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Prototyping Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Get PDFInterdisciplinary collaboration is critical to addressing systemic challenges. Given the importance of such partnerships, is it surprising that designers, academics, and practitioners are rarely given a chance to practice how they might work across disciplinary boundaries. In this session, participants will briefly share their research to explore potential connections and highlight the differences between transactional and relational interdisciplinary collaboration frameworks. Through structured activities, participants will explore constituent elements of partnerships, including collaborative foundations, power relationships, language and means of expression, approaches to risk, products of the collaboration, and the potential for transformative outcomes. These attributes help distinguish between transactional and relational interdisciplinary collaboration and offer participants language and frameworks that can be used to construct more effective cultures of collaboration
Complex Urban Futures: Using scenarios to tackle the complexity of megaregional systems
Get PDFMegaregions represent the massive scale and overwhelming complexity of contemporary urbanisation. This requires new and adapted methods for those designing in and for megaregions. Scenarios are a promising tool for this, but urban designers struggle to use them systematically. Improved and adapted scenario-building methodologies for urban designers are needed. Therefore, this presentation puts forward a framework to reveal and discuss urban complexity through megaregional scenarios. The framework is constituted by three phases: analysis, design, and evaluation, in which the analysis builds the basis for an iterative process of drafting and assessing scenarios. The focus of this presentation is the design phase, which is most relevant for the implementation of systemic design principles. The presentation emphasises the importance of including multiple stakeholders in a design process that triangulates different design methods. It shows tests of the framework in design studios at different universities, in which students translate abstract themes into concrete spatial concepts during playful, intuitive, and fast-paced design sessions. The exploration of various design options across various performance indicators helps to initiate discussions on the complexity and ambiguity of megaregions. While further fine-tuning of the framework is needed, it shows the potential to ultimately support well-informed decision-making in the context of megaregionalisation
Leaky Bodies and Environments: Infant feeding and design
Get PDFIt is well established that breastfeeding or chestfeeding is immensely beneficial to breastfeeding mothers, chestfeeding parents, and infants throughout their life spans. There are wide-ranging and far-reaching benefits to increasing breastfeeding rates in all areas of the world (Victora et al., 2016). Despite the many benefits, recorded rates in the UK remain among the lowest in the world (Renfew et al., 2012). Mainstream British culture, support, and literature positions infant feeding as a personal choice and a local issue. However, choosing how to feed a child is not an open and unrestricted choice (Brown, 2021). This illusion of choice is coupled with public health messaging encouraging new mothers and birthing people to exclusively breastfeed or chestfeed their children. However, parents and infants are surrounded by a systemic and cultural lack of support to do so, placing the mother or parent in a double bind. Shame and guilt commonly occur in association with infant feeding experiences, regardless of how a child is fed (Jackson et al., 2021). In this paper, I argue that it is possible and necessary to move outside binary expectations of infant feeding dyads, expanding the field of vision or situation of focus when seeking to understand UK infant feeding practices. I argue that human bodies and (often designed) environments are ‘leaky’ and permeate each other. This leakage happens in different ways, from the physical to the cultural and behavioural. The consequences of the leakage are substantive and insidious. I discuss how lactating bodies, feeding bodies and eating bodies are among many interrelating leaky ecological bodies. Furthermore, these and other ecological and environmental systems, matters and meanings’ leak’ into and between infant feeding and design. I argue that how infants are fed (in the UK or elsewhere) is a critical issue of planetary health, that issues of planetary health impact infant feeding bodies, and that these relationships are mediated by design. Therefore, recognising and discussing ‘leaky systems’ in and through design enable possibilities for understanding and responding to complex planetary health issues
Navigating Wicked Futures Through More-Than-Human Perspectives: Experiments in design education
Get PDFThis presentation discusses the design and outcome of POD (Participatory Ocean-Sensitive Design), a game combining strategy and experimental design. It was developed as an instantiation of systems play, a mode of collaborative speculative world-building. The game presented a speculative scenario demonstrating a plausible outcome of current human responses to climate change, employing conventions of design fiction and pervasive games (Raby, 2018). In POD, players were assigned species identities, oriented within one of four locally connected habitats, and prompted to respond to ecosystemic conditions of anthropogenic climate change at different scales and across different time horizons (Biggs et al., 2015). We will discuss the method underlying the design, which is intended to prime groups through play to manage complexity and uncertainty. The experience was created and tested by Information Experience Design (IED) specialists from the Royal College of Art within a four-month project funded by the British Academy. It employs the unconventional strengths of art and design experimentation, most notably a positive orientation toward uncertainty, to generate social cohesion and creative problem-solving around shared goals. As a learning mode and engagement tool, systems play has exciting potential to destabilise established norms of problem-solving and orient collaboration toward system-wide resilience
Systemic Design Principles Guiding Perinatal Mobile App for Ethnomedical Midwifery Unit in Bogota
Get PDFIn the course of the 20th century public health surveillance systems became pervasive on a global scale, in particular, in the context of the establishment of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the boom of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in healthcare. Data pouring out of the ICT public health surveillance systems became integral to understanding, managing and planning health activities for healthcare systems and organizations worldwide. However, there are populations who are regrettably invisible to public health surveillance systems. In Colombia, these are mostly ethnic minorities of Afro-Colombian groups with limited engagement with national healthcare institutions. Their invisibility has negative consequences for both the public healthcare systems and these minorities. We investigate how systemic design can increase ethnic inclusion in ICT public health surveillance by applying a linear and complex approach to participation in systems. As a result, systemic design opportunities were identified and translated into a framework to design an ICT tool for an ethnomedical centre in Bogota. This ICT tool aims to restore relations and increase the visibility and participation of Afro-Colombian practices in public health surveillance systems
The Ultimate Control: Using systems and futures thinking to confront “the Pill” as a system of liberation and oppression
Get PDFInformed choice is essential to realising reproductive justice, where people can enact their human right to bodily autonomy to have or not have children in healthy and sustainable communities (SisterSong, n.d.). The dominant system of Western society prioritises the use of hormonal contraceptives as the preferred tool and technology for reproductive justice. While we believe this solution has been revolutionary, it has not been without many unintended consequences that negatively impact women’s fertility, physical health, mental health, sexual health, and quality of life. Simultaneously, the over and early dependence on a solution that shuts off the body’s natural and healthy hormonal cycles prevents people from developing their body literacy and systemic understanding of how their bone, ovarian, and heart health are all interconnected (Hillard, 2014). This leads us to question if birth control not only controls the function of female reproduction but also controls the limitation to body literacy that could be attained by shutting off the completely natural and healthy functioning of one’s body. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the topic of birth control by applying systems thinking and strategic foresight lenses to confront it as both a system of oppression and liberation for female education, health and well-being, and economic prosperity
Visualising Systems as Stories and Narratives: Storyboards and comics
Get PDFDesigning involves making decisions that affect the living and non-living things of the world. It undertakes the responsibility of answering what to design, how, and why, and consequently, determines the lifecycle of artefacts. Designers are supposed to be aware of these responsibilities and evaluate the context and necessity of their designs by studying the footprint of their project in life, considering all related systems.
studioSUSTAIN design studio course, founded in 2017 in the industrial design department at Istanbul Bilgi University, is based on this approach with sustainability at the centre of the design process. Each semester the studio takes a particular locality as the context of design activity. Students are presented with real-life conditions and situations in the local context. They research, experience, and be part of the locality in field trips planned as design camps. They collaborate, work, and live together for a while with locals and stakeholders, participating in their routines, learning local practices and production cycles, and understanding the details and dynamics of local life. They study the tangible and intangible things and processes, in other words, the systems, in the locality.
Students are expected to think in terms of systems so that they can grasp and understand the local context with the complex social systems and the sociotechnical systems within. They use specific tools and methods for visualising their research on various aspects of the local systems. These tools and methods function both as means of making sense of the local information as well as of collaborating and communicating with locals and stakeholders. Students understand various parts of the local context in relation to sustainability topics. However, in comprehending existing local systems and in composing system designs, they have difficulty integrating and relating these parts and visualising them in system storyboards.
Presented here are the early stages of ongoing research on a proposal for a framework for structuring and visualising systems and system designs. It is suggested that complex social systems or sociotechnical systems can be defined as stories, and their complexity can be grasped and communicated by visualising these system stories in established forms of visual narratives, namely comics and film storyboards. Stories and visual narratives would constitute both a common ground for a mutual understanding of systems as well as for designers to compose and develop system designs through collaboration with stakeholders. The proposal is accompanied by a selection of system storyboards by students of five semesters of studioSUSTAIN
Carrying Distance
Get PDFCarrying Distance is a body of research in the form of visual artworks, performances, and writing that takes up the idea of distance as a poetic framework for approaching contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora. I generate embodied knowledge through movement by performing live, collaborating with my family, and engaging in tactile and laborious making processes such as ceramics and natural dyes. The project is comprised of an exhibition of two curtains and two live performances, with a door and one of the curtains respectively. The hands-on making of the two curtains activates body memory and a meditative place for reflecting on diasporic entanglements. I position curtains as symbolic manifestations of sites where multiple distances converge, gesturing to borders shaped by geographies, cultures, languages, gender, and time. My door shape shifts into a diasporic in-between space: a threshold, a borderland, and a crossroads. Insisting on staying in this liminal doorway—as opposed to moving to a known destination beyond—represents a commitment to carrying embodied traces of many lives, making room for contradictions and unbelonging, and seeing what can be made of them. With Carrying Distance, I ruminate on what it means to inherit diasporic families and colonial ruins
Alternative Housing Solutions
Get PDFFor more than a decade, serious public concern has been growing over the cost of housing and the shortage of affordable options geared to low- and moderate-income households globally. Research has shown that a large and increasing share of the population cannot afford its housing costs. In Canada, the gap has increased between the number of households that need supportive housing geared to income and the number of these units the current housing system can deliver. Increasing demand for this type of housing has put incredible pressure on cities and social housing providers to try and meet demand. Cities have been depending on market-developers to provide affordable options through varied incentive programs, but uptake has been slow due to their lower profitability. Within the global context of unaffordability, we are seeing a re-emergence of alternative models of provision and ownership being piloted by cities and community groups around the world. These alternatives are largely based on principles of co-production and community ownership that recognize that housing can be both a strong driver of productive economic development as well as a means to improving social well-being and the quality of life for all. Such models include co-operatives and community land trusts. While these models are still seen as alternatives to mainstream supply, public and social housing operators have proven their viability and potential in helping fill the affordable housing gap.
Through a combination of research methods taken from the fields of design thinking, foresight, and systems thinking, this Major Research Project explores alternative housing models in Canada and abroad. A focus is made on building institutional resilience, by looking at emerging patterns of increased self-reliance, entrepreneurial strategies, and partnerships for the provision of new social housing. Additionally, this project considers new paradigms being explored in the housing and city-building space which acknowledge the complexity of varied perspectives in cities, as well as the climate-related emergencies and other factors that impact the housing ecosystem. Finally, this project proposes a conceptual co-production model of housing provision by leveraging public land
Joy and Social Change
Get PDFJoy is a phenomenon about which many disciplines have written or theorized, with different results that can cause confusion or uncertainty in defining and engaging with it. For individuals involved in change-making, engaging with the concept of joy can provide a sense of momentum, moments of respite, or motivation for imagining the future. Still, it can be difficult to access with imprecise and sometimes conflicting understandings of what joy is. Through a multidisciplinary literature review, this paper synthesizes existing work into a new framework to understand joy in the different ways it may appear. Self-reflexive journaling is also used to help the researcher track thoughts, impressions and engage with the concepts during the development of the framework. The framework presents three forms of joy: Personal Joy, as in how joy appears in an individual’s life and how it impacts their approach to experiences; Applied Joy, as in ways individuals can actively cultivate and use joy in their work; and Aspirational Joy, as in ways joy can serve a goal or be a fruit of change. This framework builds on existing research on joy and furthers the study by creating new spaces for dialogue between disciplines and media on this topic. A prototype of a reflection activity is also presented to provide an example of how the framework might be engaged with, with the intent that it should be tested and refined