had an aha moment.

Let’s reframe the opportunity and ask the right questions. Design wants to make a positive impact on people by creating a better world. Why doesn’t design create better people to positively impact the world? We know education and knowledge are some of the most powerful instruments of positive change. So design needs to connect the dots of learning and become the cornerstone of education.

Now that we have identified education as the catalyst, where are those moments of transition that will allow for the greatest transformation? People state that every moment is an opportunity to grow, which is completely true, but certain moments are more impressionable and impactful.

First is primary education, 4th–6th grade. At this transitional moment, children are setting their dreams of who they want to be and where they want to go. The second is secondary education, 11th grade through the freshman year of college.

These adolescents are finding new levels of autonomy that

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Design in the middle school STREAM program in Kingsport, TN, the Aether Youth Lab, 2017.

allow them to grow toward the career they want and into to the person they will become. Finally is higher education, junior year through early professional life. Young adults enter the chaotic and stressful workforce hoping they are prepared with the right skills for what the world throws at them.

Look around. Design already has a strong presence in higher education around the world. Institutions are doing an amazing job teaching the fundamentals of design, understanding the principles of design thinking and building the hard skills needed for industry. But why are we waiting for higher education to influence creatives? Why are we not applying these lessons and more throughout the entire educational spectrum? Are we limiting what higher education can offer because we do not have the necessary foundations? The STEAM program has done an incredible job of enhancing the learning capabilities within our primary and secondary educational systems, which are better preparing youth for higher education. Children are being exposed to the sciences, technologies, engineering, the arts and mathematics in fun and impactful ways. STEAM also helps create a strong skill base that opens up many more levels of opportunities. It’s no wonder why STEAM has become a staple within educational curriculums.

Design has the ability to contribute even more to the development of people through education. Beyond lessons of design thinking and fundamentals, design can develop such skills as emotional intelligence, creative confidence, cultural awareness and empathy. These skill sets can carry over to any field of study. Design needs to step forward to help people develop awareness of their strengths and to cultivate in them an ability to learn as they mature in a way that will amplify their unique abilities.

To build the future leaders we want, we need to approach education differently. So we are back to asking more questions: How does design interject itself into an already crowded course of study? The skills we need can’t be taught through school alone. This is not news; several organizations are already adding value to the educational system on behalf of design. How far can we go? How deep

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can we dive? I have endless stacks of notes with ideas. I want to share just a few that everyone reading this article should be able to use to foster change.

Develop a Culture for Creative Learning The culture of learning is something that doesn’t come easily for most. It’s not based on intelligence, but more about environment. Some people have an innate thirst for knowledge. They will push themselves and others around them in the search for more. Sadly, this is not always the case.

Most people allow themselves to blend into the environment they find themselves in. Design is about open dialogue and authentic interactions, all the way down to the smallest details. By using these attributes, design can cultivate a community of learning that would include all ages and demographics to foster positive growth for everyone. n

Design projects centered around the creative mindset and principles have the potential to instill confidence and encourage future learning for a wide demographic.

The more people you can engage, the more momentum you will gain.

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Design workshops based around creativity and problem-solving will challenge and inspire groups of people who will then pass along the new knowledge to others.

Using a series of workshops with a broad range of creative topics could ignite a passion for learning.

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Everyone loves an event. Why not use events to showcase and reinforce the positive changes that design and creative learning have brought to people. Recognize people from all demographics to celebrate what impact individuals can have within a community.

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To continue to learn, a person needs to teach. I’m not talking about in a classroom, but as a mentor. A culture of learning needs to foster mentorships for the young and old. A good mentor will teach others how to think, not what to think. For me, everyone at every stage of their life should have at least five mentors.

Create an Interwoven Curriculum A curriculum is needed that expands the full spectrum of education inside and outside the classroom. A curriculum that is not bound by a single class, defined grade level or specific discipline. A curriculum that instills courage and relevance. Because without courage, you will never extend beyond your own reach. Without relevance, people don’t understand why something is important enough to learn. n

Design should spark curiosity and allow for the understanding of discovery and observation within primary education. Allow children to capitalize on their innate characteristics of being curious and naïve of the world around them to discover that the world is an amazing palette of wonder. This stage is all about design learning and hands-on play.

n Design

should encourage secondary education to embrace positive failure. The only thing that you can say is truly 100 percent yours is your failures. Students should also learn how to ask the right questions and document their thoughts. Let them adopt the practice of visualizing and embrace it as a living document of their thought process. By this stage, the students should be versed in the principles of design thinking.

This understanding can be used throughout all aspects of life, not just to create the next artifact.

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With such a strong foundation of design entering higher education, students should be able to step up and morph to take on more responsibilities of design application. Higher education should use design methodology to develop mindsets that can adapt to changes in industries, cultural needs and business demands and can continue to evolve over time. Each student should gain confidence and fortitude to become an individual and build intuition.

Going Beyond Routine Collaboration Collaboration is common practice within many industries.

People with diverse viewpoints and from various fields such as business, engineering and design come together to gain a better understanding of the opportunity at hand. This is known as multidisciplinary collaboration. Though very useful, so much more can still be gained from the use of collaboration. Collaboration is about teaching each other, learning from each other and coming together to create something amazing. n

Multidisciplinary collaborations need to go beyond just checking a box and recording the information on the Post-it. Instead, build a community of trust and respect.

Take time to find out what each person has to offer and how to communicate with them.

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the world becoming more connected with the introduction of technology, multicultural collaborations are becoming more invaluable. How can we create for the people of the world without ever understanding the people of the world?

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Multigenerational collaboration seems to be the opportunity that is most overlooked and avoided. Each generation has something of value to offer. It’s not only the young who need to learn from the old; the old also need to learn from the young. Industry should adopt the mentor mindset and bring deserving youth to meetings and allow their voices to be heard. Both will grow from the experience.

Immersion Is the True Teacher Immersive learning allows for a more true-to-life experience to see beyond one’s assumptions. By placing people in environments beyond the computer screen and enabling them to live the opportunity, they will gain a new understanding of how to ask the right questions, create a more impactful solution and grow personally. Think of it this way: the more data you gather and the more experiences you collect, the greater pool of knowledge you are able to pull from. It does not matter if the immersive experience happens in your backyard, within a neighboring community or in some remote area of the world. Nothing can replace the ambient learning opportunities offered by true immersion. n

Immersive experiences are at the core of new discovery. Using these experiences with the design mindset will allow for biases to be reduced, open-mindedness to be increased and the context of the opportunity to be realize.

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When design looks to help with creating better people, immersion plays an important role in developing cultural appreciation and social responsibility. People who acquire deeper understanding and empathy tend to make more responsible judgments with each decision.

Empathy is the key to truly understanding people and the opportunities that surround them.

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is based on human-centered thinking. This human focus allows for the forging of strong longlasting relationships through immersive experiences in diverse settings.

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key to gaining intuition is participating in activities where you can acquire diverse sets of skills and actively develop mutually beneficial relationships with groups of people.

Envision a project that focuses on a deep-seated issue within a culture. Now take a collection of students and young professionals from various disciplines in the fields of business, engineering, social sciences and design to create a deep and multifaceted collaboration. Immerse this team into the community and culture to uncover truths and true opportunities for positive change. Allow both the community and the creative team to co-create solutions that will have relevance and longevity.

This article in a nutshell: Imagine a world where a whole generation feels prepared and empowered to take on any challenge to make the world a better place. n

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By Allen Samuels, L/IDSA allenall@umich.edu Allen Samuels is the emeritus professor and dean of the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He has been a member of IDSA since 1967.

WHO IS DESIGNING FOR THEM?

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design products for people who are often underserved: the elderly, the differently abled, the poor and those who experience disasters. I have designed products for 50 years and have worked for and with more than 30 corporations, all manufacturers and marketers of consumer products. Very few

welcomed the opportunity to create and distribute products for the people I design for. They were either uninterested or convinced that these categories did not represent markets large and profitable enough to make it worth their time. We need 100 yeses to move a project along, and yet just one no can end a project.

When dealing with the elderly, the poor, disasters and the disabled, there seems to be endless nos.

Plenty of people in the world would benefit from thoughtful design, careful consideration and action. For example, the elderly now make up the majority of people in many countries. As the world’s population ages, those with physical and/or cognitive challenges are increasing in number.

Consider also that millions of poor people around the world have no access to medical services, educational facilities, shelter or enough food, and close to a billion people in the world practice open defecation, often resulting in otherwise preventable diseases. And in an instant, disasters both natural and man-made can leave people with little or nothing.

The Elderly For those individuals who are older and bedridden and who cannot get to and/or use a standard bathroom, I have designed a mobile bathroom (right). It comes in two forms, a vertical version that provides back support and a horizontal version (right) with other features. Both are on castors and can be rolled to any indoor location and be located immediately adjacent to a bed. The horizontal version provides a center toilet that flushes and has a chamber for decomposing waste, a removable hamper for soiled clothing and a wet sink for in-place sponge bathing. The vertical version has the same features except for a hamper.

A caregiver simply rolls the mobile bathroom adjacent to a person’s bed, and, with assistance, the user safely transfers to it. Once in place, a person can disrobe and deposit soiled clothing into the hamper, use the toilet and have a warm sponge bath. The user can then redress and transfer safely back into bed. This can occur wherever the

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bed is located. The mobile bathroom is also safer for a caregiver because it does not require a long and challenging assisted walk to a bathroom and a challenging transfer onto a standard toilet, which can be dangerous.

The Differently Abled Individuals who use wheelchairs are often limited in what they can reach. A simple chest of drawers (next page, left) can be a challenge that keeps them out of the lowest and highest drawers. One solution is a series of mechanized drawers placed within a freestanding frame or mounted to a wall with side panels. The drawers can be activated to rise upward or downward to the ideal spot at lap height enabling the user to see and access items in each drawer one at a time. Both the wall-mounted and freestanding versions utilize simple motors and inset channels in which the drawers travel. With additional hardware, each drawer can actually be activated to open and close, further aiding the user.

The Poor People with few or no resources, often categorized as poor both here and abroad, do what they must to survive. An example is adults who choose to sleep with their newborn (0–5 months) in their adult bed. This creates an unsafe situation that sometimes results in an adult inadvertently rolling over and suffocating the infant to death. This infant platform (above, top right) is made of die-cut scored, folded and tabbed corrugated paperboard and is under $5. It provides a low-cost barrier onto which parents can safely lay their sleeping newborn when placed on an adult bed. It makes it very difficult for a sleeping adult to roll over onto their child.

This design is for those adults who may understand the dangers but who will still share their bed with their infant.

Natural Disasters When a tsunami hit Indonesia, when a hurricane hit New Orleans, when an earthquake hit Haiti and in so many other cases, many people were left without toilet facilities, among many other things. One consequence of the lack of toilet facilities is that people defecate in place. This creates a health hazard when people come in contact with raw human waste, potentially resulting in hepatitis, cholera and other related conditions.

In addition to the sanitation problems that occur in the wake of a natural disaster, millions of people around the world continue to practice open defecation as a cultural way of life. This custom may result in another kind of natural disaster: causing and promoting disease as people deposit their waste in the open. It is often the very young and the very old, because of compromised immune systems, who suffer and die from cholera and hepatitis.

My solution is an 18-cent, die-cut, corrugated paperboard paddle and an off-the-shelf plastic catch bag (above, lower right). Together they form a handheld toilet device that can be used by both adults and children and both men and women alike. The user simply holds it in place to collect

their waste. Once used, the bag is removed, sealed with a tie and then buried, burned or processed.

By providing an inexpensive, mass-produced, intuitive handheld toilet, people no longer have to defecate in place.

This decreases the possibility of contracting preventable diseases in what are already stressful situations. Women around the world are vulnerable to sexual assault as they walk to and use an outdoor latrine, especially at night. They also benefit from the handheld toilet by being able to use it inside the safety of their own shelter.

Additional Benefits It should also be noted that when we design for those with special needs, often our designs serve everyone else as well. A door handle designed for those with arthritis is often easier for everyone else to use. Food preparation tools designed for people who have strength, dexterity or gripping challenges are often more comfortable and useful for the rest of us. In fact, when we design for people with special needs, we are actually designing for everyone.

I enjoy the challenge of designing for those who are so often underserved. The design processes require me to step aside and purposefully consider and see the world differently. This approach takes me out of my comfort zone and the work attitude that says, “I know what I am doing; been there, done that.� When designing for those with different needs, I have to frame my thinking differently, as if I know little or nothing. I then can begin to explore, reconsider, reconfigure, redefine, rediscover and, ultimately, redesign and invent original and functional products.

Not only are my designs new and original to me, so is the creative process I use to create them. Each new project demands a fresh, new approach and I have to be open to risks, failures and discoveries. This is both fun and rewarding, especially when a design actually works in ways that my intended audience and I feel are important. n

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By Kevin Phaup phaupkb@jmu.edu Kevin Phaup, professor of industrial design at James Madison University, embraces the ambiguity of the design process to uncover social innovation in the areas of mobility design, accessibility and disaster relief for the developing world. Prior to his academic career, he worked in the construction and fabrication industries, in addition to working in the ministry with troubled teens.

FEARLESS DESIGN

The village of Saku destroyed after the 2015 earthquakes; 75 percent of buildings were damaged or collapsed in this area.

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raveling down the treacherous road, I could hardly see out of the truck as the monsoon rains pummeled the earth. Around the bend, the jungle opened up revealing a breathtaking gorge and an almost vertical view several hundred feet down to the raging river below. Descending to the river

basin, we came to a sudden stop. Wondering what was going on, I looked to my good friend Devi Sapkota to translate the driver’s comment, “This is as far as we go. It’s too dangerous to cross the river.” Escaping the cramped cab of the truck, I stretched my legs as we surveyed the situation on foot. How are we going to get 20 12-foot-long sheets of corrugated tin across this river and the rest of the way up the mountain?

A narrow footbridge with no rails crossing some 20 feet above the river presented itself as our only option. Making several trips, we managed to get the tin across the river.

“Now what?” I thought. Looking up the hill, I saw a stream of villagers coming down the mountain. In this moment I was reminded again of the resiliency found in Nepal’s rural communities.

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In 2013, I traveled to Nepal to conduct my thesis work on postural support devices for wheelchair users. After investing immense amounts of work and time on the project, in April 2015, I was eagerly awaiting my return to continue that work when I received news of the devastating earthquakes that had rocked the country. Initially I worried about my friends and colleagues. As things began to settle down,

I thought about my upcoming research trip. It no longer seemed like the right time for this project. I struggled with the thought of abandoning years of work, but I couldn’t just do nothing.

Day after day, the death toll and the number of homes destroyed and people displaced rose. “Wake up, Kevin,” I thought. “Here’s a situation you can really help with. Don’t follow a project; follow your heart. I’ve been building and making things for as long as I can remember and have extensive experience and education in construction, architecture and industrial design. My passion is for people, education, design and making. I have to go.” And so I did, returning to Nepal in July 2015.

Problems Have Problems On the ground, I was immersed in the unthinkable. How long will it take to clean up, find loved ones and rebuild?

Who will pay for it? “Sure we can help with the immediate needs, build this, move that,” I thought, “but are we even making a dent in the problem? For that matter, what is the problem?” The earthquakes in and of themselves were not really the problem. Collapsed buildings and reconstruction weren’t either. Rather, these gave light to a myriad of existing problems, all of which are intertwined with a corrupt and unstable government, extreme poverty, poor infrastructure, dependency on foreign aid, limited education and an outlook that offered little hope for change.

Humanitarian efforts faced challenges at every level from the transportation of materials, limited funds and the quality of tools to the hot, humid and rainy climate. Areas that didn’t lie directly along the country’s only highway failed to get disaster relief. Further complicating the problem, shelters provided by the government were like tin ovens, quality foreign shelters seemed alien, and tarps and tents were shredded shortly after the earthquakes. The most promising shelters were being built by the Nepali people in the urban areas using bamboo. However, familiarity with bamboo construction techniques and skilled labor was significantly less in rural communities.

Amid the need for temporary shelters was an underlying and overwhelming concern for rebuilding permanent homes. The possibility of history repeating itself was scary, but developing permanent earthquake-resistant housing solutions and providing enforcement can take an immense amount of time. Recognizing this complexity led me to a more manageable but critical question: How can we empower villagers still living in emergency or makeshift

Nepali villager harvesting bamboo from the jungle for shelter construction.

shelters to build temporary housing? And how is “temporary” defined? My path toward resolving these questions was founded in the belief that educating villagers about how to construct temporary housing would provide a more sustainable and meaningful outcome than the design of another new prefabricated shelter.

Limited resources and a sense of urgency forces creativity in working with what’s available. Bamboo was readily available, strong, light and renewable. I saw an opportunity to leverage that through education in bamboo construction techniques. And I wouldn’t be starting from scratch, because constructing with bamboo builds on an existing knowledge base. The majority of villagers possess some knowledge of constructing bamboo porches, livestock shelters, wall surfaces and crafts, a critical observation when you consider who will build the houses. The number of homes destroyed versus the supply of skilled labor forced everyone into constructing temporary shelters.

Takeaways Worth Noting Through the overwhelming immediate needs, I was constantly thinking about creating impact on a larger scale.

Successful initiatives would have to consider utilizing local materials, educating unskilled populations, empowering resilient communities, and building on existing indigenous

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Providing suggestions to improve bamboo connections for construction.

skill sets and knowledge. The following are a few things that stood out to me along the way: n

Balance Needs: Nepali villagers want to have a strong physical structure. They also want to have a home, one they can take pride in, one that represents their heritage and culture, and one they can make their own.

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Visual over Verbal: Physically demonstrating new ideas and techniques breaks through the difficulties faced in verbally communicating them.

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Utilize Existing Skills: The tradition of handicrafts in Nepal is virtually ubiquitous. These fabrication skills can be repurposed for construction, encouraging personalization, and pride of participation and home ownership.

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Consider Who Will Build: As healthy individuals return to work, those left to rebuild will likely be the women, children, the elderly and the sick. Effective design solutions must consider ease of construction in terms of human factors.

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or Local: With the difficulty of transporting materials, design solutions need to utilize local and/or lightweight materials. Portability must be considered; roads are often inaccessible or nonexistent, requiring people to transport materials over rough, narrow terrain.

Ke Garne (What to Do?) Stateside, developing a design response to this life-changing experience became a persistent passion. Unraveling and visualizing the pieces of the puzzle, I recognized a need to do something different, holistic, inclusive and use-

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Demonstrating a prototype of PACK in the thesis exhibition at the Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame.

ful. Traditional approaches to disaster shelters focus on providing displaced individuals with tarps, tents or prefab shelters. I chose a different approach, proposing to aid an often-unskilled civilian population to build structurally sound shelters using locally available materials with a portable shelter template. This radically different approach distributes a system for building transitional shelters, rather than the costly and wasteful distribution of numerous tents and prefabricated temporary shelters.

The shelter template is a system that takes the place of a carpenter or foreman and makes constructing a temporary shelter safe, simple and repeatable. Following the old philosophy “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime,� I set out to design a system that would empower people to build their own shelters,

Top Row: An illustrated sequence of PACK showing the removal from the backpack, instruction set and assembly process.

Bottom Row: An illustrated sequence demonstrating how PACK is used in combination with locally available bamboo to construct a temporary shelter.

namely, the PACK: Rapid Shelter System. Once disaster strikes, these portable systems can be carried into the most remote of locations. On site, the system is unpacked from its case, revealing a detailed set of instructions for assembling PACK and constructing the shelter.

Assembled, PACK acts as a system for laying out, leveling and locating the bamboo structure. As the bamboo is cut and secured to the building template, the system assists by supporting the bamboo during the construction process.

The geometry of the corner connecters is designed to keep the bamboo stabilized by the PACK template while leaving space in the areas needed for digging post holes and connecting bamboo to bamboo. The system functions by building a quarter of the structure at a time. Once the first quarter is built, release PACK from the bamboo structure and rotate it to build the next section.

Careful consideration was given to providing flexibility in the final form and the shelter’s aesthetics. While the intention is to lead individuals through the process of creating a square shelter, the template acts as a freestanding module.

The provided instructions demonstrate and encourage options for floor plans, wall and roof surfacing, roof framing styles, doors and windows. The flexibility aims at empowering the Nepali villager to turn a shelter into a home. Breaking away from the traditional handout of prefabricated or even volunteer-built shelters, PACK actively involves villagers in the building process, instilling a sense of responsibility, ownership and hope.

Distributing Design Working in Nepal shifted my philosophy on a designer’s

responsibility to prioritize our practice as humanitarian. Humanity is not a project to be solved; it is a mindset that considers people over profits. An egregious inequality exists in the global distribution of design skill sets. While a small portion of the world faces infinite choices in humanitarian needs, the majority struggle to survive. Everyone needs and deserves thoughtful design. That’s not to The backpack prototype and mansay design, ingenuity or nequin for scale. The shelter concreative problem-solving struction template fits inside the aren’t practiced in Nepal backpack. Weighing less than 30 and other developing lbs., it can easily be carried to the countries. On an average most remote villages of Nepal. day, these skills are leveraged for survival. Rather, it’s a call to help balance the scales.

Consider how design can serve these populations of the world by creating new solutions to challenging problems.

Place empathy, a fundamental component of design thinking, at the forefront of design processes. Engage users. You can be empathetic from a distance, but when you are there experiencing the reality, hardships and emotions, empathy increases. Be vulnerable, use that to drive a design process unafraid of risking failure and remain hopeful of success. n

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By Jonathan Mills mills@design.utah.edu Jonathan Mills is a visiting assistant professor and the social impact coordinator in the Multi-Disciplinary Design program at the University of Utah. His studio courses focus on designing products and systems for regional partners in health and natural resources, while his research examines the links among drawing, cognition and communication.

EDUCATING IMPACT

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ocial impact design projects involve a wide variety of stakeholders in both design- and non-design disciplines (community members, officials, supporters, funders, nongovernmental and governmental agencies). They also involve time scales typically much longer than consumer-market

design projects; as such, the facets and links within these contexts are complex and often disproportionate.

Impact mapping is one technique that equips students with the broad and deep contextual understanding advantageous to social impact design work.

Comprehending the Ecosystem In the design process, we encourage our students to collect meaningful research and then synthesize these bits and pieces to discover and articulate their findings—insights about the nature of the studied context that indicate opportunities or directions for design. For various reasons (clarity, communication, sanity), we often oversimplify the complicated relationships among the stakeholders, systems and policies that define the context in which we are tasked to intervene. In doing so, we tend to strip these contexts of their reality; no ecosystem is as controlled (or controllable) or as clear as we might like, and simplification hides or edits out potential game-changing insights.

To be fair, with so much to teach, learn and practice, it is often enough to train students in the application of the design process with all its generally accepted phases and the skills necessary to fulfill each phase. In short, we don’t oversimplify on purpose—we do it because the time, access and complexity of these ecosystems is overwhelming. This is in large part human nature: We tend to avoid ambiguity and complexity, seeking clarity to simplify our decision-making processes. The challenge for education lies in training ourselves as designers to acknowledge and engage the complexity inherent in large ecosystems.

Fortunately, in the design education environment, we have the opportunity to practice engaging ecosystem complexity multiple times throughout a student’s design school career.

We typically divide the various skills required of a graduating design student into hard skills, such as sketching, modeling and wireframing, and soft skills, such as

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empathy and critical thinking. How then might we categorize a designer’s consideration of the effects of their design decisions as a skill? Impact mapping, or critically examining and tangibly constructing thorough representations of design impacts within ecosystems, could be seen as a semirigid skill. At the core of this particular skill is a willingness to engage in the complexity of entire ecosystems and draw out how each intervention will likely impact the ecosystem as a way of developing long-term design criteria.

Design educators are in some sense problem designers; we set up projects to highlight certain learning objectives, which involves considering the possible and probable trajectories each student will take through the project, acknowledging potential pitfalls or obstacles (some intentional), and visualizing how projects may be resolved. Within the Multi-Disciplinary Design program at the University of Utah, we also strive to identify and design studio projects that provide opportunities to develop solutions in one of three broad product categories: physical, digital or platform (systems and services). This means establishing a project scope wide enough for diversity in potential problems and solutions but narrow enough to encourage dialogue and support between individual projects.

One way to define multidisciplinary design is that students are willing and able to tackle an application of design outside their preferred discipline if it is an appropriate response to an identified need within the ecosystem.

This is a rare or unnatural quality because product design students often want to specialize as product designers; user experience design students often want to specialize as user

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

—Max Planck

experience designers. Encouraging this multidisciplinary outlook equips students to scan ecosystems for potential points from which to address a problem while reducing blindness to other disciplinary approaches to opportunities.

This awareness is a key mindset in social impact design work: It prepares students by establishing an openness and willingness to entertain a broader set of problem-solving approaches within the project space.

Designing toward the Impacts During a recent junior-level studio focused on developing impact mapping skills via a material ecologies project, students developed an understanding of designers’ responsibilities in the flow of materials and products that exist in the world currently as well as those products yet to be designed. The intent of this project was threefold: confront students with a complex multifaceted context, provide dedicated time to examine that complexity for deep insights, and practice balancing their design decisions and goals against the likely impacts of those decisions.

Visiting the local landfill, which serves seven municipalities and nearly 400,000 residents, established an anchor point for exploring vast material and product systems and offered a tangible touchpoint to understand long-term impact of designed products.

Casting a wide research net allowed the class to collect content from which to begin modelling and mapping the material-product ecosystem related to the waste-disposal anchor point. The class of 18 was divided into research pairs, each responsible for collecting and visually representing research in one of the following categories: public and private access, transportation, reuse and recycling, governance, funding and finance, energy, maintenance, operations and materials. These findings were then presented to the executive director and staff of the landfill as well as the rest of the class for verification of accuracy.

With this large collective body of information, each student then constructed a map of understanding of the ecosystem of stakeholders, relationships, flows, systems and influencers regarding how we manage materials and products in the designed world. No small task, this phase was an iterative one; initial ecosystem maps suffered from oversimplification of the sheer amount of information to be considered and communicated. Subsequent revisions, however, began to acknowledge this complexity and in doing so revealed unique connections and dynamics between unlikely groups of elements: for example, the tonnage of recyclable materials missed by contractors because of policy differences among the seven municipalities served by the landfill or the annual costs to those municipalities to

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D E S I G N AT T HE MAR G I NS

repair roads damaged by laden garbage trucks transporting wasted food.

Mapping these ecosystems to their fullest extent makes visible the interconnected nature of the systems on which we rely and the systems in which each stakeholder resides. Additionally, this exhaustive process is valuable in that it moves visualization skills away from oversimplification and toward comprehension. Once students build these representations, they then identify problems in the form of broken, missing, weak, redundant or misplaced links or sections within the ecosystem. In this, students develop their own brief or problem statement within the larger scope of the project (in this case, the opportunities for intervention to

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improve our current material/product ecological systems).

As students begin to consider the strategies or forms their design interventions may take (and remain open to the possibility of solutions outside of their own skill set or preferred discipline), the potential impacts of each concept are examined using an “If this, then that� logic. For example, in response to understanding that 30 percent of the landfill is wasted food, how could the introduction of a specific foodwaste collection service streamline the sorting process for target users? If that process is streamlined, how will that affect the garbage truck’s routing? If this means fewer trips or more efficient routes, how will this alter the municipal funds devoted to road repair?

Charts: Evan DeGray and Bahaar Rohkva

The initial waste ecosystem map (left) and the post-design modified map (right).

This line of questioning (or impact tracking) leads to the inclusion of design criteria for the project that go far beyond the intended user experience. At each phase of the development of their design, students are asked to revise their representation of the ecosystem to incorporate new findings. That is, how does the map of the ecosystem change to reflect the impacts of their design? Are links in the systems repaired, redirected or eliminated? Are certain stakeholders brought closer together, or are their relationships otherwise altered? Are flows reversed, reworked or made more efficient? This updated ecosystem serves as a design tool throughout the development process and, in its final form, as a communication tool to be shared with stakeholders and shareholders alike.

Taking the Long View In design generally and social impact design specifically, the brief or statement of problem to be solved is often not up for debate; NGOs must deliver on their mission to keep funders giving, after all. The purpose then of isolating or focusing on impact mapping in design education is to prepare designers to consider the downstream effects of the way they address a given problem and to include long-term impacts as legitimate criteria during the design process.

The primary challenges to impact mapping are time (it takes longer to develop a comprehensive map of an ecosystem) and access (in an ideal world, students could engage with each and every stakeholder). But the benefits— a readiness to engage complex systems, an awareness of the relationships between distant nodes of a network and a flexibility to employ multiple disciplinary strategies to solve a problem—are those that design students can carry forward into the social impact design sphere. n

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By Deana McDonagh, PhD mcdonagh@illinois.edu Deana McDonagh is a professor of industrial design in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As an empathic design research strategist, she focuses on enhancing quality of life for all through more intuitive and meaningful products. Her research concentrates on emotional user-product relationships and how empathy can bring designers closer to users’ authentic needs. She is a research fellow at Coventry University (UK), adjunct professor at Northwestern University and director of insight for the Herbst Produkt design consultancy.

Bringing Empathy into the Designing Process

BUILDING IN DESIGN INTEGRITY

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e are living in an empathy economy. Products, services and environments need to be functional but also must meet the emotional, social, cultural and aspirational needs of customers and consumers. Technology alone used to be good enough to sell products and services.

Within the current economy, more balanced outcomes that meet both functional and emotional user needs are clearly succeeding.

Apple products have served the consumer by offering convenience, social connectedness and lifestyle. Starbucks has transformed a cup of coffee into an experience where business meetings are now acceptable in coffee shops. The empathy economy is significantly elevating the value of the designer, and for that we should all be truly grateful.

opening. Empathic modeling encourages a more thoughtful approach to design that results in design outcomes that serve a wider range of consumers with diverse abilities.

Disability The World Health Organization and World Bank report approximately 15 percent of the world’s population is livEmpathy ing with some sort of disability.1 This is likely to increase as Empathy is the ability to deeply appreciate another perpeople are living longer, and therefore, chronic diseases will son’s experience. As an empathic design strategist, it increase. According to the Centers for Disease Control and is important to consider the consumers’ Prevention, one in five adults in the United existing, emerging and possibly unforeStates has a disability, which amounts seeable needs as you begin to design for to 53 million people.2 For designers, this Disability need not them. By appreciating the limitations that offers an incredible opportunity to focus you yourself bring to the table, you can be an obstacle to our attention on real people with real issues actively seek a deeper insight and underthat require real solutions. success. standing of your consumer. While surAt the University of Illinois at Urbana– veys, spreadsheets and statistics can be Champaign, our first legally blind industrial —Stephen Hawking, World helpful, they pale in comparison to experidesign graduate student and an underReport on Disability, 2011 encing the experience of another person’s graduate industrial design student who is experience. Intellectually we can imagine a wheelchair user, recently graduated. One what it must feel like to be homeless or rely on the use of of the most significant impacts of opening the educational an adult diaper for eight hours. But physically experiencing environment to individuals with disabilities is that students that experience will equip the designer with an insight that, and instructors can observe how they approach and comsimply put, cannot be gained another way. plete the activities of daily living. Through observation, colThe visceral physicality of expanding your experiential laboration and increased interaction, the design students understanding of how consumers engage and navigate begin to acknowledge that the person has a disability, rather the material landscape we have generated for them is eyethan the disability is the person. From this point, viewing the

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The life span of product ownership (by Deana McDonagh, published in “Emotional Sustainability� in the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design, edited by Jonathan Chapman).

material landscape through a new lens of visual impairment or limited mobility, for example, design students begin to identify opportunities for improvement, refinement or a total rethinking of how particular tasks are completed. Everyone benefits from opening the design studio to extreme users.

We are designing for others just like us, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. Our discipline needs to represent the people we design for. We are missing a wealth of knowledge, understanding, sensitivity and wisdom otherwise.

Life Span What is proving to be a valuable tool is for us to consider where we are in our own life span in regard to the material landscape or, put another way, what we surround ourselves with. This life span shown above represents an individual (assuming a healthy life) from cradle to cradle. We start out consuming as dependent babies by having food, clothing and medicine purchased on our behalf. As we develop our own sense of identity, we begin to transform into customers and start making purchasing decisions regarding clothing, food and things such as which posters to hang on our bedroom walls. As consumers, we dedicate the majority of our energies to acquiring stuff in accordance with the culture in which we find ourselves. Ultimately, we reach a point of realization that stuff is not as satisfying as we once per-

ceived it. Divorce, illness, children going to college, as well as other life issues can trigger this shift in thinking. Selecting fewer objects that offer deeper meaning now becomes the motivator for consumption. Being socially connected to reduce isolation becomes a lifesaver. Toward the later stage of life, we become less customer focused and return to the consumer state, similar to how we entered the world.

Our food, medication and clothing are provided for us. It is important for individuals to be aware of this life span, but it is even more important for designers to fully appreciate the consumer-customer-consumer spectrum.

If anyone has experienced a migraine or sprained ankle or upset stomach, this temporary disability is disruptive for a short period of time. Consider a longer-term impairment or disease that could render your home inappropriate for you if, for instance, you are unable to climb and descend stairs. We are all temporarily able. When you design for the extreme scenario, mainstream consumers will enjoy their material landscape longer.

The Challenge for the Design Community Recognizing that we have an industrial design field numerically dominated by men and abled-bodied people, how can we access the experience of others? Empathic modeling is helping to more deeply understand the people we aim to

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reach with our products, environments and services. To be clear, empathic modeling is a tool that expands the designer’s toolkit, but will not fully substitute for integrating the voice and heart of the customer in the designing process.

Since 2005, I have been conducting and developing empathic design activities for design students, medical professionals, service providers and manufacturing companies.

Using low-technology tools can help simulate the experience of diminished ability, such as taping hands with duct tape to simulate arthritis or obscuring vision by spray-painting safety goggles to simulate vision impairment. The material landscape becomes overwhelming when even one of our abilities is diminished. Higher-technology tools can simulate tinnitus, overall body mobility impairment, back pain, hand tremors and so on.

What is critical about empathic modeling is reflective practice, which is when designers are mindful of their emotions, physical being and any concerns before, during and after such experiential activities. For many of us, it is too easy to go through the process without being aware of the experience in terms of how we feel. By expressing these thoughts and observations, we are able to communicate and therefore identify insights that can develop through the process of empathic modeling. Going through a five-minute empathic modeling exercise or an eight-hour full immersion requires planning that can include many of the above artifacts.

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Expanding Design’s Reach For designers, reaching consumers with diverse abilities offers an incredible opportunity to focus our attention on real people with real issues that require real solutions.

However counterintuitive this sounds, as designers we thrive when we have more, rather than fewer, constraints.

Consider designing for a diverse user group with every project you are involved in, even if the client does not require it. You will build in design integrity (giving more than was anticipated) and therefore enhance the experience for the consumer.

The longer we can all live independently in a more accessible and intuitive manner, the more the wider community will benefit. Diverse consumers will support our innovative design solutions.

Consider the collective knowledge and understanding of your own design team. How diverse is that library of knowledge? Empathic modeling can substitute, to a degree, for a lack of customer understanding, but in the long term, we need to focus on products, services and environments that enable, empower and engage the most diverse group of people possible in our communities. Building design integrity will ensure that when we are fighting to live independent lives (aging in place), the design community is not dismissing our impairments, but celebrating the challenge of enabling us through empathic design. n

By Joon Kwon jajubonea@hotmail.com Joon Kwon is a creative director at Havas Korea. He has experience managing campaigns of such global brands as BMW, Heineken, LG and many others. He previously worked at GREY Worldwide and Geometry Global. Kwon is dedicated to the team at IDEAfree, where he works on social impact product designs. He has won many design awards, including IDEA and iF.

CHANGE STARTS WITH ME AND YOU

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he “Miracle of Han River” is the term that describes South Korea’s magnificent economic growth since the 1950s. At the end of the 1950s, right after the Korean War, South Korea’s GDP was only $45. The country suffered from many social issues including war, poverty, sexism and a

lack of education. It was truly a dark age. People were starving. Children were fed one piece of bread a day by the school. Because of poverty and the preference for sons, education was a privilege only the first son received. But Koreans overcame these adversities and produced the Miracle of Han River.

In 2017, everything is different. All children have the right to be educated. Through education, women’s social status has risen. Korea even elected its first female president in 2012.

In Korea there are generations who experienced war and those who did not. The younger generations have witnessed the generations before us achieve rapid economic growth and how they overcame the dark era. So we understand what developing countries experience. We know that hard work needs to be done to make things better. At IDEAfree, we want to help those in need create their own miracle, but faster, with help. We design solutions that will transform people and communities.

IDEAfree is a group of people gathered from an advertising agency. All the members of IDEAfree believe that we should give our best to our profession but also to the society we live in. We have pledged to spend 80 percent of our talent on business and 20 percent on society. Using our many experiences in managing global brand campaigns, at IDEAfree we see and solve global social impact problems.

Walking Along, Not Ahead Working in the advertising industry requires an ability to constantly think of refreshing, trendy, creative ideas. The world requires that we keep moving forward, stay one step ahead of everyone else and lead the trend. However, at IDEAfree we chose to walk along, not ahead. When we

work on social impact design, we do not try to charm the idea with advanced skills. What’s important is to understand the difficulties people face. One idea has the power to change a life and a society. We want our ideas to be catalysts that start a reaction.

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People require certain things to survive. There are so many different problems in so many communities around the world. We use our experience as advertising experts to observe the diversity in the problems. In the advertising industry, ideas are no longer restricted to the frame of conventional media. It covers all sorts of areas such as digital, architecture, experiential design, etc. It’s common to find solutions from unexpected places and times. So we are open to different possibilities even if we are unfamiliar with them because we are trained to adapt.

Although the world is full of problems, we can’t always easily tell if the problems are urgent. That’s because we are so used to living in a world where problems are justified.

We have to keep asking ourselves, “Why?” We have to keep our eyes open and look for the problems we missed because we’ve gotten so used to them. Even if a problem feels insignificant, it may be vital for someone’s survival. By seeing familiar things from a different perspective, we can better see the problems.

There are a few things to consider when we talk about social impact ideas. Is it cheap? Is it sustainable? Is it commercially valuable? Is it appealing to the people it is designed to serve? These add up to the question, Is the solution appropriate for the end users’ living environment? The key is to let the solution be naturally soaked into the recipients’ lives: technology reinterpreted in their way and a solution people can easily apply. We don’t necessarily have to use fancy technology to do so.

In business, ideas are usually kept secret until their debut; the commercial value of an idea plummets as soon

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as it is revealed in public. But we treat ideas a little differently.

Our social impact ideas are designed of the society and for the society. So opening up and sharing our ideas is a very exciting thing to do. We believe that the ideas become more compelling when we gather feedback from the process of revealing and sharing our work.

By revealing our ideas, we are given an opportunity to address weak points seen from a different perspective. As part of this process, we enter many award programs to meet experts from diverse areas. A competition is a place where we can share and circulate our ideas. Some people will have useful comments on our design. Others could be inspired by the idea and design something completely new. We believe that sharing our ideas in a way that they can be viewed from

SUNcubator (left) was a IDEA 2016 Gold winner and Dream Ring (below) was a IDEA 2017 Gold winner, as well as the 2017 Curator’s Choice.

several different perspectives is the ideal condition for ideas to develop. As we share our thoughts and ideas, the possibility of making communities better is increased. Two of our projects, the SUNcubator and Dream Ring, became more solid as a result of entering them in design competitions, and they scored good results as well.

Ideas for the World Africa is well-known for its hot weather, but it is actually a region where the temperature range is huge. Through researching articles, we discovered that Africa becomes a fatal environment for babies when the temperature drops under 10 degrees Celsius at night. Doctors say that babies’ immune systems are 30 percent less effective when their body temperature drops by 1 degree. That means that if we can prevent that 1-degree drop, we can boost their immune system. We wanted to help babies have the strength to fight diseases themselves naturally.

The SUNcubator’s goal was to strengthen babies’ immune systems by keeping them warm at night. Our idea was to capture the heat of the sun and store it until night. To do so, we combined two different products, a heat pack and a baby bed. The SUNcubator was designed for the poorest, those who couldn’t even afford a blanket. Therefore, it was made with economical and sustainable materials. And it was designed to last for generations. IDEAfree prefers ideas that are simple and easy, not complicated.

Dream Ring started off as a solution for sexism in Africa.

Many African women suffer from sexism. Before examining the problem in Africa, we looked at a case that happened

quite near us. Until recently, South Korean women were frequently the target of sexism. But now women are regaining their right to be respected. We realized that women’s education is the key to solving sexism. When women were given the same amount of education as men, women started to be empowered to fight for equality.

However, African women are far from receiving enough education. We found out that the cause was menstruation.

Menstruation is considered dirty, and a lack of sanitary pads keeps girls out of school. We decided to make an affordable sanitary product for African women that is also perfectly safe and easy to use. We wanted a product that would stop girls from quitting school because of menstruation.

The Dream Ring is a substitute for rags, fabrics or even the mud that African women use as sanitary pads. When designing the Dream Ring, the main points we considered were price and sanitation. The Dream Ring is sustainable and disposable at the same time, which immensely increases price competitiveness and sanitation. Using a silicone ring and sugarcane vinyl made that possible. The Dream Ring can be a solution for not only Africa but also all over the world since sanitary products are a necessity for all women.

The Road Ahead IDEAfree is continuously working hard to make a social impact. We are planning to manufacture and distribute the SUNcubator and Dream Ring. We are continuing to strengthen our designs.

In our work with global advertising agencies and managing global brand campaigns, getting funding for a project was not difficult; clients invest in great ideas. However, we are experiencing a difficult time trying to find funding for our social impact ideas. We received a lot of interest after winning a number of awards, but attempts to produce the products dissipated every time. This is an unexpected, challenging wall that we must break to walk forward. But we believe we will overcome this as well.

We hope to challenge and try out more with colleagues who share our ideals, and partners who value our works and support us. We are looking forward to the day when the SUNcubator keeps babies warm and healthy and the Dream Ring is used as a feminine hygiene product for women in Africa.

We all are global citizens. We contribute to society by doing what we can do best. If you invest 20 percent of your talent, the world can change. We strongly encourage you to join us in creating a better, more equal world. n

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By Alex Liggins and Alex Sejdinaj (shown), and Helen Cramer and Jules DeLee alex.l@southbendcodeschool.com n alex@southbendcodeschool.com Shortly after graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in English and premedical studies, Alexandra Liggins co-founded the South Bend Code School as a way to make coding more accessible to all. Upon learning that there were over 20 tech startups in the South Bend area, Alex Sejdinaj, a South Bend native and Indiana University Bloomington grad, decided to jump into the mix by co-founding the South Bend Code School. Helen Cramer and Jules DeLee are the Code School’s lead designers. Cramer specializes in UI/UX design; DeLee specializes in logo creation and art direction.

CODING FUTURE POTENTIAL

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arissa was nervous about the after-school program she had signed up for. She had seen a presentation on coding and it sounded so interesting. She wanted to learn more. But none of her friends had signed up, and she worried about being the only girl. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

Igniting the Kindling Two and half years ago, a group of us sat around a table after work one night brainstorming ideas for a new pilot program we were creating for middle and high school students. We had two months to prepare. All we knew at the time was that we were going to be teaching somewhere between 10 and 20 students for a five-week summer camp and that we would be teaching them how to code.

What is the coolest thing we could build? This was the question that drove us. We wanted the students to see coding as a long-term opportunity for themselves, and we knew the best way to do that was to give them an out-ofthis-world experience, something they would never forget.

“Have them present at Google” was one response to the question that night. We never looked back.

During the pilot, we witnessed 19 students with no prior coding knowledge, code 23 websites in five weeks. Four of their websites were civic applications that promoted nonviolence in the city of South Bend. Students then presented their apps to the mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg, along with city officials, technology professionals and various other members of the South Bend community in a Techcrunchstyle demo day. The next day they traveled to Google offices in Chicago to present their work to Google team members and spend the day learning from industry experts.

At the end of the pilot, we had 13 inquiries about bringing our program to other locations. To meet the demand, we decided to open the South Bend Code School in 2015.

The South Bend Code School has grown into an organization that works with groups of culturally diverse students ages 7–18 to give them experience conceptualizing, designing and building web applications that solve real-world problems in their community. Since the pilot program, we have had 300+ students complete our formal coding programs and have served more than 1,000 indi42

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viduals through community outreach. And we work hard to provide coding for all by maintaining diverse classrooms of 47 percent female, 56 percent underrepresented minorities and a 50 percent split in socioeconomic diversity— numbers well above industry averages. In the past year, we have assisted students with career and college prep, leading 13 students to obtain paid technology-related internships and 14 students to pursue postsecondary studies.

Illuminating the Darkness When we used to present to students, we would ask how many of them knew what coding is. Only a small percentage would raise their hands. We would then explain what coding is and ask how many of them thought they need a college degree to code. This time, almost all of them would raise their hands. We finished our line of questions by asking how many of them thought they could code. Again only a small percentage of hands would go up. The problem here is that the majority of these students never thought of themselves as coders. We had to prove them wrong.

Accessibility is a huge issue when it comes to the gap in our computer science talent pipeline. At a time when coding and computer science are all the rage, from the companies that have boomed in Silicon Valley to the state representatives who tout tech skills as a mandate for their public schools, the question many are currently trying to solve is, How do you get a student who has never been exposed to technology or coding interested in wanting to learn how to code? It is difficult to sell a tech education path to students who have never pictured themselves as coders.

Students need to see someone who looks like them working in technology in order to picture themselves doing the same thing. This is especially true at a young age.

Marketing this type of program while amplifying a message of inclusivity comes with a unique set of challenges. We are

very fortunate that our instructor base is as diverse as our student population and we are able to show students that a broad spectrum of people can work in technology. A lot of programs don’t gain as much traction as ours does because they aren’t able to demonstrate diversity at the same level.

When we do a marketing sprint on social media or show up for community events, our team is able to be relatable to a lot of different families and individuals. Representation matters, period.

In order to reach a large, diverse audience, we advertise for our various programs on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Our posts generally consist of photos of our students with special care to highlight girls and the underrepresented minorities, both as students and as instructors. Every picture we post, every message we share and every aspect of our marketing design is chosen with the deliberate purpose of saying, “everyone can code and we want you to join us!”

Though not traditional forms of advertising, 80 percent of our signups have been achieved through these platforms.

In the form of community outreach, we visit local schools, libraries and after school programs with a laptop cart to give students the opportunity to try coding for the first time. This method is effective because it is easily accessible.

For instance, the activities do not require a large time commitment or any interest in coding. They provide an accurate introduction to coding and are achievable, which quickly dispels any biases students may carry with them about not belonging in tech.

For students who enjoy this process, we offer afterschool coding programs that take place throughout the school year and over the summers. In our formal program, we try to make it as clear as possible that anyone can code by designing our lessons with low barriers to entry.

We start coding on day one. Within the first 20 minutes, student have coded something that appears on the screen, usually their name. We start off with coding their name because it gives the student a sense of well-earned ownership and validation. Often times, this level of ownership gives students the level of self-confidence they need and empowers them to want to continue learning and to dive deeper into their code.

Students spend most of the time in our class building applications that solve issues they care about in their community or in the world as a whole. Students then have to present those applications to stakeholders from their community who can ask them questions around what they have built. It is usually at that point that students see the value in what they are learning. It wasn’t good enough for us to have a student build a game that would earn them a pat on the back. We wanted them to show that coding is powerful because it allows coders to build technology that helps people. And by taking our students to visit tech companies, they gain exposure to different career options and see that the skills they’re learning are valuable.

Spreading the Light We get a lot of questions about our name. To us, South Bend is a great name to attach to our brand because it is a great example of a rust belt city rising from the ashes of its industrial past and flourishing in new technology services that are growing in the region. It is a story and an idea that can be celebrated by many rust belt towns today, and to be quite honest, it is the reason we teach what we do. A lot of people don’t realize that code is a great equalizer. Code allows a low-income student who lives in South Bend, IN, to build a digital platform that can be seen by people around the world.

Our name also reminds us of where we come from.

From the beginning, we have worked hard to let families and students know that we are here for them. We have gone on to create alumni programs for students who have completed our initial course offerings. We have created a friendly environment for students to get help with homework, preparing for college or writing a cover letter or resume to apply for a job. It is by going above and beyond that we have increased the sense of community among our students and their families. We made South Bend Code School about more than the code. It’s about the people.

Our most recent group of students traveled to the Google headquarters in Chicago this past November and presented their apps and websites to executives. Marissa was one of them. n I N N O V AT I O N W I N T E R 2 0 1 7

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By Nathan King, DDes nathanking@vt.edu Nathan King is the research strategist at the Autodesk BUILD Space and co-director of the Center for Design Research in the Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design. King is the former director of research at MASS Design Group and has taught in industrial design, architecture and design technology at Virginia Tech, RISD, Harvard GSD and the University of Innsbruck.

Principles for Design Pedagogy

SEEDING IMPACT

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ocial impact is an increasingly important theme in design education and practice. Over the last decade, a number of design firms have demonstrated that it is possible to be both financially sustainable and focused on social impact. Their success shows that design professionals have a real

practical opportunity to fully participate as professionals while addressing some of society’s most intractable problems, just like our colleagues do in other sectors, like law or medicine. Design education is lagging behind this new and exciting reality. Considering this, our question should be, “How do we prepare our students to become the best possible practitioners while also instilling impact and outcomes as core design principles?”

Nathan King

Design educators have a demics to produce work duty to reorient and calithat is unique, practical brate our efforts to ensure and imaginative. Beyond that design students are the university, the CDR culprovided not only with the tivates industry collaboraconventional components tions that inform the focus of a design education and expand the impact of (which are critical thinking its work. The CDR partabilities, hands-on learning ners with professionals in Performance-based digital design-to-robotic fabrication workflow developed experiences and other traacademia, industry and

by CDR students and faculty translated to a contextually appropriate solution ditional pedagogical condesign practice who each in Haiti in collaboration with MASS Design Group. structs deeply rooted in bring diverse skills and precedent and proven methods), but also skills in stakeknowledge to its projects and root these projects in realholder engagement, cultural awareness and sensitivity, world conditions. In this way, the CDR positions its work to and other important attributes. We believe that we cannot contribute to innovation and broader shifts in industry and provide our students with this sort of education if we practice that have the potential to influence larger global continue to offer training in social impact design through systems. one-off exploratory projects that are presented as a Among the CDR’s most productive partnerships is its footnote to real design pedagogy. Instead, we need to relationship with MASS Design Group, which is facilitated integrate this training into core design competencies and through the Industrial Affiliates program at Virginia Tech. The treat social impact as a fundamental design parameter.

CDR and MASS Design Group have collaborated on various projects that advance their shared mission of using design A Foundation for Social Impact Education to effect positive systemic change. Their first collaboration The Center for Design Research (CDR) in the Virginia Tech was a unique technology transfer, one that translated an School of Architecture + Design has a long history of proadvanced digital workflow used in the development of the moting grassroots projects, research and pedagogy that CDR’s LumenHAUS into an application for MASS Design seek to expand design’s potential to address social issues.

Group’s Gheskio Cholera Treatment Center in Port-auBy integrating research and practice in a university setting, Prince, Haiti, where it was adapted to create a highly custhe CDR enables students, researchers, designers and acatomized performance-driven façade.

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ADC Fellows Brianna Bussinger (left) and Thandizo Kachiza (right) demonstrate multi-material functional furniture prototypes made during a module taught by the CDR at the ADC in Kigali, Rwanda

Extending Collaborations into Long-Term Partnerships Both of these collaborations represent a successful technology transfer from academia to practice and afforded new student opportunities. These are both measures of success, but they still fall short of a true pedagogical integration of social impact skills and values. To this end, the CDR and MASS have expanded their partnership over a new research, design and training initiative in Rwanda through programs connected to the newly established African Design Centre (ADC) founded by MASS Design Group.

In 2016, faculty, staff and students from the Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design worked with MASS Design Group and a group of Rwandan students and craftspeople to design and produce furniture for the ADC studios and classrooms. The CDR and MASS designed the project to align with the core principles of the ADC, namely that understanding local context is essential to the success of any design project and that the building process itself is an opportunity to invest in local craftsmanship and expand knowledge of design and construction practices through testing and evaluation.

To design and build the furniture, a team from Virginia Tech’s CDR, including Mark Leach, Jonathan Rugh and Nathan King, joined Rwandan designer Aziza Cyamani of MASS Design Group and wood production expert Kalisa Emmanuel of the Kigali-based Kalka and Partners in Kigali for four weeks. A group of six carpentry students from a local trade school joined the project as a part of their training.

During the project, Virginia Tech team members worked side by side with Rwandan students to produce furniture prototypes. The team sought to avoid imported wood (usually harvested unsustainably from forests in Congo) and instead used sustainably harvested local Rwandan species—a difficult task considering that the lack of wood-

Maame Adwoa Prempeh

The CDR and MASS also collaborated on the design and fabrication of the MASS Lo-Fab Pavilion. This pavilion was inspired by MASS Design Group’s work on a remote conservation school in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It responds to the fact that many of the areas in greatest need of built infrastructure have material supply chains that are inadequate to support construction, and as a result, materials have to be harvested locally, posing a significant challenge for the development of infrastructure. The pavilion demonstrated how an advanced structural typology could be adopted in resource-limited settings to create a longspan enclosure using short spanning structural members made from readily available wood.

processing infrastructure and knowledge often results in wood supplies with a high moisture content that is warped or otherwise compromised in terms of quality. The project also integrated metal, wood and weaving into the furniture pieces, giving craftspeople an opportunity to create multimaterial prototypes and encouraging collaboration across trades in Rwanda’s usually siloed furniture industry. Finally, the project identified opportunities to offer young carpenters valuable training, such as techniques for precise joint detailing and instruction on more complex tool use.

Through collaboration between design practice (MASS Design Group), industry (the Rwanda-based Kalka and Partners) and academia (Virginia Tech), the emerging program resulted in the following during its first year: n The team produced an entire line of furniture for the ADC. Several pieces of furniture have gone into production, two of which have been reproduced in scores to support the African Design Centre. Adaptations of the associated details have found their way into several other projects throughout Rwanda. n

The project provided training and education for American and Rwandan collaborators. At the end of the summer, five of the Rwandan students returned to their trade schools to complete their degrees; one recent graduate, Elysé Ndagukunda, joined MASS to lead the furniture production for the ADC and further projects.

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By their own accounts, the project profoundly impacted participants from Virginia Tech, who have all stated

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Virginia Tech students and faculty evaluate the future site of the Mzuzu University Library in Malawi. Left to right: Lindsey Blum, Ephriam Nyirenda, Mzuzu University facilities manager, Kevin Jones, Pablo Cabrera Jauregui, Dhawal Jain, Amanda Milella, Cody Dodd (hidden), and Martin Angst.

that while the group initially intended to train their colleagues, in reality, all contributors came together in the Rwanda shops and learned from each other. n

This work was exhibited at the 2017 International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in an effort to disseminate content to a particular audience, thus diversifying the message and further integrating the efforts into various modes of design.

The furniture created is not only responsive and responsible to the constraints of the Rwandan context but is also the product of a meaningful cross-cultural training and skillsharing experience that has provided educational value to all of its members.

Beyond these outcomes, this collaboration—because it is sustained by both partners—has also given students even more opportunities to integrate social impact work into their design educations. Sarah Ahart, a 2017 graduating senior in the Virginia Tech Industrial Design program, continued this collaboration by addressing the local fabrication of user-centered furniture through the design and prototyping of furniture specific to young school children. During her project, she was hosted by MASS Design Group in Kigali, Rwanda, where she was able to engage stakeholders from regional schools (both teachers and students) and connect with experienced furniture manufactures in Kigali’s manufacturing district. The result was a prototypical design proposal that provided school desks that are both anthropometrically correct and adaptable and that used locally viable materials and manufacturing methods. During the summer of 2017, an expanded team from Virginia Tech, including former Director of Industrial Design Ed Dorsa, L/IDSA, and program veterans Mark Leach and Jonathan Rugh, returned to Kigali to teach an ADC module that included curriculum focused on design thinking, human factors, and materials and processes.

The Center for Design Research has expanded student opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa and is now engaged in projects in Uganda, where a group of graduate students has designed a soon-to-be constructed reproducible community clinic that utilizes advanced infection-control strategies. This project is part of a larger initiative to combine design and fabrication technologies with local labor and training. In addition, through an ongoing collaboration with Mzuzu University, the CDR is leading studio projects based in Malawi that address the future of the Mzuzu campus plan and design curriculum, including the design of the new university library. Through these examples, the students and faculty from Mzuzu University are working in collaboration with their counterparts at Virginia Tech.

Principles for the Future This narrative is a glimpse of the current state of our program.

We present these examples in order to suggest how social impact might be meaningfully and sustainably integrated into design pedagogy in our university and elsewhere. In our experience, we have found that it is valuable to position each new project or outcome as part of a longer-term engagement with partners in industry or practice so that relationships and contextual knowledge can deepen and the projects can have greater success.

Beyond this, we have seen that it is important to make the goal of each project more than just the finished artifact. Rather, the goal should be opportunities from which students can develop complex perspectives as well as communication skills, critical thinking and humility. By developing long-term collaborations, establishing student exchanges and creating program diversity, we hope that our educational programs begin to instill positive social impact as a fundamental design parameter. From this point, we believe that only critical engagement, evaluation and self-reflection can help us realize this goal. n

Acknowledgement: The CDR’s Impact Design Initiatives are made possible in part by support from and collaboration with the Autodesk Foundation.

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By Percy Hooper, IDSA phooper@ncsu.edu Percy Hooper is the coordinator of entrepreneurship and new product development at NC State University College of Design.

In this capacity, Hooper teaches undergraduate and graduate design studios focusing on invention, innovation and the design process. He directs a suite of entrepreneur-focused programs called EntrepreneurShop consisting of Industrial Design Community Contact, Design Assistance for Entrepreneurs, Innovation Crossing Borders and Product Innovation Lab.

GEOMETRY FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS

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s I began my design education in 1973, I knew little about geometry except that I was drawn to it.

It was not so much the numbers that describe the forms, but the magical feeling of viewing, touching, and contemplating these shapes. As a small child, I was captivated by the three-dimensional

symmetry of a Moravian star with its faceted rays extending in all directions like a crystalized glow. To me, it looked like celestial perfection itself. I certainly didn’t understand how it was made. It was simply magic.

One winter, later in my childhood, the Coca-Cola Company distributed ornamental paper cutouts that when folded yielded three-dimensional curved symmetrical forms. I was ecstatic! More pure magic. In my high-school years, I discovered the string art so popular in the hippie era. How a series of taut threads strung between nails hammered into a board could render a smooth curved edge was mind-bending.

This led me into my first year of design school where I was introduced to the geometry of the five Platonic solids.

An invisible structure connected these forms to each other and to the world around them. Learning of the Archimedean solids deepened my fascination with the crystalline wonders. They contained an underlying truth, not only in the facetted perfection of the form but in how they made the viewer feel. Yes, it was magic.

Studying with designer and mathematician Duncan Stuart helped me cultivate a heightened relationship between pure spatial geometry and the environment around us.

Buckminster Fuller and Stuart had worked together at NC State University in the late ’40s and early ’50s. At that time, Fuller had envisioned the principle of the geodesic dome, but had no idea how to calculate its measurements. Stuart, without the use of computers, calculated the spatial geometry of Fuller’s high-frequency dome to the 10th decimal point.

Stuart’s own research into the kinship between the classical geometrical solids became part of the Smithsonian Museum’s traveling exhibit in the 1960s. I was on hand to see Professor Stuart design and build his cylindrical blackboard, an 8-foot cylinder on the inner surface of which he scribed a cylindrical perspective grid. The curved-line grid converged and vanished to the horizon at the north, south, east and west. This allowed design students to step inside the silo and sketch environments on the gridded curved panel that enclosed them. By sitting in the middle of the cylinder and slowly turning to see their surroundings, the

students could quite effectively convince themselves that they had been transported into those sketched worlds. This was the virtual reality of the ’70s.

In 1977, I managed to wrangle a seat in Professor Stuart’s class, Geometry for Designers, where he covered everything from how the Greeks made household use of the Pythagorean theorem to the growing number of ways one might accurately draw an ellipse. We examined why the dimples in a golf ball help it to fly farther and why individual bubbles in beer foam tend to have, on the average, four-sided and six-sided faces where the bubbles meet. We lived in a world of wonder and exploration with geometry as the constant. Yes, it was magic.

Geometry for Industrial Designers Today Now, several decades later, I teach my own version of Geometry for Designers. At its heart, the course is about geometric visualization: conceptually, graphically and physically. The sample subject matter below may seem more like geology, biology or physics. But geometry is the underpinning of it all.

Natural Systems and Applications: We ask why waves on the sea look so much like sand dunes crossing a desert. What would be a suitable application for such forms in our design work? Or how do force and resistance make a branching lightning bolt resemble the spreading roots of a young plant as it reaches for nutrients in the soil?

What other applications of this geometry might be appropriate? What do the plates of a crocodile’s skin and the pattern found in the cracked mud plates of a dry river bed have in common? How can that principle be best utilized in a product?

Practical Patternmaking: How are wallpaper patterns created? The students make a practical application of geometric tessellations to create these repeating patterns,

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as well as unique tilework and masonry craft. To bring flat patterns into three dimensions, students employ a skill dating from the Sung Dynasty (905–1125 CE). They fold paper to help visualize the volumetric forms.

Mechanics and Geometry: What does geometry have to do with physical intent? We play a game in class about cause and effect and what happens in between. Press a button on one side of a box and a specific physical result is described on the opposite side. The student must envision and draw on a whiteboard a plausible arrangement of gears, levers and pulleys inside the box that makes the intended result possible. This is practical geometry that quickly teaches student teams the fundamentals of mechanics.

Classic Drafting Construction: Pencil and straightedge geometry has a rich and noble history that is often lost in our computer age. Yet understanding its principles can open a wealth of practical possibilities to the designer.

In current times, hardly anyone other than carpenters would know how to draw a perfect circle using two nails and a right-angled framing square. (Two nails are driven into a sheet of plywood marking the ends of the circle’s diameter.

The framing square is set touching the two nails with the inner angle of the framing square on one nail. The framing square is then rotated around the two nails, always keeping in contact with them both. A pencil point in the crook of the framing square will trace a perfect semicircle onto the board.

The second half is just as easy.)

Geometry for Industrial Designers of Tomorrow While the above is not typical geometry education, it teaches practical thinking skills based on geometry. But needs change and technologies evolve. What might geometry education for industrial designers look like in the future?

At its heart, it will still be about visualization: conceptually, graphically and physically.

Conceptual/Intellectual: Industrial design students of the future should know the basic geometric systems and have a sense of their application. They should have sufficient understanding of classical polyhedra to look at a Moravian star and at a glance discern that it is a stellation of the lesser rhombicuboctahedron. And because of that insight, they conceptually understand how to construct it themselves.

Many other complex modular constructions are quickly deciphered once their geometric underpinnings are recog-

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nized. Twisted playground climbing structures may seem mind-spinningly complex for one who doesn’t recognize the geometric tessellations upon which they are patterned.

Geometry is often shorthand for “ordered understanding.”

Visual: The sleek lines of an automobile can be alluring, even seductive, without the admirer ever touching the vehicle. What is the essence of that appeal? Who hasn’t seen an elegant driving machine that reminds them even subtly of a shark or some other animal form? Similarly, it is no coincidence that a vehicle might display curves reminiscent of the contours of the human body. It is from this organic geometry that we derive the muscle car. Even with the advancing sophistication of digitally crafted imagery, nothing has yet replaced the efficacy of a designer with a pencil to give an idea life. In truth, Disney/Pixar has confirmed that the combination of hand sketching and digital imaging could well be the wave of the future.

Tactile/Experiential: Creating products is often as much about designing the tactile experience as the visual.

Designing these tactile elements begins with the touch and the grasp of the human hand. The mass, the contours, the radii and the menagerie of textures under one’s fingers are what make a grip, a handle, a keyboard or a button much more than plastic and steel. These elements give it personality, a unique voice, making it a source of pleasure to use again and again. Feedback gloves might even allow us to “feel” the contours of a digital object.

Product Companionship: Beyond functionality, how does the geometry of the product make you feel? The past 20 years in industrial design have been about inviting us to build a relationship with the products we use. It’s the reassuring smoothness we feel in our pocket upon touching our cellphone. It’s about the soothing caress that rewards us whenever we nestle into the contoured driver’s seat of our car. The product we view as a daily companion is the one that will earn its place in the market.

I plan to continue stimulating the thinking of my students to recognize and implement the hidden geometry of the physical world around them. Whether manufactured or of natural origin, whether graphic communication or physical craft, whether digital or analogue, the geometry my students discover will make them more capable designers. They may also learn something that I cannot teach them: that geometry is magic. n

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