Design for Interdependency (D4i) by Sophie Lan Hou

DESIGN FOR

All content, diagrams and frameworks in this book are property of Sophie Lan Hou & Melike Kavran DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY, 2014

SOPHIE LAN HOU & MELIKE KAVRAN Parsons The New School For Design Transdisciplinary Design, MFA

2014

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THANK YOU

Lara Penin Clive Dilnot Jamer Hunt Patricia Bernie Mathan Ratinam Lisa Grocott Carlos Teixeira Jacalyn Brookner Alison Schuettinger Brittney Williams Rhan Aladjem Pandora Thomas Mustafa Serdaroglu Ayse Bozkurt Our wonderful (and growing) TD family Our families and ancestors & the many biological and ecological members of our shared planet.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

OUTCOMES & IMPACT

THE CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

The Limits

A Downward Spiral A Constellation of Paradoxes A Unique Opportunity

CURRENT LANDSCAPE

Design and Sustainability Potential Space for Intervention Key Theories and Precedents Conversations We Are Joining

OUR COLLABORATION METHODOLOGIES

Our Design Playground Preliminary Probes

Revelation and Provocation Our Role As Designers

AN ADDITIONAL TOOL: Integrated Impact Assessment

Integrated Impact A Randomized Control Prototype Observstions and Key Insights Outcomes

FUTURE SCENARIOS Summary Phase 1: Incubate Phase 2: Expand Phase 3: Launch

PRACTICING INTERDEPENDENCY Reversing the Spiral

DESIGN INTERVENTION: BioRegional Mapping Bioregions Partnering With CELLA Designing the Tools Designing the Experience Case Study: Where Is Here?

Implications for 21st Century Design Practice

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ABSTRACT

While sustainability has achieved a mainstream appeal through all-things-green, the urgency of ecological issues has yet to deeply impact global patterns of behavior. The fact of our interdependency within an ecosystem has yet to penetrate the deep psyche of our collective human identity, as well as expectations and standards of individual and collective competency. Current issues of social, ecological and economic crisis are deeply rooted and interconnected within human perceptions of self and environment. With the progression of industrialization, urbanization and globalization we have become increasingly disconnected from experiences with nature, earth-based knowledge and interdependent sensibilities. This base of ignorance has led to increasing illiteracy of ecology and whole systems thinking as human actions flow from the meaning that we attribute to our surroundings. This lack of literacy has in turn, disabled our ability to design and behave sustainably, which then reinforces a centralized (versus interdependent) identity. This phenomena becomes a reinforcing downward spiral, not only dangerous to the sustainability of our natural systems, but to the survivability of human beings as well. To try and redirect this trend, our thesis explores the potential of Identity and Values as intervention points in influencing pro-ecological and interdependent behavior change. To achieve this deep level of shift, we believe people must be empowered with an understanding of themselves as a living organism within an interdependent ecosystem. To that end we examine how transdisciplinary methods might function to constrain or expand possibilities, particularly in collaborative settings that engage diverse and complicated issues. We designed two exploratory tools: A BioRegional Mapping activity and Integrated Impact Assessment framework. The purpose of our work aims to build capacity for sustainable behavior and shift values towards interdependency by designing simple tools that function as a lens of ecological literacy. In doing so, Design for Interdependency seeks to reframe ecological literacy and interdependent understanding as a core competency for living, and designing in the 21st century.

CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

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A Downward Spiral

A Constellation of Paradoxes

A Unique Opportunity

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THE CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

A DOWNWARD SPIRAL A ghastly incident took place on October 18th of 2013, when an Australian sailor, Ivan MacFayden happened to sail from Osaka to San Francisco, a route he does once every 10 years. The usual tranquility and refreshing atmosphere of the ocean was expected. This time however, the tranquility was not of a revitalizing type. The sailors aboard had to go through one of the most dense clouds of man-made debris in the middle of the ocean, subtly stretching all the way from Osaka to Hawaii. They had met the pacific gyre garbage patch. Consisting of small plastic particles remaining in loose cohesion by the undercurrents of the pacific gyre, the patch of garbage is estimated to be between 700,000 to 15,000,000 square kilometers1. When MacFayden and the sailors finally reached their destination, one of the crew looked back to the horizon and said “The ocean is broken.” When MacFayden returned home he petitioned the parliament to take action. Ironically he was told it could be hazardous to take action, for the amount of fuel required to clean up the mess would pollute the waters even more and would be highly costly. Though ironic this scenario is far from tragic. As we all know, the ocean did not come to contain a garbage patch stretching across hundreds of thousands of kilometers overnight. It came to be like this because we allowed it to be. This situation results from bad decisions made by human beings lacking a thorough understanding of the systems and the values nature applies. “The highest function of ecology is understanding its consequences,” wrote Frank Herbert in his critically acclaimed science fiction series Dune2. Progressively disconnected from ecological awareness humanity definitely failed to understand the consequences of plastic, especially water bottles. Initially considered an innovation (who wouldn’t want the ability to easily transport clean potable water?) plastic water bottles now compose a bulk of landfills and require millions of barrels of crude oil for production. Designed to have a shelf life of two years and be consumed in a matter of minutes, designers definitely didn’t anticipate the consequences of plastic water bottles. This lack in foresight grossly punctuated by a garbage patch spanning the pacific ocean. Our current issues of environmental sustainability and resource scarcity demand a profound reflection on patterns of human design. Since the 18th century, Industrialism has greatly shaped the structure and systems of our modern world. It has enabled an extraordinary affluence and comfort of life for vast numbers of people as transportation, education, food and health care became broadly

1 Marine Debrif Info website http:// marinedebris.info/book/ export/html/33

2 Herbert, Frank. Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965.

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accessible. While the mechanization of industries allowed goods to be mass produced and distributed , it pushed the demand for labor into and around cities forming our contemporary patterns of human settlement laying the foundation for a consumer oriented global economy, that impacted all aspects of society. Industrialism also required an unprecedented scale of natural resource consumption which deeply influenced political and social worldviews. Vandana Shiva, environmental activist and author, summarizes this shift as Terra Madre (Mother Earth, the earth as living) being replaced by Terra Nullius (the empty land) and effectively transformed into dead matter ready to facilitate an industrial revolution.3The seeds of our contemporary ecological crises she argues, began with this idea of separateness between humans and environment. 3 Shiva, Vandana. “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest.” Yes! Magazine. 05 Dec 2012

4 Brown, Lester. 2011 World on the Edge, Earth Policy Institute.

As a shift in worldview, the severance between humans and the environment has become self renewing. Fritjof Capra, physicist, educator and premiere scholar of ecological literacy, argues that our interactions with our environment are cognitive, reflecting an iterative cycle of perception, emotion and behavior. These dynamics form a learning system, continuously developing with every interaction, triggering changes in our cognitive structure. These changes form our opinions, ideas and perceptions which, over time create and affirm perceptions of value. These conceptions of value in turn, determine our behaviors and reinforce meanings that we attribute to our surroundings and ourselves. Given our current and progressive patterns of urban settlement and industrialization, we have become increasingly disconnected from immediate and consistent experiences of nature. Cognitively this has simultaneously distanced us from earth-based knowledge and interdependent sensibilities leading to a lacking of ecological literacy and whole systems thinking. This lack of literacy has in turn, distanced humanity from valuing the earth and limited our capacities of understanding and acting sustainably, thus reinforcing a centralized versus interdependent identity. With our expanding population growth, sustained progression of industrialization, and urbanization our collective rate of global consumption currently exceeds the earth’s carrying capacity to sustain human life 4. Disavowed from the guidance of ecology and earth-based knowledge we have stunted our capacity of foresight and ignorantly pursued an unbridled development. Rushing towards the future with no concept of consequence, we have now built a world on hundreds of years of industrial technology, entrenching it in bad design decisions that have produced enormous amounts of stress and weight on our systems resulting in staggering inequities and inefficiencies. This phenomena becomes a reinforcing downward spiral, not only dangerous to the sustainability of our natural systems, but to the survivability of human beings as well.

A CONSTELLATION OF PARADOXES Awareness of the urgent need to remediate these life-threatening inefficiencies and imbalance found expression with the term ‘sustainable development’ and rose to prominence with the 1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development’s report Our Common Future.4 Otherwise known as the Brundtland Report, the commission provided what has become the most common understanding of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Since then sustainability has continued to advance with diverse efforts in multiple arenas of life and economy. Culturally, sustainability achieved mainstream notoriety with the branding ‘green’ and increasingly consumers are demanding healthy and sustainable standards. This mainstream desirability however is a double-edged sword. On one hand it creates a strong consumer demand for sustainable businesses practices and citizen demand for progressive policies such as B corporations, impact investing, fair trade, and GMO labeling. Lacking a critical foundation of ecological and interdependent understanding however, these efforts at sustainability can devolve into a patchwork approach with no long term and comprehensive strategy. Or worse, sustainability is merely a marketing gimmick often referred to as greenwashing. While sustainability has achieved a mainstream appeal, the true urgency of ecological issues has yet to deeply impact global patterns of behavior. The fact of our interdependency within an ecosystem has yet to penetrate the deep psyche of our collective human identity, as well as expectations and standards of individual and collective competency. If sustainability is readily agreed upon as optimal, why hasn’t it become standard? Why is sustainability still niche? Sustainability, while desired, has yet to be understood as empowered by ecological literacy and yet to be fully imagined for modern times. For many, reestablishing ecological literacy signifies a backsliding, a decline to pre civilized times. The idea of returning to earth-based knowledge directly confronts modern notions of progress, strongly established during the Western Age of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. The goal of sustainability threatens material goals, paradoxically challenging intrinsic motivations for physical safety and security. In addition to material goals we also have emotional goals. Feeling a sense of in control is an innate characteristic of human beings. Another challenge thwarting sustainability is that environmental problems often makes us feel out of control given the complex scale of the situation.

5 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future (Brundtland Report)

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6 James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning 2010

Furthermore as individuals it is incredibly challenging to perceive the immediate consequences of our actions on the environment. Litter in the streets is obvious, but how many people are able to see their plastic water bottle become plastic particles in the pacific gyre? There is almost a cognitive gap in our experience as individuals versus as a collective human species occupying and utilizing the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resources. Individually we try to live meaningful lives of dignity, ideally in peace and ease. It is safe to say no one has a conscious desire to instigate ecological crisis and destroy our planet. As a species however, we are fully and unconsciously engaged in self destruction. To illustrate this point many argue that, from a biological perspective the planet earth is infected with the virus, humanity.6 Given the complexity and enormity of our environmental issues, and with our current paradigm placing humans above (versus interdependent with) nature, it is understandable that people donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realize the connections of their daily individual actions and collective impacts. The urgency of sustainability truly requires a deep shift in how we perceive ourselves, as individuals and a species, in relationship with our environment. As individuals, as long as we continue to see ourselves separate from our collective species and environment, we will continue to lack the values and capacities to behave sustainably. So how do we bridge an individual and collective sense of self? The gap between individual identity and species identity alongside the chasm between development and sustainability are two illusions of progress. These two oppositions are neither scientifically based nor reasonable to accept.They are artificially constructed by a worldview lacking consciousness of biology, ecology and the fact of our interdependence. Bridging these gaps, reconciling our disavow of nature and mitigating the tensions between transforming antiquated industrial models of growth while building alternatives grounded in earth-based knowledge is an an incredible task of all citizens living in the 21st century, but especially for designers. Human beings, with all our brilliant capacities of intelligence, empathy and design can rewrite the collective history of our species not as a virus upon the earth but as stewards and protectors.

A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY With the threat of ecological disasters on the horizon, design cannot afford to be merely relevant, it must be impactful. All the more so considering the role design played in contributing to the problem. As we move towards a globalized knowledge based economy 7, we see design gaining multidisciplinarity and rightfully so. The interconnectedness, complexity and global scale of challenges (and opportunities) have required design to adapt beyond traditional boundaries of organization. In addition to architecture, fashion and industrial design, universities now offer degrees and courses in service design, collaborative design and design for social innovation where these practises of experiences, services and interactions were used to be by-products of traditional design practices. Design now finds itself in new domains to address emergent problems in healthcare, politics, businesses as well. These are healthy indicators of design practices remaining relevant and potentially impactful. As emerging design practitioners we have a wonderful opportunity to approach this task with innovative, imaginative and impactful strategies. Aligning sustainability and development can open up new possibilities of innovation previously unimagined by an old industrial paradigm. Rediscovering our relationship with the environment and finding creative ways to give people an understanding of themselves as a living organism within an interdependent ecosystem will only expand our identity and enrich our lives. The poet Rainer Marie Rilke wrote, I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.8 This opportunity is what design for interdependency seeks to respond to. Our work aims to build capacity for sustainable behavior by designing simple tools that can function as a lens of ecological literacy. In doing so we hope to cultivate new knowledge, new values and reframe ecological literacy and interdependent understanding as a core competency for designing in the 21st century. Shifting individual and collective values forward, returning to an interdependent worldview.

7 Powell, Walter and Snellman, K. The Knowledge Economy, Annual Reviews 2004.

8 Rilke, R.M. I Live My Life In Widening CIrcles, The Book of Hours 1905

CURRENT LANDSCAPE

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OF SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STRATEGIES

Design and Sustainability

Potential Space for Intervention

Key Theories & Precedents

Conversations We Are Joining

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DESIGN AND SUSTAINABILITY

1 Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan, 2009

2. Melles, G., de Vere, I., Johnson, K.B., & Strachan, M. (2010) Sustainable product design: Balancing local techniques and holistic constraints through innovative curricula Journal of Design Strategies, Change Design 4 (1), 42-51

3 Braungart, M. & McDonough, W. (2002) Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things New York, USA: North Point Press

4 http://www.usgbc. org/leed 5. Parsons the New School for Design. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Journal of Design Strategies. Change Designâ&#x20AC;?. 4.1. 2010

Traditional design disciplines are increasingly adopting the goal of sustainability. For design disciplines whose work directly participates in material consumption and production systems the efforts for greater sustainability have been diverse and ranging.1 Many universities have established a focus on sustainability and utilize tools such as a Life Cycle Assessment within degree programs such as Product, Industrial and Fashion Design.2 A more progressive approach is framed by the concept of cradleto-cradle design3, which attempts to create more efficient products that are simultaneously waste free. Architecture has perhaps made the greatest strides, engendering the green building movement and establishing the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. LEED is an internationally recognized certification providing third-party verification and currently has achieved certifying projects implemented in over 135 countries.4 (http://www.usgbc.org/leed) It provides guiding criteria and has became a global standard all architects are aware of. All of these advances in traditional design fields are critical to advance towards a sustainable future that lessens environmental destruction.

The depth of endeavor contemporary practices of traditional design disciplines are exploring to advance sustainability stretches far beyond these examples. The important point is that regardless of more complex approaches to sustainability, traditional design disciplines have established tools and precedents they can familiarly and readily depend upon to enhance the sustainability of a design. However, we now have the emergence of new design disciplines that have yet to develop an established standard of tools and resources that explicitly engage ecological impact and enhance sustainability. These emerging practices of design have no consensus of definition and utilize similar but broad methodologies. They have a variety of names: service design, design for social innovation, relational design, collaborative design and our own Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons the New School for Design. Program director Jamer Hunt describes the discipline as emerging in response to the global economic shift in industrialized economies from the manufacture of goods to information, services and innovation.5

This shift places social capital, information technologies and new collaborations as primary concerns. In this context sustainability often refers to developing systems that can sustain themselves once the designer is gone. Fair trade, co-design and humancentered design are conceptual tools that find ready application in designing for sustainable social innovation.6 There are few however, if any frameworks or tools that explicitly deal with environmental concerns and impacts for transdisciplinary design projects. In our experience, we have found

Emerging design disciplines are still discovering the appropriate tools to advance sustainability.

that unless the problem area is explicitly environmental it is dependant upon human motivation to bring an ecological lens to the table. In a highly globalized world that is already so heavily impacted by man-made industry and systems7, utilizing design methodologies that explicitly engage environmental concerns is critical if we are to design an alternative future. 6 Lawson, C. (2010) Designed by versus made by: Two approaches to design-based social entrepreneurship Journal of Design Strategies: Change Design 4 (1) 34-41

7 Speth, J. (2012) American passage: Towards a new economy and a new politics Ecological Economics 84 (2012) 181â&#x20AC;&#x201C;186

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POTENTIAL SPACE FOR INTERVENTION

CONCEPTUAL

Platforms Methodologies & Tools Policies & Declarations

green collar economy triple bottom line bioneers

capra / eco literacy

biomimicry hannover principles scoprai

INDIVIDUAL

city climate change action plans

ladder of tolerance greendrinks footprint calculators water usage calculators

green festivals

iiss business

earth charter To contextualize our work and learn from precedents we tried to approach this robust landscape of sustainable design strategies systematically and engaged an XY axis framework. We plotted Platforms, Methodologies & Tools, Policies & Declarations along an X-Y axis of scale and form (see Figure 1). The X axis provided a spectrum from individual to global and the Y axis from physical to conceptual. We chose key precedents familiar to us from our personal, professional, and academic backgrounds.

natural capitalism rights of nature ipcc un millenium goals kyoto protocol

GLOBAL

Not surprisingly the majority of policies plotted in the upper right hand quadrant representing ethos and principles at a regional, national and global scale, or in the case of climate change action plans at the city scale. Methodologies and tools maintained broad application across individual to industry and tended to weigh towards the physical spectrum. Some of the methodologies by nature, reached towards the conceptual, however the primary application of many of these methodologies such as biomimicry, is often on the level of industry production or architecture. This reflected established tools and strategies used by traditional design disciplines to be more sustainable, such as life cycle analysis and

greenmaps upcycling

design for sustainability life cycle analysis

cradle to cradle

ashrea standards leed

permaculture

community gardens

eco-industrial parks

PHYSICAL Figure 1

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“...the most effective leverage point for change lies in the underlying set of beliefs about how the world works, for from our worldviews flow the values that underpin the implicit goals and rules of society.”

CONCEPTUAL

INDIVIDUAL

GLOBAL

the leed rating system.

PHYSICAL

Figure 2

CONCEPTUAL

INDIVIDUAL

GLOBAL

PHYSICAL

Figure 3

Curiously there was one area that remained quietly vacant compared to others: services, ethos, myths and worldviews of individuals and communities (see Figure 2). This is also the space emerging design practices are increasingly operating in, reiterating a lack of tools that explicitly engage ecological sustainability. This gap in knowledge and resource affirmed our initial intuition that while there are many efforts to affect behavior change by establishing external motivations, there are not many strategies that approach sustainability by deeply enabling internal motivations. Referencing systems pioneer Donella Meadows in her article Using the long lever of value change, design educator Chrisna du Plessis reminds us that ...the most effective leverage point for change lies in the underlying set of beliefs about how the world works, for from our worldviews flow the values that underpin the implicit goals and rules of society. If worldviews and values are strategic points of intervention to affect change, where do they come from? We might assume our values traditionally come from our family, culture, and religion. They are shaped by 8 Chrisna du Plessis. Long lever of value change. Motivating Change: Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment. 2013

our education and life experiences or our communities and locales of living. They are things so familiar to us we easily take them for granted. They simply become an unconscious expression of our identity.8” In Buddhism there is a concept known as esho-funi.9 The literal translation is “life, environment not two.” Essentially esho-funi means the oneness of self and environment. Rather than perceiving human life above or distinct from its natural environment Buddhism recognizes them as interdependent and both dignified manifestations of life. Self is a more subjective experience whereas environment is a more objective realm. According to Buddhism, everything is connected and a reflection of our inner lives. What we imagine to be agents of shaping values - external factors such as family and religion are actually deeply intertwined with and influenced by internal factors such as identity and self perception. Our objective environment and experiences are perceived and altered according to our individual state of life. Seeking to empower behavior change by enabling a deep shift in how we value our relationship with the environment, our thesis adopted the concept of esho-funi and per9 Soka Gakkai International website http://www. sgi.org/

sonal transformation as a prime point of exploration. Contemporary theories of change champion bottom-up strategies versus top-down approaches to affecting desired behavior change. While we agree with bottom-up strategies having greater salience, recognition of and designing for the power of individual transformation remains underexplored. Building upon previous transdisciplinary design work core-out became a shared expression representing the power and potential of deep inner transformation. Our intuition and mapping revealed a gap in strategy at the level of personal transformation as well as a lack of tools, either conceptual or procedural, that explicitly engage human and ecological interdependency. This gap became our opportunity space for intervention (see Figure 3) and we began to ask how might we penetrate and shift a deep level of self understanding to be more ecologically interdependent?

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KEY THEORIES AND PRECEDENTS

PERMA CULTURE Permaculture is sustainable design methodology grounded in a set of ethics - earth care, people care and fair share. Often refered to as applied ecology it is essentially indigenous wisdom of how to live in harmony with the earth, gleaned from around the world and distilled into twelve design principles. The practical solutions permaculture offers have most often been applied to human living settlements but are increasingly influencing social patterns of organization and business model development.

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

Upon exploring the diverse landscape of the sustainable strategies and identifying potential intervention spaces we were glad to know we were not alone. Drawing from our professional and personal experiences, we found a natural synergy with select key theories, practices and precedents. We continued to reference these throughout the development of of work.

Knowledge and understanding of our natural environment does not just belong to science. Since human settlement began communities and cultures have developed strategies, skills and experiences that enable them to live in harmony with their surrounding environment. These different bodies of indigenous knowledge and expertise are increasingly being recognized in the world today as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

BIOMIMICRY Biomimicry is the study of emulating systems, patterns, and characteristics found in nature to optimize human designs. Because nature creates conditions conducive to life, it is the best instructor for designing with the most efficient use of materials. Biomimicry highlights this fact and applies lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s principles to industrial scale design. The term biomimicry (bio meaning life and menesis to imitate) first appeared around 1980s and continues to gain noteriety.

DONELLA MEADOWS Donella Meadows is a systems pioneer. As an environmental scientist, teacher, writer and social analyst she introduced new ways of thinking about and intervening in systems. In 1972 she helped initiate a debate around the world with her book Limits To Growth which called into question the carrying capacity of the earth to support unbridled population growth and economic expansion.

FRITJOF CAPRA Fritjof Capra is the premiere thinker of ecological literacy. Austrian physicist, writer, environmental educator and activist, he founded the Center for Ecological Literacy in Berkeley, California. His twenty years of work and research integrates biological, social, cognitive and ecological dimensions of life. He has written numerous books, two highly influential to the fields of environmental education and ecological literacy are The Web of Life (1996) and The Hidden Connections (2002).

HEROIC IMAGINATION PROJECT The Heroic Imagination Project is a research-based non profit founded by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University that provides knowledge, tools, strategies, and skills to individuals and groups focused on enhancng the power of compassion as a guiding principle for daily decision-making. Heroic Imagination refers to the natural capacity we each possess to dream of a better tomorrow. HIP seeks to transform the egocentric-me into a sociocentric-we.

ECOMUSEUMS Ecomuseums are museums that are not defined by what they are but by what they do. They aim to protect and interpret local heritage through the involvement of communities, reflecting the natural and cultural values of a locale. Their motivation is to improve quality of lives and promote sustainable communities. With an interdependent understanding between land and populations, ecomuseums create smart connections within systems and engender harmonious spaces that promote health, education and economic development.

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CONVERSATIONS WE ARE JOINING IN

Sustainable Development Transition Design Organization Change Given the truly transdisciplinary nature of sustainability our thesis work joins a multitude of theoretical and practicebased conversations. In addition to those highlight below (see figure 4) the primary conversations our thesis work joins are around design for sustainability, social innovation, participatory planning, transition design, and education.

Future Studies

Social Innovation Open Innovation Education

Health & Wellbeing Cultural Studies

Urban Planning Sustainability & Design

Place making

Figure 4

Psychology

OUR COLLABORATION

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The process of our collaboration happened very organically. Beginning thesis prep we knew we both cared strongly about the environment but didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to force a partnership. Initially we almost avoiding working together thinking perhaps it was best if the environment got spread out amongst thesis projects. Eventually however it became glaringly obvious that we were asking the same questions. Once we began working together our work propelled forward. We come from very diverse backgrounds and brought a different set of lens to the same questions. Despite these different lenses, our core questions, values and issues of concern continued to align. How can we reframe ecological literacy as fundamental, how can we get at the deep shift needed for sustainability to succeed, how can we design for the fact of our interdependency?

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Istanbul Turkey

Oakland California

BA Interior and Lighting Design, Milan, Italy

BA Global Studies and Art, UC Santa Barbara

Worked in different fields of design

Worked extensively in the non-profit sector (social justice, youth empowerment, green alternatives)

Certificate in Sustainable Urban Design, UC Berkeley Permaculture Design Certificate

Most recently worked as an organizational change consultant

Loves Buddhism

(architecture, construction + lighting)

Certificate in Sustainable Design + Construction, NYU LEED, GA

Most recently worked as an environmental design consultant Loves Science

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SOPHIE

A few years ago I experienced a dramatic shift in perception. I’d call it a paradigm shift, but it was more like a paradigm embrace. I was at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a beautiful thirty year old intentional community and organic garden on 80 acres in Northern California’s Sonoma County. I was enrolled in a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC), which involved two weeks of full-time immersion in courses ranging from Functional Analysis and Pattern Application to Climate Justice and Growing Food Forests. Over the duration of the two weeks I became shocked with learning how absolutely backwards our modern world has been designed, and yet how readily available solutions are. Droughts in California? Install rainwater catchment and gray water systems. Global hunger and urban food deserts? Plant food forests, low maintenance food production grown in succession layers that mimic the natural layers of a rainforest. It was unlike anything I had ever learned and solutions I didn’t even know to consider. Some background: I was enrolled in the PDC as a professional development opportunity in my role as Marketing and Community Outreach Manager for an Environmental Service Learning Initiative in San Francisco. My position had little to do with a deep commitment to environmental sustainability and arrived almost happenstance. Recently returning home from living abroad, I stumbled into the position as a part-time administrative assistant hoping to make some cash while transitioning back to the States and before working full time. I eventually ended up facilitating the strategic planning of the initiative and with a team of three, designing the organizational structure of the program. Needless to say, I have always loved and appreciated the environment but it wasn’t my focus or expertise. My background working in community organizing and non-profits was always fueled by a deep commitment to peace and social justice.

MELIKE

I come from a design background with an environmental focus which is an interdisciplinary field itself. Working in an interdisciplinary field required engagement across different stakeholders, but it left out the most important component of design - the relationship between people, the design and the nature. Through design, I wanted to other ways that could extend beyond the traditional boundaries of built environment. That is why I came to the Transdisciplinary Design program, to acquire the knowledge of and practice what I have been searching to gain. Everything we created under the process of design seemed to bother me and when I elaborated on this feeling, I came to discover that we were missing a key premise of the act of designing. We were, and some ways still are, designing for humans and beings, never taking into account all the factors into which we implement our designs. To be frank, we design for beings, but we always seem to think that our designs and our objects for whom we design were detached from their surroundings. Growing up, I naturally had the tendency to want to figure out how things worked, or to put it better, how things functioned. I was fascinated by how the nature functioned perfectly in itself. This is the primary reason why, for me, the design was always about function. However, what disturbed me was that if the function was the key element, it must be assumed that a purpose was behind that function, for what has been designed, has been formed to solve a problem. But when the implementation of what we have designed created other problems, we proceeded to solve them one by one, always assuming that our primary design was free of problems. In my perspective, what needed to be done is a change in psyche where one designs for not a single object, say, for humans, but for an ecosystem not detached from its

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My experience with the PDC built on this commitment in a way I never anticipated...it decentered it. Every morning our sessions began with a group song. One morning, while singing a harvest song in the traditional call and response style of West Africa my eyes suddenly became faucets. I wasn’t sobbing and didn’t feel particularly emotional, but my eyes wouldn’t stop tearing! It slowly became very clear. The deep, painful chasm we’ve created between ourselves and the earth is one of the greatest social injustices of our time. How can we fight social inequity and expect people to live harmoniously with each other when we are absolutely clueless about living in harmony with our shared planet? Is there any wonder, being so severed from knowing the means of sustenance that enable our life, that we are so severed from each other? The relationship between social justice and environmental sustainability became devastatingly clear and I realized if I want to contribute to a peaceful, just and abundant world I had better start with the earth. Since then it has been a personal commitment to learn how to bring a lens of ecology to my work. Thesis arrived as a concentrated opportunity for me to vigorously engage this endeavor, not just for my own process but with the goals of tangible outcomes that might be of service for others.

environment, like, designing for humans living in the nature. For me, design could never be thought as a separate thing from the environment, and that when we encounter a problem in designing and implementing, it is simply because we are not looking at the big picture, so to say, we are failing to see all the premises that create the problem for which we design to solve. Briefly put, I believe that our take on systems implementation is obsolete. Whatever we do, produces wastes or end products, byproducts which are the contradictions of the initial products we produce, and that is not and will never be sustainable. Sustainability asks for balance, which is produced by perpetual motion, not a one-way movement where abundance and scarcity are factors that affect the system. Nature produces matter and antimatter, they come together to annihilation and maintain balance. I believe that in everything we design, we must always keep this in mind. This is the second law of thermodynamics applied to our mentalities. In my opinion, this mindset poses a new paradigm by itself where it seeks to change our perception of systems within design and facilitate entropy, a prime rule of nature, which we broke and which the new paradigm dictates to re-obey to harmonize. I believe that the problems today are deeply interconnected and by understanding functions and their relationships, we can turn everything into design opportunities. I searched for ways to achieve this, which was the element that brought me to the question of how we might reframe ecological literacy.

METHODOLOGIES DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Our Design Playground

Preliminary Probes

Find Your Inner Animal

Casual Layered Analysis

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

OUR DESIGN PLAYGROUND

SCALES

Individual

Organization

Community

Identity

Behavior

Ideas

MODES

METHODS

Play & Public Interventions

Narrative, Storytelling & Dialogue

Workshops & Frameworks

Once we started working together we quickly identified parameters of exploration for ourselves in terms of Scales (Individual, Organization, Community), Modes (Identity, Behavior, Ideas) and Methods (Play & Public Interventions, Frameworks & Workshops, Narrative, Storytelling & Dialogue). This process happened organically and emerged from initial discussions of our problem space as well as personal reflections on our experience in TransDesign and professional experience working towards sustainability. There was a natural synergy amongst the themes and clear understanding that, at some point we would have to tighten the parameters and advance with a more nar-

row focus. In this initial phase of research we wanted to have the space to explore many options and discover what approach yielded the greatest insights and/or impact. We also aimed for a high standard of rigor and wanted to ensure we had a robust enough toolbox with which to adequately explore the expansive topic of sustainability. Lastly maintaining these constrained yet broad parameters created an environment conducive to trial and error. Having options to mix and match across different scales, modes and methods empowered us to be unattached to a any one in particular and instead, focus on pursuing insight grounded discoveries.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

PROBE 1

IDENTITY + PLAY + PUBLIC + INTERVENTION Assumptions As a species, humans tend to be very egocentric.1 We love to learn about ourselves and within the animal kingdom, have a special capacity of intelligence that allows us to be self-reflective and conscious. We wanted to leverage this and create an opportunity for participants to better learn about themselves as interdependent organisms. After exploring a spectrum of biological and ecological options, we focused on animal and insect species. Furthermore, we wanted the opportunity to be as interactive and experiential as possible assuming that, the greater the engagement the more impactful the learning and embodied the understanding.

1 Griffith, J. (2011). Ego, and Our Egocentric Lives. In The Book of Real Answers to Everything.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

rely on keywords and frame the question for themselves. We quickly wrote down their response and then guided them through the rest of the activity.

Image 5.1

PROCESS We created an If/Then activity which asked participants about their lifestyle and paralleled their behaviors with different animals. Depending upon their answers, they were guided to the next question. (see image 5.1) By the end of the activity the participants discover the animal they are most similar to. The circles and questions were drawn in chalk on the ground, creating a playful obstacle course or maze like environment.

Before beginning the activity, we asked participants “As an individual how do you contribute to the world?” Often times participants seemed somewhat surprised by this question and either immediately began to reflect with pondering sounds (“hmmmm”) or to clarify with questions in return (“Like, what I do for work?”). If participants had clarifying questions we responded with a level of ambiguity, forcing participants to

Once participants completed all the questions (see image 5.2), they arrived in one of five final circles each indicating a different anima l- Beaver, Wolf, Bat, Frog, Bee. We chose these animals both to offer a diversity of characteristics for human comparison as well as a range of ecological insight. Participants then received their animal card which included an illustration, exalted title and three insights about the animal: Spirit Medicine, Role in Ecosystem, and Benefit for Humans (see image 5.2). We specifically wanted to include the Spirit Medicine insight2 , not only to capture the curiosity of participants but to provoke them in considering the animal in its own essence, as a living creature worthy of respect. After participants reviewed their animal card we invited them to answer the same questions for the human species. Mimicking the layout of the animal cards, we shared a human card that had fill-in-the-blank spaces to respond to the questions: What role do humans play in the ecosystem? and What title might humans have? Once filling this out, if desired we then took pictures of participants wearing a mask of their inner animal.

Image 5.2

2 Ted Andrews. Animal Speak: the Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small. Print 2004

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

OBSERVATIONS AND KEY INSIGHTS We implemented this probe on two occasions, once with our colleagues in Transdisciplinary Design and another time with the public in Union Square during the weekly Green Market. With both implementations, participants were enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy the activity, as well as learning about their “Inner Animal.” It was a highlight that often times, after the activity people wanted to continue to dialogue and we were able to share ecologically relevant information about each animal.

3 National Geographic website http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/beaver/

During the first implementation with TransDesign students, the vast majority (11 out of 16) of participants ended up with Beaver as their inner animal. Interestingly, among the animal kingdom the Beaver’s ability to alter the landscape is second only to humans3. Additionally the three people that arrived at Bat all identified as more introverted. Contrary to Hollywood representations, the majority of bat species are very gentle and shy, primarily feeding on fruit and small insects. Within the animal kingdom they might be considered a more sensitive or introverted species. As participants finished the activity there were moments of new camarade-

rie, with people of the same inner animal (mostly the non-Beavers) identifying with each other and chatting casually in small circles. The first implementation helped us refine some details with the cards and encouraged us to take the probe to the streets. To our utter surprise, the outcome of inner animals was completely different. Out of eleven participants there was an even spread of all animals. This was a compelling comparison that, however faint, seemed to suggest there was a level of accuracy in utilizing animals as a framework for understanding human personality. Or put another way, humans and animals have much more in common than popularly accounted for. This insight was completely unexpected and beyond our assumptions.

There is a dramatic difference in how people identify as individuals, versus as species

Image 5.3

More pertinently, we learned there is a dramatic difference between how people identify individually, versus as a species. During both implementations, when initially asked how participants contribute to the ecosystem as an individual, many people replied with very emotional abilities such as “give positivity,” and “empathize with others.” A few participants mentioned action-oriented behavior such as “write a blog,” “smile at strangers,” and “compost.” After the activity, when asked how humanity contributes, the responses always negatively referred to environmental degradation.(see image 5.3) Various titles given to humans included “Alien,” “Destructor,” or “Cancer.” This major gap in identity not only revealed the disconnect between personal and collective

scales, but reinforced our assumption that the fact of our interdependency has yet to deeply penetrate individual and collective expectations of awareness and behavior.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

PROBE 2 F U T U R E N A R R AT I V E S :

WORKSHOP + IDEAS + STORYTELLING + BEAHVIOR ASSUMPTIONS Environmental issues have become part of mainstream sensibility, yet around the globe we are still far from the level of radical change required to maintain a healthy and habitable planet earth. Despite diverse strategies to mitigate carbon emissions, reduce waste and enable more “green” lifestyles we don’t seem to be penetrating the core of the issue. Furthermore finding solutions are often relegated to the domain of experts within siloed disciplines and often without comprehensive strategies that connect civilian action with systemic change. Through employing a visualized Causal Layered Analysis we aimed to uncover the root of our environmental issues, while simultaneously exploring the potential of storytelling in generating alternative scenarios for sustainability and identifying further points of intervention.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

events, trends, problems, media spin, â&#x20AC;&#x153;word on the street,â&#x20AC;? official positions ISSUE

# structures, interrelationships, systems, policy analysis, technical explanations,

CAUSES

culture, values, paradigms / mental models how language frames / constrains the issue. WORLDVIEW

slogans, archetypes, ancient stories, symbols, gut/emotional responses, common sayings

MYTH/METAPHOR Framework 5.1

CONTEXT The Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is a technique for generating alternative future forecasts developed by Prof. Sohail Inayatullah, Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies). The CLA believes that how issues are framed strongly influences how they are understood, and therefore limits the perceived scope of possible change. We found a natural resonance between this method and a Transdisciplinary Design practice, since much of what we do is critical reframing with a whole systems analysis. The CLA seeks to widen the framing of issues in a systematic way, following an iceberg model that begins at the top with Litany (events and trends), and then moves through Causes (structures and systems) and Worldview (culture and paradigms), to finally arrive at the deep core of Myth and

Metaphor (archetypes and ancient stories). Once the driving myth or metaphor is identified, it is reframed and then projected back up the iceberg creating an alternative future scenario. (see framework 5.1) We were fortunate to work with a Sustainable Systems undergraduate course at The New School to implement the Causal Layered Analysis and begin exploring alternative future scenarios. The class was composed of first-year university students from various Parsons programs. At the point we engaged the class they were about halfway through their course and had already learned about climate change, water and waste systems. In addition to our goals of scenario building, we worked with the professor to design our probe in a way that served as a synthesis opportunity for the students.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

PROCESS We took the methodology of the Causal Layered Analysis and translated it into a visually engaging and interactive workshop. With eighteen students we began the workshop with a rapid brainstorm prompting students to think of any events, trends, headlines, expressions or problems related to the broad theme of environment and document then on post-its. Then we collectively clustered these into themes to explore. We asked the students to form groups of 4 to 5 students and pick a theme to work on. After the groups randomly formed, we provided them with a visual framework (see image 5.4) to begin unpacking the issue through the Causal Layered Analysis methodology. Having already identified the Litany of the issue via the rapid brainstorm, participants were then asked to identify the Causes of the issue in terms of social trends, economic, natural and political drivers, structures, systems and policies (see image 5.4). As they moved down through the framework, they were then prompted to identify the Worldviews backing the causes - underlying values and cultural paradigms that shapes the causes (drivers) of the issue. Finally participants get to the layer of Myth

and Metaphor and identify the deep myths, metaphors, symbols and archetypes that influence the previously identified worldviews. At that point, groups had a comprehensive and visualized analysis of an issue. We then had a short group discussion forcing each group to synthesize their analysis into a cohesive narrative of the issue. Before moving forward with the 2nd part (scenario building) of the activity, we switched 1-2 people from every group to cross-pollinate analysis, enrich and diversify conversation. The 2nd part of the workshop focused on re-imagining an issue starting with reframing the deep myth and metaphor of that issue. We prompted participants to decompose and reframe the existing myth, transforming it into a more desired myth or metaphor. From that base, participants then built back up through the layers to eventually create a re-imagined newspaper headline that showcases the future narrative. The completed framework serves as a visual snapshot of an alternative scenario in regards to an environmental issue. Finally the groups had an opportunity to share back and reflect on the experience and alternative future scenarios they created.

Image 5.4

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Image 5.5

The key issues identified included Global Warming, Health, Population Growth, Water, Food, Animal Related, Green Businesses, Policy, and Social Justice.

OBSERVATIONS AND KEY INSIGHTS During the first rapid brainstorm participants quickly generated a diverse array of environmental issues, headlines, events and trends. Once clustered the key issues identified included Global Warming, Health, Population Growth, Water, Food, Animal Related, Green Businesses, Policy, and Social Justice. That fact that social justice came up as an environmental issue reflected an awareness of the interrelatedness of natural and social systems.(see image 5.5) It demonstrated a more holistic framing of environmental issues and was encouraging for us. Interestingly, no issues or references emerged from the scale of personal perspective. Health came closest to a personal framing however it was primarily focused within collective health trends. This observation seemed to reinforce our key insight from the Inner Animal Probe that there is a major gap between notions of self and our collective humanity.

As we moved down the framework it became increasingly challenging for participants to fully grasp the layer, especially the deep core of myths and metaphors. They needed further support presumably because they were young in age and this was a highly reflective exercise with awareness of tradition. We provided them with different examples and more nuanced directions. This seemed to help and eventually they began to identify different myths such as ‘All that glitters is gold’, ‘Its never going to happen to me’, and ‘Everything has a price’. The myths were simple to decompose and productive in yielding insights about the various litanies of environmental issues. Eventually the groups arrived at joyful headlines that all emphasized interconnectedness and interdependency.

DESIGN INTERVENTION

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

BIOREGIONAL MAPPING

Bioregions Partnering with Cella

Designing the Tools

Designing the Experience

Case Study: Where is Here?

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

BIOREGIONS

image 6.1 Peter Berg, ecologist, writer, activist and a leading advocate of bioregionalism, was the founder of Planet Drum Foundation, which encourages local organizations and communities to achieve sustainable ways of living within a bioregion.

A bioregion is a geographically defined area that shares similar terrain, plants, animals and human culture often organized around watersheds with distinct natural characteristics.(see image 6.1) A bioregion is a unique framing of place in that it bases itself on natural boundaries but strongly incorporates human, built and cultural elements. The term Bioregionalism was first used by Allen Van Newkirk, who founded the Institute for Bioregional Research in 1975, and was later popularized by Peter Berg, founder of a bioregionally-focused nonprofit organization Planet Drum. Since the 1970â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the work of Berg and others have encouraged a proactive place-making that reintegrates society and ecology. Inspired by a bioregional quiz Sophie received during a permaculture course, and

further guided by an essay written by Peter Bergon visualizing bioregions, we decided to explore the possibilities of a bioregional approach to mapping. As a framing tool and major artifact of communication, maps are often used by designers. When engaging in place-based interventions maps are used in detail, however, unless explicitly related to environmental issues they rarely include natural systems and non-human species in detail. Believing our current issues of social, ecological and economic crisis are deeply rooted and interconnected within human perceptions of self and environment, we wanted to explore ways of empowering people with the ability to re-understand themselves, through re-conceptualizing their relationship with their environment. In doing so, we decided to design a participatory bioregional mapping activity.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

PARTNERING WITH CELLA Community Incubator in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Image 6.2

Greenpoint

Cella is an entrepreneurial and collaborative team (see image 6.2) aiming to develop Greenpoint into a net-zero community that is climate resilient and economically sustainable by establishing a community incubator that provides diverse social and ecological services. Their current base of operations is at the Lutheran Church of Messiah, just across the street from McGolrick Park in the Greenpoint neighborhood of North Brooklyn.(see image 6.3) When we began to collaborate with Cella they had just applied to the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund (GCEF) Small Grant for three main initiatives - a Homeowner Lot Remediation service, collegiate collaboration with various classes and scholars at The New School, Colombia and Brooklyn College and a Legacy Grant Preparation. The GCEF is a $19.5 million grant program created in 2011 by the New York State Attorney Generalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office and Department of Environmental Conservation. Funding for the GCEF was obtained in a settlement with ExxonMobil over its Greenpoint oil spill. The Greenpoint oil spill occurred over

Image 6.3

several decades as 17-30 million gallons of oil were leaked from ExxonMobilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refinery and storage facilities into Newton Creek, the soil and groundwater. The leaked petroleum has created a 50 acre underground plume, severely contaminating the soil beneath homes of local residents and businesses. While waiting to hear back from the GCEF grant Cella began implementing outreach for the Homeowner Lot Remediation (HLR) program and secured five families interested in the soil testing and remediation services. They also began the collegiate collaboration, enabling three classes at The New School to work with the Lutheran Church of Messiah as a site project and three graduate theses, including Design for Interdependency. By partnering with Cella we gained the constraints necessary to contextualize BioRegional Mapping. At their first meeting with community members interested in the Homeowner Lot Remediation services we would have an opportunity to prototype our design intervention.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

DESIGNING THE TOOLS

In designing BioRegional Mapping we made a series of design decisions to maintain integrity with our greater exploration of designing for interdependency. We wanted the process of BioRegional Mapping to be fun, exploratory, collaborative and reflective. To accomplish these goals we established guiding criteria which included utilizing a user-centered approach, gamifying the process and maintaining space (on the map and in the process) to get messy. Knowing bioregional knowledge can easily become inaccessible with highly scientific language, we simplified the concept of a bioregion into five key themes (humans, wildlife, climate, water and land) that still honored the social and natural elements of place. To gamify the mapping we decided the themes would function to organize participants into teams and bioregional questions written on cards could serve as prompts for the mapping process.(see image 6.4) Once we identi-

Image 6.4

fied the themes we referenced the Green Map System for representational icons. We wanted to support the Green Map movement and hoped this might allow for easy integration and collaboration in the future. The Green Map System did not provide all icons we needed, however when designing the additional icons we honored the logic of the Green Map System. We designed a series of question cards organized by the bioregional themes. The cards prompted groups with specific questions in order to map social and ecological features either directly onto the map or in a related thematic key. For example a Water card asks “Where does your tap water come from?”, a Humans card asks “Where are the cultural sites and activities?” and a Land card asks, “What are some native plants in this region?” (see image 6.5) We specifically framed the questions in language we

Where are the cultural sites and activities?

DIRECTIONS: Indicate on map with culture icons and write in HUMANS KEY

HUMANS When you turn on your faucet where does your water come from?

DIRECTIONS: Color the path from its source with a blue marker

WATER

Where is the closest wilderness?

e r

(forests, prairies, mountain ranges)

DIRECTIONS: If possible color on map or identify in the LAND KEY

Image 6.5

LAND

e map

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Where does your waste go and who takes care of it?

DIRECTIONS: If possible draw on map and/or write in the HUMANS KEY

HUMANS

ker

hoped could be easily accessible, hoping to target a variety of education levels and hint at the nuance of everyday living. Realizing this language may be new to participants, many of the cards included hints and tips or further explanations. This also became a way of providing a learning experience through the questions. We also designed blank cards for each theme, enabling each group to come up with their own questions or to share information they felt was pertinent but lacking. Designing the map, another core component of the activity, proved to be a challenging task. How could we focus on Greenpoint at an accessible scale for participants while still framing an 125 mile radius to capture the watershed, a defining characteristic of the bioregion? We considered multiple options - having a series of maps at three dif-

Image 6.6

ferent scales, defining the watershed as the large map and a highlighted box with Greenpoint boundaries. Eventually we decided to focus on Greenpoint and surrounding areas as the base map, with a specialized watershed key that included a blank map for people to identify water sources, rivers and tributaries. To streamline knowledge capture we designated keys for each additional theme. (see image 6.6) We branded each key with related thematic icon and if necessary, designed additional frameworks within the key corresponding to particular questions. We wanted to provide as many tools as possible to free participants from the logistics of mapping and instead be able to focus on content. A critical addition to the tools we designed was a set of stickers featuring a question mark. The question mark stickers let partici-

pants know it was okay to not know the answer to a question. It also served to quickly visualize gaps in knowledge. In addition to the question marks, we designed other stickers with icons relating to specific thematic questions. For example, we created stickers with footprint icons for the wildlife group to map animal habitat.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A critical addition to the tools we designed was a set of stickers featuring a question mark.â&#x20AC;?

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

DESIGNING

Like the tools, our aim in designing the experience throughout the workshop was to frame the whole experience as a collective and interdependent process. With this in mind, we referenced an icebreaker activity called â&#x20AC;&#x153;making it rain.â&#x20AC;? In this activity a facilitator guides participants through a series of hand and feet gestures designed to mimic the sound of the rain. The transition of rubbing hands, snapping fingers, clapping and stomping corresponds to rain clouds gathering, and raindrop growing into a downpour with lightning. With this activity we wanted to make an immediate connection between ourselves (composed of 70% water) and our environment to highlight interdependency and the power of collaboration. We knew a warm up activity would be necessary, not only to set the frame of BioRegional Mapping, but to create a comfortable environment for collaboration amongst strangers throughout the workshop. Given the context of Cella and the diverse stakeholders involved in the project, we had a crucial role as facilitators in designing the cross-disciplinarity of the groups. We wanted to make sure that each group had a community member, an environmental expert, and a student who was involved in the project. We had to identify the experts beforehand to position them into semi relevant categories. In the beginning, we somewhat struggled with the positionings because each there was not a direct correlation between expert and thematic groups. Once we experimented with different possibilities, we decided to place the handful of experts into themes that could provide the most support to community members. For community members we thought it best to let them self organize amongst their interests. This would increase our chances of maintaining a level of enthusiasm throughout the mapping.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

CASE STUDY: WHERE IS HERE?

WHERE IS HERE? MONDAY March 10 6-8pm

Join CELLA, Messiah, The New School, ecological experts, and Greenpoint community members for a participatory workshop to learn about your BIOREGION, access new FREE SERVICES, and CONNECT with you neighbors. @ the Lutheran Church of the Messiah 129 Russell St Image 6.7

Hosted at the Lutheran Church of Messiah and titled “Where Is Here?” (see image 6.7) this first meeting for the Homeowner Lot Remediation program brought together a group of 23 people. Attendees included community members, church leadership, Cella leadership and various partners students and a handful of environmental experts ranging from biochemists to gardeners. Since this was the initial meeting for community members to learn more and hopefully sign up for the HLR services we proposed doing the BioRegional Mapping activity to Cella as a way to engage participants and frame the issue of remediation from a holistic and interdependent perspective. The agreement was D4I would have an hour for the BioRegional Mapping activity before Cella went into detail explaining the Homeowner Lot Remediation services. Unfortunately the day before Where Is Here? Cella learned they did not receive the GCEF Small Grant which would deeply impact their capacity to implement the HLR services. Nonetheless they determined to honor implementing the services for the invited families and we still had the event Where Is Here?

PROCESS We began BioRegional Mapping with the “Making It Rain” icebreaker. It was a playful activity that served to energize participants, highlight the power of collaboration and immediately draw connections between the social (participants) and ecological (water). We immediately followed the icebreaker by quickly organizing people into the thematic teams. While the handful of experts were already designated to groups we encouraged community members and students to choose the theme that most interested them. We distributed the question cards and encouraged groups to utilize an arrangement of supplies (post it’s, markers, pens, chalk) spread on a central table.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Participants were sincerely responding to the prompts, sharing information and personal experiences. They also challenged each other within groups, questioning answers and sources.

Participants mapping social and ecological features onto the map.

Despite the large scale of the physical map (6.5 by 10 feet) and designated thematic keys there was some initial confusion about how groups would proceed logistically within the space. After brief verbal communication and direction, groups settled in and started discussing the questions posed by the cards. After this initial hiccup things progressed very smoothly and quite rapidly. Participants were cooperating amongst themselves and different groups came up with different ways of mapping answers or remaining questions. Some groups utilized post-its and transferred them to the maps while others wrote directly on the keys. (see image 6.8) Image 6.8

At different points in the activity it seemed as if energy might be waning. Upon closer examination however we realized the groups were very intently in dialogue. Participants were sincerely responding to the prompts, sharing information and personal experiences. Participants also challenged each other within groups, questioning answers and sources. From what we witnessed the groups seemed to naturally arrive at consensus for final answers after thorough dialogue. When the mapping activity was over any questions that specific thematic groups could not answer were posed to the group at large and a larger discussion ensued. As a closing, individuals shared key obser-

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

image 6.9 Participants working on the framework.

vations and insights from their experience with BioRegional Mapping. After the mapping Cella leadership unexpectedly informed us we had more time. Since they had not received the grant, they did not want to go into detail about the Homeowner Lot Remediation services with the large group. We had prepared a first iteration of an integrated impact assessment framework, but were caught off guard by this sudden opportunity. At this point we began to freestyle an ideation workshop building off the experience of the BioRegional Mapping. Once the collective group discussion reflecting on the experience of mapping finished, participants were invited for

a quick brainstorming to identify concerns and assets about Greenpoint. They were prompted with the questions “What do you love about your bioregion?” and “What concerns you about your bioregion?” Collectively, they clustered the concerns and assets into themes, highlighting the main categories in their neighborhood. Participants were then randomly assigned to groups for ideation around a chosen concernalong with three assets extracted from the “What do you love...” prompt. They were provided with the integrated impact assessment framework (see image 6.9) which consisted of three circles within each other representing different scales of

image 6.9

individual, community, environment. The framework was very simple and essentially a direct translation of a sketch we had rapidly visualized on a whiteboard the previous day. In other words, it was half baked with no embedded directions or clarifications of use. We verbally directed participants to draw a line down the center of the circles, separating the sheet into two halves, and to utilize the lefthand side to unpack the impacts of the concern the group had chose to work on. After analyzing the different implications across scales, participants came up with simple ideas, strategies and goals that addressed the concern inspired by the three assets they had collected. Their ideas were then mapped on the other half (right hand side) of the framework. (see image 6.10)

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Because the atmosphere of the group was so helpful and positive, unknown questions really left me curious and eager to learn.â&#x20AC;? -Participant

Upon the workshop, participants were provided with postcards to send to themsleves.

OBSERVATIONS AND KEY INSIGHTS Since we initially only planned for the BioRegional Mapping activity, we did not thoroughly design the integrated impact assessment framework nor the ideation workshop. We had initially hoped for the opportunity to do a longer workshop however were informed many times in planning that we would not have the time so we only developed a draft just in case. Without being fully designed or clearly placed within an agenda the framework allowed us flexibility and improvisation during the workshop, however it also required us to provide explanations and directions for the groups. The ideation and integrated impact assessment framework seemed to provide a natural follow up to the mapping activity.

Without our prompting participants referred back to insights on the map and were easily able to plot issues across scales. Once we encouraged groups to begin thinking of ideas, some utilized the framework as a type of checklist. For each issue on the left hand side an idea was mapped on the corresponding scale to the right. One group began drawing connections across scales, which allowed solutions that had broad impact to be highlighted. Focusing on what we had planned for, the BioRegional Mapping received great feedback and was a definite success. The initial hiccups for participants with how to orient themselves around the map and the diverse techniques of transferring knowledge to the map helped us realize we need to refine some logistical and procedural aspects

to better design for ease of use. Luckily we provided enough materials, which enabled groups to be creative and resourceful with mitigating the limited people to map ratio. More importantly the level of engagement throughout the mapping was completely beyond our expectations. We had absolutely no idea how provocative and captivating the questions would be for participants. It seemed that not knowing the answer to questions so basic and relevant to daily life gripped participants and engaged them in a new way. This experience of Greenpoint reframed within a bioregion seemed to inspire participants not only to discover more about their bioregion, but to take some kind of action relevant to these newly discovered relationships between the social and ecological.

OUTCOMES AND IMPACT

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Revelation and Provocation

The Limits

Our Roles as Designers

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

REVELATION AND

The BioRegional Mapping invited participants to consider their everyday experience of life in a different way.â&#x20AC;?

Initially we had imagined the mapping activity to be a framing tool that could be applied in the beginning of a project as a lens of ecological literacy. We assumed that by framing a project with this literacy, it will be designed and implemented more sustainably. Cella was an appropriate partner because they had an expressed intention of ecological restoration and we hoped the BioRegional Mapping could strengthen the integrity of their mission and approach. Based on our observations from the first prototype at Where Is Here? we realized BioRegional Mapping can not only serve as a framing tool, but can also function to reveal gaps of knowledge, provoke reflection and discovery, and inspire participants to take further action. Immediately following Where Is Here? we found ourselves surprised by how provocative the experience was for participants. At particular moments in the activity energy

amongst certain groups seemed to be waning. Upon closer inspection, we realized participants were deep in discussion and intently focused on discovering answers. (see image 7.1) In general, participant engagement was sustained beyond the mapping activity we planned and when we unexpectedly had more time participants leapt vigorously into the freestyled ideation workshop. Despite it being a weeknight evening no one left early and many lingered afterward in small group dialogue. What was so provocative about the experience of BioRegional Mapping? By grouping participants into themes of human, land, wildlife, water and climate and giving them colorful theme cards with simple questions, participants were invited to consider their everyday experience of life in a different way. They were invited to perceive their home and place of living with a lens of interdependency. In addition to read-

image 7.1

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

importantly however, it revealed what was unknown. It showed what is missing in knowledge and understanding, despite its everyday implication and relevance. The BioRegional Mapping exposed the silent gap we have between our sense of self in daily lives and the natural environment which completely sustains us. The physical map materialized the experience and became evidence of our cumulative void of ecological knowledge. Suddenly pronounced and visualized, this revelation created a vacuum which highlighted the need, opportunity, and potential of what and how we might begin to bridge the gap.

ily known cultural characteristics and transportation hubs, the cards asked about native plant species and annual rainfall. All themes were treated equally, given an equal number of participants and designated space on the map. In addition, participants were prompted by the cards to share what they knew tacitly about their bioregion. There was no prerequisite of expertise and participants were encouraged to rely on their personal experience, education and each other. In this way each individual was affirmed that they had something to contribute to the map and our collective understanding of our bioregion. The affirming and empowering experience of being able to answer a question is highlighted in participant feedback. In an online questionnaire shared post BioRegional Mapping, when asked “How did

you feel when you did know the answer to a question?” participant responses included expressions such as “helpful,” “great,” and “it felt empowering.” Further reflecting on the provocation of BioRegional mapping, in addition to being invited to view place with an interdependent lens and affirmed with the validation of tacit knowledge, the capacity of participant’s to map their bioregion was constrained by the existing knowledge of the group. The participation of experts was no guarantee and there were no additional resources made available during the mapping. No quick searches on smart phones or flipping through pages in a reference book. In this way the mapping revealed the group’s collective knowledge of their bioregion. More

In the online questionnaire we also asked participants “How did you feel when you did not know the answer to a question?” Opposed to the affirmative and empowering responses when knowing answers, participants shared the disappointing and startling emotions of recognizing what they don’t know. “I felt disconnected and that I was little ignorant, self absorbed…” one participant shared. “Surprised, in some ways as I have lived here for a long time,” comments another. Others simply shared they felt “bummed” and “kind of sad.” Luckily these emotions were all experienced within a positive and playful environment of collaboration where no single individual was expected to be capable of answering all the questions. To that end, while somewhat painful to recognize the gap between our human selves and natural environment it was also provocative and inspiring. Participants recognized “Because the atmosphere of the group was so helpful and positive, unknown questions really left me curious and eager to learn.” Another participant even shared “I made a list, and went home to do some homework on plants, wildlife and the land original to NYC...all things I’ve never really thought about before.”

“The BioRegional Mapping exposed the silent gap we have between our sense of self in daily lives and the natural environment which completely sustains us.”

While not all participants reported doing bioregional homework, the feedback was overwhelming positive. Engaging, Interesting, Fun and Inspiring were popular descriptions in participant feedback. To know participants could color a river black representing a massive oil spill, have stickers of question marks staring back at them as symbols of unknowing, and still walk away with such a positive experience is a great testimony to the power of design. Reframing Greenpoint within the context of a bioregion created an experience for participants that prompted them to think about their environment in a more holistic way, and by extension their personal relationship with it. The accessible and playful form of the mapping, along with our facilitation through the experience maintained an encouraging environment. The subsequent gaps revealed by the mapping, while somewhat shocking and saddening for participants, still seeded a curiosity to explore and learn more about their bioregion.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

THE LIMITS

A major limitation with Bioregional Mapping is that on its own, it doesn’t offer solutions. It reveals the major gaps we have in knowledge and conscious relationship with ecology, however it doesn’t close them. (see image 7.2) The experiential and visualized aspects of the activity provoke reflection, empower tacit knowledge and seed curiosity. The collaborative and playful group dynamic offers support, encouragement and validation. The cumulative experience leaves participants engaged, curious and gently empowered with new knowledge and basic ecological literacy. This literacy, such as watershed or soil types, becomes an entry point for further exploration. It does not however, empower participants with knowledge or strategies of how to protect their watershed or in the case of Greenpoint, rehabilitate it. Additional tools and experiences, such as a fully designed ideation workshop or online learning sources, are needed to begin fully bridging the gap between humans and the natural environment. Another limitation extending from the first, is that BioRegional Mapping does not provide a sustained community of support or platform for engagement. Once provoked to recognize the gap and opportunity in our relationship with the natural environment, the image 7.2

mapping itself does not provide participants a pathway for further engagement and action. We mitigated this limit by enacting the BioRegional Mapping in collaboration with a partner organization that does provide a sustained platform for engagement. In the context of Cella, participants could immediately follow up with the experience of BioRegional Mapping by becoming involved with the organization’s pilot homeowner lot remediation program. Research has repeatedly shown a sustained shift in behaviour change benefits greatly from a community of support.1 Especially given the place-based focus of a bioregion we realize a platform for further engagement, either through an expanded tool or with a partnering organization, is critical to realizing the full potential of BioRegional Mapping.

8 Chrisna du Plessis. Long lever of value change. Motivating Change: Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment. 2013

“A major limitation with BioRegional Mapping is that on its own, it doesn’t offer solutions.”

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

OUR ROLES AS DESIGNERS

As emerging design practitioners dealing with the complexity of sustainability and interdependency in the context of community engagement, we had to wear many hats in implementing BioRegional Mapping. Reflecting on our experience and the many roles we occupied is insightful in understanding the greater potential and trajectories of design beyond disciplines. Below are three key roles we played in designing for interdependency.

REFRAMING As a major aspect of our thesis, reframing became a primary tool employed to help participants acquire an interdependent perspective. While methods of framing/reframing are diverse and may be exercised with a range of specificity or nuance, the simple idea of depicting social and ecological systems alongside each other on a common map was the beginning of a critical reframing. By reframing large environmental considerations from the perspective of everyday living, as designers we helped enable participants to see the relationships, causes and consequences of these elements over the systems they are living in at the readily accessible scale of personal experience. The practice of reframing enabled us in encouraging participants to approach complexity in a fun way, which gradually guided them toward a more interdependent perspective of themselves and the environment. It also allowed us to establish design criteria that further guided our roles as designers in forming and facilitating the tools and experience of BioRegional Mapping. In essence, reframing gave us the initial step that we needed to take in bringing an ecological lens to our own tools and practice, and more importantly in our capacity to provide that service to others.

FORMING Giving form to ideas is a major role that every designer plays, regardless of their field of practice. Needless to say, as emerging design practitioners we are no different. Through out the design process we formed various physical tools such as maps and cards, frameworks and graphics. However unlike traditional design disciplines, we also formed flows of knowledge and processes of engagement, reflection, discovery and ideation. These forms allowed us to involve non-experts in dealing with the complex issues of ecological crisis and interdependency. Not separate from reframing, our practice of forming constitutes the next step and translates our intentions into something actual and tangible. By reframing interdependency from an everyday perspective and then forming that interdependency into the tools and experience of BioRegional mapping, participants were able to seamlessly experience a new perspective and the flow of new knowledge.

FACILITATING Given the diversity of the participants and complexity of topic, effectively facilitating each moment of the experience was essential for the success of BioRegional Mapping. The reframing of interdependency and forming of the BioRegional Mapping process could not work by themselves. Our role of facilitating the experience was an essential component of implementation. Our intent in forming the experience was to create a space for getting at the core of our personal relationships with ecology. In facilitating this experience we had to maintain a strong sense of the collective pulse, sensitive to any fluctuations of engagement or particular needs of participants. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to lose the transformative yet elusive part of the experience with the practicality of map-making. Facilitating a game-like experience not only engendered patterns of action, but also helped to maintain a collaborative and fun experience. Being capable as designers to facilitate the experience of BioRegional Mapping in a way that enabled collaboration, creativity, provocation and reflection brought the full potential of our intervention into expression.

AN ADDITIONAL TOOL

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

INTEGRATED IMPACT ASSESSMENT

Impact Assessment

A Randomized Control Prototype

Observations and Key Insights

Outcomes

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

CONTROL

IMPACT ASSESSMENT

SCALES OF IMPACT What are the different implication and impacts of the issue? How does it effect individuals?

How does it effect the comminities and societies?

How does it effect industries and economies?

ex: well-being, safety

ex:access, education, welfare

ex: labour, incentives, legistations

Framework 8.1

INTEGRATED IMPACT SCALES OF IMPACT What are the different implication and impacts of the issue? How does it effect individuals?

How does it effect the comminities and societies?

How does it effect industries and economies?

How does it effect the environment and natural systems?

ex: well-being, safety

ex:access, education, welfare

ex: labour, incentives, legistations

ex:pollution, deplition, hazards

Building from the ideation workshop we improvised at Where Is Here?, we wanted to more fully explore ideation as a point to intervene in bringing a lens of interdependency. The first iteration of the integrated impact assessment framework, though half baked, provided a structure for participants to unpack the impact of issues across scales that included the natural environment. The consequence of this was directly related to the solutions they designed. With an opportunity to collaborate with the New School student group Project Africa and design an ideation workshop for an upcoming conference, we decided to do another iteration of an integrated impact assessment framework. We consulted a variety of impact assessment tools and frameworks across different domains as a process of developing strategies for a framework relevant to the

Framework 8.2

structure of an open innovation ideation workshop. Such tools and frameworks included Environmental Impact Assessment, Life Cycle Assessment, and an Input-Output Analysis. These tools are primarily conducted as a method of evaluating impacts in very material and technical contexts such as industrial product development. And they often require specialized software and knowledge. There were no readily available frameworks that addressed the interdependencies of our consumption and production systems across social and ecological scales in a simple and visually accessible form. To meet this need we focused on simplicity in designing the framework. We tried to maintain a simple concept of nested systems and embedded brief directions that could prompt and guide the user through the framework.

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A RANDOMIZED CONTROL PROTOTYPE

On April 5, 2014 New School student group Project Africa hosted a one-day conference titled Design Africa that featured presenters, panel discussions and an open innovation workshop. The conference was a response to Africa’s absence in traditional discussions of design and had three goals: to showcase what is currently happening in design communities in Africa, to examine the implications of those developments and to explore the potential impact design can have in the fields of architecture, communication, infrastructure, technology, fashion and transdisciplinary design. We had an opportunity to collaborate with Project Africa and utilize the workshop as a randomized control trial to prototype the integrated Impact Assessment Framework. A Randomized Control Trial (RCT) is a technique most commonly used within the fields of science and medicine. They are often used to test the efficacy of new medicines or medical interventions. During a RCT a group receiving treatment is compared with a control group that receives no treatment. They key criteria of an effective RCT is that once participants are deemed eligible, they

are randomly assigned to groups. It has become the gold standard for clinical trials and seemed like an interesting way to test the impact of engaging our framework. During the conference we implemented what might be considered a Randomized Control Prototype, with groups randomly selected to receive one of two different frameworks. (see framework 8.1 and 8.2) Both frameworks assessed impact of a given issue, however one included natural systems (integrated impact) and one did not (control).

Project Africa is an interested-based group formed by students in the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) to encourage and foster awareness about African issues, cultures, and values. The organization’s mission is to promote a greater understanding and increase cross-cultural awareness of the continent through constructive dialogue, personal research, and interdisciplinary engagement.1

1 Project Africa website http:// projectafricanewschool. wordpress.com/about/

image 8.1

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

IMPLEMENTING THE PROTOTYPE At the start of the conference participants and guest presenters were encouraged to write and post assets on a large poster of Africa that had different prompting questions such as, What do you love about Africa? or What is unique about African design? (see image 8.1) Throughout the day the fifty conference attendees were given post-its and encouraged to capture issues, themes or questions that arose in the panels or guest presentations. During lunch the postits were clustered these into six key issues of concern. They were:

sheet and randomly selected assets - all to be guided by facilitators.

Emergent Technology and New Media

The first activity of the workshop involved our frameworks. Groups were asked to analyze the impacts and implications of the issue utilizing the framework, first in pairs (see image 8.2) and then within their group. (see image 8.3) Participants then choose 2 key issues from 2 different scales to carry into the next activity of ideation. Participants could use the assets at their table or come up with their own. At the end of the workshop participants had the opportunity to present their ideas to the large group.

Urbanization and Infrastructure Educational Futures Governance and Civic Engagement Cultural Integrity and Commodification Business Innovation

For the workshop tables were set up and designated as a working group for each theme. Tables were prepared with workshop materials including our integrated impact assessment framework, an ideation

Of the total six groups, we randomly distributed the the control framework (3 half elongated circles within each other representing the scales of individual, community and industry) to three tables and the integrated impact framework (same as above but with an additional circle representing the scale of the environment) to the remaining three. We had no idea what topic received which framework, nor which participants might be at the table.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

OBSERVATIONS AND KEY INSIGHTS

Image 8.2

Image 8.3

For the majority of the participants and workshop facilitators, despite their expertise as professional designers and in development fields, it was their first time in an ideation workshop. It took some groups longer than others to start mapping implications. One group directly started to ideate solutions and used the framework to map implications of the solution instead of the issues. After brief communication, groups started to work in pairs and the process progressed smoothly after this point. Working in pairs gave the participants the room to be more comfortable in sharing their opinions and to better explore the issue in question. So when the pairs came together within their groups to map the implications on a larger size framework, participants were eager to engage in conversation with a more ample perspective.

Once the ideation process started, people became more enthusiastic and the dialogues became very insightful. Initially, participants were hesitant about drawing diagrams and sketches, so the facilitatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role was really important in capturing the processes on the ideation sheet. However when they were exposed to the process through the facilitators, they became more engaged in expression through imagery. Visual representations enabled participants to figure out the different components and elements of their idea and allowed the ideas to become more refined.

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

OUTCOMES Theme Business Innovation & Supply Chain

Eco?

implicit explicit

In the workshop there were eight ideas generated. To analyze the impact of our prototype, we mapped the flow of knowledge through the ideation process. (see diagram 8.1). We mapped beginning Theme, if there was implicitly or explicitly Eco?, Prompts via issue post-its, which Framework was in use, Assets extracted from the large Africa poster, which scales the Concept addressed and finally any major Insights. What was most important to us was to see if the resulting concept would reflect the implications identified by the integrated impact or control framework. The ideas that explicitly considered the environment, directly corresponded with the groups that received the integrated impact framework. The only anomaly was the business innovation theme which did not receive the integrated impact framework, but altered it so that industry was crossed out and replaced by the environment. (see image 8.4). Not surprisingly, the final concept included impact at the scale of environment. When we analyzed the flow of knowledge however, we realized that ‘Sustainability’ was an explicit prompt they received to begin ideation. Furthermore we later learned one participant in the group was the Corporate Social Responsibility manager at her company. This reaffirmed that the concepts generated during the workshop which involved the environment, were either provided with the integrated impact framework or with an explicit prompt related to sustainability and the environment. (see diagram 8.2)

Cultural Integrity & Commodification

Emerging Technology & New Media

Urbanization & Infrastructure

Future of Education

Governance & Civic Engagement Diagram 8.1

explicit

none

implicit

explicit

Prompts - Sustainability - Extraction / investment - Distribution - Homogenization

- Role of tradition - Black bodies - If modern = industrialization = alienation, why Africa need to modernize? - Tech products not meeting real needs - Lack of access to information - Spirituality

- Lack of infrastructure - Racial segregation - Branding/Traditional vs modern - Land development

- Exposure vs literacy - Skills, tool for empowerment - Retention + mentorship

- Agency and ownership - Hierarchical system - Lacking trust in government (transparency)

Framework

control

integrated impact

control

Assets - Design thinking - Coffee ceremonies - Care & respect for elders

- Dedication - Patterns - Collective modes of spatial experience

- Ben Okri - Formality through informality - History, Music, Culture

- Resilience - Opportunity - Sense of community

Africa to Africa Trading

N/A

N/A Integrated Schools

X integrated impact

- Varied Landscape - Fluid/ non district - In the people

> Health = entry point for human understanding > Local = respecting cultural heritage and environement. > Eco can unveil new possibilities!

Land use framed as ownership (Human Rights, community issues) > Enviroment not included!

Ethical Foreign Investment

Edited framework from indusrty to environment! - Had ‘Sustainability’ prompt - Participant was CSR manager

Access to clean water came as a community issue. (did not carry through)

Public/private partnerships for infrastructure

X integrated impact

Insights

Concepts

Solar-powered rural ‘civic booths’

> Land management, natural systems/gardens connected to individual empowerement > Place = opportunity for experiential learning

> Eco lens brings new opportunities! (Maybe inspired from the parallel env. - feedback loops?)

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY // 2014

Theme

Despite the mainstream desirability for sustainability, if we are not assertive on the fact that the environment must be considered, there is no guarantee that it will. Even with a theme like Urbanization and Infrastructure (see diagram 8.2) that so explicitly relates to the environment, and even when receiving explicit prompts of ‘Land Development’ and ‘Resilience’ the group did not receive the integrated impact framework and so were not prompted to consider environmental impacts of their issue and idea. Another key insight which the framework yielded through the workshop is that local and cultural heritage is often associated with the environment. In the context of designing for social impact, utilizing the environment as a leverage point can unveil new possibilities and and innovations that maintain the integrity of local culture and identity. This is a critical concern for designers as we progressively work across the globe and within social domains of development. As a procedural tool, the integrated impact assessment framework enabled different perspectives to come together. Often these different perspectives of a given problem were regarded and treated as conflicting notions. Through the framework, these conflicting issues become revealed as interdependent issues and helped the diverse perspectives work together with greater collaboration. In prompted participants to identify various impacts of the problem across scales, the framework also began to reveal different forces and drivers of the problem. These insights formed snapshots of the problem, allowing users to see a more interdependent, systemic view of the problem.

Business Innovation & Supply Chain

Eco?

implicit explicit

Cultural Integrity & Commodification

Emerging Technology & New Media

Urbanization & Infrastructure

Future of Education

Governance & Civic Engagement

Diagram 8.2

explicit

none

implicit

explicit

Prompts - Sustainability - Extraction / investment - Distribution - Homogenization

- Role of tradition - Black bodies - If modern = industrialization = alienation, why Africa need to modernize? - Tech products not meeting real needs - Lack of access to information - Spirituality

- Lack of infrastructure - Racial segregation - Branding/Traditional vs modern - Land development

- Exposure vs literacy - Skills, tool for empowerment - Retention + mentorship

- Agency and ownership - Hierarchical system - Lacking trust in government (transparency)

Framework

control

integrated impact

control

Assets - Design thinking - Coffee ceremonies - Care & respect for elders

- Dedication - Patterns - Collective modes of spatial experience

- Ben Okri - Formality through informality - History, Music, Culture

- Resilience - Opportunity - Sense of community

Africa to Africa Trading

N/A

N/A Integrated Schools

X integrated impact

- Varied Landscape - Fluid/ non district - In the people

> Health = entry point for human understanding > Local = respecting cultural heritage and environement. > Eco can unveil new possibilities!

Land use framed as ownership (Human Rights, community issues) > Enviroment not included!

Ethical Foreign Investment

Edited framework from indusrty to environment! - Had ‘Sustainability’ prompt - Participant was CSR manager

Access to clean water came as a community issue. (did not carry through)

Public/private partnerships for infrastructure

X integrated impact

Insights

Concepts

Solar-powered rural ‘civic booths’

> Land management, natural systems/gardens connected to individual empowerement > Place = opportunity for experiential learning

> Eco lens brings new opportunities! (Maybe inspired from the parallel env. - feedback loops?)

FUTURE SCENARIOS

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Summary

Phase 1: Incubate

Phase 2: Expand

Phase 3: Launch

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SUMMARY

Evaluating the impacts of the Bioregional Mapping, we recognize it was a small step in advancing behavior change for sustainability, but one with great potential worthy of development. As an experiential based activity BioRegional Mapping can build capacity for sustainable action through provoking reflection, revealing gaps in knowledge and empowering users with basic ecological literacy as a starting point for sustained engagement. Recognizing the limits of BioRegional Mapping in offering solutions and providing a platform for sustained engagement, we have embraced these constraints as guiding criteria for how we immediately move forward with design development. We would like to continue prototyping Bioregional Mapping as a two part service we offer as consultants consisting of Part 01: Participatory Mapping and Part 02: Ideation Workshop. Our target users are environmental organizations and/or place-based projects that are seeking community engagement and capacity building. We would like to refine the tools and procedures of the mapping as well as fully design the ideation workshops, where additional tools can be explored such as the framework for integrated impact assessment. Most immediately we identified Greenmaps and NY Restoration project as two potential partners to further prototype these tools and service. As we develop BioRegional Mapping into a comprehensive offering, we would like to expand its use beyond our immediate target users and eventually create a tool that can live beyond our own service delivery. These goals are delineated into three phases summarized below.

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PHASE 1:

NEW YORK RESTORATION PROJECT One possible scenario is to prototype Bioregional Mapping with the New York Restoration Project. NYPR is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to transforming open space in underserved communities to create a greener, more sustainable New York City by promoting environmentally responsible living practices and advancing public policies.1 At the beginning of last semester, we had the opportunity to meet with NYRP as a potential thesis partner. At that time they were looking to launch a restoration project in East Harlem that would create a sustainable neighborhood, addressing concerns around public health, economic development and social prosperity. Unfortunately, project planning was not going to start until Summer of 2014. Therefore, it wasn’t possible for us to collaborate because we were interested in developing tools that could be implemented at the front-end of a project. Nonetheless, they encouragingly shared they would “love to use the tools whent he project starts.” Through our collaboration, Bioregional mapping can provide an outreach opportunity for NYRP, enabling them to involve community members in a participatory process and diverse stakeholders in the decision-making process. NYRP can utilize BioRegional Mapping to identify gaps of knowledge along with previously unrecognized concerns and assets within the neighborhood. Since Bioregional Mapping creates a snapshot of time within a given place, it can also act as an assessment tool for the planning team. And if implemented at strategic points in the project, it can provide an opportunity to evaluate progress and stakeholder buy in. 1 http://www.nyrp.org/

GREEN MAPS SYSTEMS Another immediate potential collaboration is with Green Maps. After our first prototype of Bioregional Mapping with Cella we were able to connect with Wendy Brawer, founder of Greenmaps and share our insights and outcomes. She shared great insights with us and helped clarify what Green Maps does. Although Green Maps and Bioregional Mapping are quite similar, there are critical differences. Bioregional Mapping completely reframes place, essentially looking from the earth’s perspective to discover new connections between the social and ecological. Green Maps also maps social and ecological elements of place, however it relies on existing features within known political boundaries. Greenmaps are local maps done in a collaborative and interactive environments (online and offline) which utilizes iconography to prompt participants in mapping green living, ecological, social and cultural resources. Bioregional Mapping is also enacted in a participatory context however participants are prompted with specific questions focused on provoking reflection and revealing voids of understanding within a bioregion. Despite these critical differences there is a great synergy between Green Maps and BioRegional Mapping and we purposefully designed icons in accordance with the logic of the Green Map System in hopes of future collaboration. By bringing BioRegional Mapping to the Green Maps digital platform, the perception of users can shift beyond known political boundaries and expand to a more holistic sense of place as a bioregion. We believe this can be a win win scenario, enabling us to learn from the depth of experience of Green Maps and for Green Maps to expand their online and offline service offerings to include a bioregional approach.

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PHASE 2:

www.designforinterdependecy. com

DESIGN FOR INTERDEPENDENCY

We believe BioRegional Mapping could have powerful application across a spectrum of endeavors. We would like to explore other potential contexts and expand our services to other domains such as education, urban planning and local businesses. Learning from the work with sustainability gatekeepers1 by think tank Demos Helsinkiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innovation concept Peloton, we would also like to develop more catered experiences of Bioregional Mapping and workshop ideation that can target key gatekeeper decisions within these domains such as transportation and food. Additionally, as we further refine Bioregional Mapping and continue exploring other tools, we imagine having design clinics as a type of training the trainer for design colleagues working within such realms as Social Innovation and Transition Design. Through these design clinics, we can empower other designers to frame their projects interdependently and enhance their capacities in designing sustainable solutions.

1 Neuvonen et al. Gatekeepers of Sustainable Innovation. Demos Helsinki, Laivurinkatu 41 (kulmahuoneisto), 00150 Helsinki, Finland

ABOUT

TOOLS

AGGREGATOR About

PHASE 3:

Start Archive Download

Lastly, having gone through the previous phases, we expect to have a more refined and robust version of the Bioregional Mapping which could be assembled as a mapping kit available for use beyond our direct service. We imagine this kit will include the core tools and guidelines for suggested implementation. We envision Bioregional Mapping and other tools such as the integrated impact assessment framework, will becoming readily accessible from our website. Thus, it could be downloaded and utilized by other designers and organizations through the platform we provide. If a sustained collaboration with Green Maps progresses, it would be ideal for the two services - a BioRegional mapping kit and online participatory platform to converge as one package.

Reframing ecological literacy and interdependent understanding as a core competency for living in the 21st century. We are seizing the opportunity of reestablishing an ecological paradigm, building capacity for sustainable behavior and shifting values towards interdependency by designing simple tools that function as a lens of ecological literacy.

Another fundamental tool we hope to develop is an Aggregator. Throughout our thesis work we consistently recognized there are already many available tools within the field of sustainability. Likewise many organizations would like to implement more sustainable strategies however they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know where to begin. We would like to leverage this opportunity and utilize our x-y axis of sustainable strategies as a base foundation to build a database of tools that could help design practitioners and organizations to identify relevant tools and sustainable strategies they could employ.

CONTACT

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FUTURE SCENARIOS DIAGRAM

INCUBATE

EXPAND

LAUNCH

NYRP

DESIGN CLINICS

TOOLKIT

Designing and implementing the Bioregional Mapping activity.

Offer design clinics and develop a training for trainers.

A BioRegional Mapping toolkit includeing the core materials and guidelines for suggested implementation.

EDUCATION

URBAN PLANNING

BUSINESS

Middle & High School

City & Local

Local Start-Ups

Environmental Education

Situational Analysis

Asset Mapping

Bioregional mapping is an ideal activity for students to engage in place-based learning that fosters student discovery.

Communication Tool

A Bioregional map can help communicate the complexities of our systems in a visually compelling way and help students to rediscover their environment as an integrating concept.

As a process to analyze economic, social, political and ecological factors, bioregional mapping can identify previous unrecognized opportunities, assets and challenges.

Builds Buy-In

Through a participatory engagement bioregional mapping can encourage the involvement of diverse stakeholders in the decision-making process.

Bioregional Mapping can help businesses identify nearby resources and create linkages with their local community.

Place-Making

With a holistic understanding of place that includes the social and natural, businesses can become an agent in creating spaces that nourish a local identity.

GREENMAPS Bring BioRegional Mapping to the Green Maps digital platform

Brooklyn Urban Garden School

City Repair

Sycamore Bar & Flower Shop

Courses: Social Studies, Geography, Biology, History, and extracurricular activities!

New project partnership to create public green spaces

To develop seasonal beverages based on native herbs

AGGREGATOR A database and aggregator of sustainability tools that could help design practitioners and organizations to identify relevant tools and sustainable strategies they could employ.

PRACTICING INTERDEPENDENCY

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Revirsing the Spiral

Implications for 21st Century Design

01 02

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REVERSING THE SPIRAL CONCEPTUAL

INDIVIDUAL

GLOBAL

PHYSICAL

Grappling with the severity of change needed to impede the ever-growing list of ecological crises is daunting to say the least. How do we even begin to transform hundreds of years of unsustainably built infrastructure, systems and consumption habits? How might we ever hope to affect behavior change for sustainability? Design for Interdependency approached this task with a pragmatic optimism, intervening in the unlikeliest of places - our own identities. By expanding our sense of place to a bioregion filled with a complex interplay between social and ecological elements, we hope to trigger a small but profound shift in personal identity to be more holistic...more honest with the fact of our interdependency. A small shift that can incrementally progress from the core-out to affect others and eventually rise from the bottom up to affect collective values and standards of competency. With restored standards of basic ecological literacy as a core competency for living on planet earth, a positive feedback loop can emerge as our

global patterns of behavior progressively strive to meet global expectations. Daisaku Ikeda, Educator, Peacebuilder and recipient of over 315 honorary doctorates from universities around the world writes,

â&#x20AC;&#x153;No matter how complex global challenges may seem, we must remember that it is we ourselves who have given rise to them. It is therefore impossible that they are beyond our power as human beings to resolve. Returning to our humanity, reforming and opening up the inner capacities of our lives, can enable reform and empowerment on a global scale.â&#x20AC;? When combined with the many existing strategies for sustainability, a small, incremental shift at the personal level can grow to affect systemic change, slowly but surely reversing this great downward spiral.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR 21ST CENTRUY DESIGN PRACTICE

Designers have a critical role to play in reversing the downward spiral. We are aware not all designers can become environmental experts, nor it is necessary to be in order to practice interdependency. Tooling ourselves with a basic level of ecological literacy will empower designers, not to have all the right answers, but in being capable of asking the right questions. Given the transdisciplinary demand of problems in the world today, simply knowing what questions ought be asked or who needs to join the conversation, is a critical and tremendous role designers can play. As a small step in building capacity for emerging design practice to be more sustainable, we would like to encourage designers to bring a lens of interdependency to their work. The concept of a bioregion is one way of exercising an interdependent lens. Another way is simply by asking, What are the relationships between the social and ecological? How will they be affected by my actions? How might we leverage and strengthen them? Exercising an interdependent lens can enable designers to use their existing tools in an enhanced capacity, helping to frame projects and identify criteria relevant to our social, political and ecological realities. In addition to a greater probability of designing sustainable solutions, exercising this lens can also expand the perspective of the user, in this case the designer herself. It is a given fact that designers are expected to know about shape and form, and should be able to convert and translate them into something meaningful, aesthetic and functional. In the same way, to design for the reality of life on earth, understanding basic ecological principles must become standard expectations of knowledge for designers. Rooting in a remembered paradigm of interdependency, designers have the opportunity to create a world of shared abundance. Clearly understanding the health and success of our ecosystems, cities and each other are inextricable bounded. With basic ecological literacy as a core component in every designers toolbox, emerging design practitioners can become the stewards of this earth, creating new knowledge and values that brings human beings back into healthy relationship with their environment. We can advance systems of knowledge and practice that are in alignment with ecology, designing ways of living, working and playing in the world that are innovative, abundant and sustainable. We can help enact the change so desperately being demanded and â&#x20AC;&#x153;fixâ&#x20AC;? what need not be broken.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Spatial Dimensions of Social Thought. By Thomas W. Schubert and Anne Maass. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. 151-76.

Vezzoli,

Carlo.

“Systems

Design

for

Sustainability.

The

Challenge

Behavior

Change.”Motivating Change: Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment. By

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