3132 research outputs found
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A Story of Change: Exploring the Intersect of Indigenous Knowledge(s), Creativity and Innovation, and Power Dynamics as a Catalyst for Change.
Get PDFIf learning is transformative, then what potential transformation could happen with learning Indigenous Knowledge(s)? This Major Research Project is the story of my learning journey as I seek to better understand the intersectionality of creativity and innovation at an individual level, and how this meeting place intersects at an organizational level in higher education. I explore how power dynamics and different worldviews (Western and Indigenous) influence the innovation process, while observing the learning through autoethnography, specifically reflexive practice. Bringing attention to the interplay between creativity, power dynamics, and Indigenous Knowledge(s), I note the relative constraints and freedoms among these three domains, offering dialogue for action, as I design for conversation. This project is about bringing awareness to systems and ideologies that can inspire and promote change within oneself. It is a synthesis of the change I have undergone; it is the story of how I became a Designer
Examining Blockchain Accessibility
Get PDFThis paper will examine the block-chain phenomenon from the perspective of inclusion. To do this we need to establish the nature of cryptocurrencies for those unfamiliar with them and touch upon the debate surrounding whether cryptocurrencies will become a necessity and ubiquitous technology or remain a platform for a sector of the population. The first question; how is cryptocurrency currently different from traditional currencies (fiat currencies)?
We will then address the important question of what, if anything, cryptocurrencies can bring to special needs and inclusive design? From the perspective of financial inclusion and more equitable wealth distribution, what are the risks and potential benefits? Are there potential future uses, if any, of Crypto currencies relative to financial inclusion and poverty reduction? How can Crypto currency systems be inclusively designed? The problem, and a possible solution is proposed in this paper.
I believe cryptocurrencies will succeed and become mainstream, but whether or not the culture of cryptocurrencies will embrace the importance of inclusivity is presently uncertain
Supporting Communication Accessibility and Inclusion in Online Meetings for Persons with Complex Communication Access Needs
Get PDFCommunication is said to be one of the greatest predictors of quality of life and life expectancy. One’s ability to effectively communicate largely impacts their well-being, interpersonal relationships, and participation in society. The global transition to online meetings resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, clarified that the ways we meet online and stay connected with our friends, families, and communities, are fundamentally concerned with communication. Therefore, ensuring access to communication when meeting online is more important than ever. Whether online or in-person, interactions can be hard for people with disabilities that affect their communication. Despite the advancement of communication disability rights and web accessibility, what remains unknown are the impacts of online meetings on communication access for persons with complex communication access needs (CCAN)—those with communication disabilities who may or may not use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Further complicating this gap is the limited availability of guidance and strategies for supporting CCAN throughout the process of designing, organizing, and running online meetings. These gaps revealed an important design opportunity and area for consideration for the study.
This community-based, participatory research study explores how online sessions can be designed to support complex communication access needs. The use of a community-led co-design approach resulted in a deeper understanding of the individual communication accessibility requirements, barriers, and lived experiences of persons who use AAC, within the online meeting context. Participants (‘co-designers’) designed and took part in collaborative design sessions aimed at developing ideas for supporting communication access and inclusion throughout the process of meeting online. Through cross-community collaboration, we co-designed an open-source communication access toolkit for online meetings. The toolkit includes accessibility guidelines with a protocol for holding accessible and inclusive online sessions; suggested accessibility features and plugins for meeting platforms; and a template for a collaborative participant notebook. The design outcomes provide guidance to the general population on how we might ensure that online meetings of all forms are inclusive and accessible for diverse and complex communicators, as we all have a right to communicate with dignity in ways where we understand and are understood
On the Contradictions of Sustainability
No full textOverproduction and waste are crucial to the function of neoliberal capitalism (Bauman, 2009), and even though we watch as the earth burns and drowns in front of us due to the consequences of our overconsumption, and with increased awareness and discourse on designing for a better world, we carry on with business as usual.
In an era of instant gratification—made easier by access to cheap credit and contactless societies—designers are utilising their power to conflate need and desire more than ever, but branding it as sustainable to evade responsibility.
This talk explores the contradictions of sustainability: the way brands greenwash their practices to signal their good and ethical practices and how they continue to create products and services branded as sustainable that we just do not need, but never challenging the systems that created the problems to begin with. The talk will conclude by considering how we can design over time and confront the effects these products and services we think we need have on the world (and the worlds within that world)
Designing a “bioregional regenerative economy”: how could that work, realistically?
Get PDFThe cross-scalar spiral as an actionable heuristic for designing within bioregional complexity.
No doubt that we need to urgently transition towards economies that are sustainable, and even beyond sustainable, regenerative. Theoretically, regenerative economies need to focus on the (bio-)regional scale, given a spatial size that includes sufficient diversity and scale to build a regenerative economy.
Thinking it through, critically, question-based, yet concrete: how could such an economy look like? What are the possibilities to create such an economy with the capacity to continuously regain its needed energies and resources to vitalize and sustain? To actively restore degraded systems and create regenerative cultures rooted in cooperation, not competition? Specific to different bio-regional assets and cultures? We propose the cross-scale spiral of autopoietic complexity, with its eight scales of governance, as an actionable heuristic to envision what a bioregional economy may comprise and what governance needs to be established.
This workshop is a question-based, partly visual dialogue around tangible entry assets for using the spiral heuristic, manifesting its governance implications together with very concrete illustrations of what a regenerative economy may look like, practically. We build upon previous RSD contributions (“When is Systemic Design regenerative?”, “Systemic Cycles – a bioregional prototype?”) and deep dive into what needs to be implemented and what maybe remains fuzzy? The outcome will be a largely enriched, critical yet tangible, visualized dialogue with more concrete understandings and tools to design toward regenerative economies
A Systemic Approach to Traps and Opportunities for Sustainable Value Chains in Norwegian Forestry
Get PDFThis paper is anchored in experiences from coastal forestry in Norway and a three years interregional project aimed at mobilising stakeholders in the value chain from forestry to industry and the end-use of wood-based products, involving politicians and public administration in cooperation networks. This paper argues for and discusses how systemic design approaches should complement today’s use of Design Thinking (British Design Council 2004) in this work to tackle complexity and wicked problems (Rittel, Webber, 1973). Compared to its potential, the Norwegian coastal forestry today is in a state of low performance with deeply rooted causes that are not easily solved by innovation events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2021, 2022) is calling for urgent action. It has provided global society with only three years (2022–2025) to start intervening at a systemic level to reduce climate gas emissions over the next 30 years and reach a maximum 1.5 ℃ temperature increase goal.
Global forests are seen as one of the most important means of reducing carbon dioxide through their growth and existence. They also promote biodiversity, timber and bio-fibre substituting fossil-based human-made materials, products and energy solutions (UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2020). Forests as a resource must be approached using local perspectives and care in parallel with a holistic view of planetary boundaries, including concern for social sustainability. The Norwegian forestry industry is experiencing resistance towards industrialised logging. This is not an unimportant hindrance to the development of industrialised production and more advanced value chains for wooden resources. Although the volume of forest resources in Norway is increasing (by 12.5% in 2020, SSB), ripe spruce and pine are hard to reach for logging in non-reachable areas. The planting of these forests started approximately 100 years ago with the aim of restoring deforestation caused by industrialisation in all of Europe. This article introduces system traps and opportunities along with Meadows’ (2008) 12 leverage points for increased awareness as possibilities for intervention. It also discusses how delays and long-term system behavioural patterns are traps and opportunities to intervene in the archetype of the value chain structure, starting with forestry. However, a surprise to many stakeholders may be the role social systems and information flow play in establishing sustainable value chains. Systemic design may lead the sector to explore relations and connections over time rather than physical elements and somewhat fragmented parts of the system
Architectural Roots of Ecological Crisis
Get PDFIn architectural design, sustainability is primarily thought of as a technical discourse concerned with mitigating the harm that the construction and use of buildings cause to their environment — minimising the energy that buildings consume, the waste they produce, and the habitats they destroy. While there is an urgent need to reduce (and, when possible, reverse) the harm caused by the built environment, these types of responses are not the full extent of the possibilities and responsibilities to address environmental concerns that come with designing architecture. In this presentation, I draw on the work of anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson to explore ways in which architectural design might contribute to addressing the underlying causes of present and future ecological crises, in addition to responding to the immediate symptomatic challenges that these crises give rise to. Writing in the context of the emerging environmental consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s, Bateson understood one of the root causes of ecological crisis as the epistemological error or hubris of Western culture’s tendency to see humans as separate from, above, and in competition with their environment and each other. This hubris has been supported and propagated by processes of marginalisation and colonialism, which have dominated many ways of knowing and doing. Here I argue that hubris is implicitly reinforced by the conventional built environment, which (literally) constructs a sharp distinction between human and ecological worlds. Connecting ecological thinking to architectural theory through Bateson’s characterisation of the former as an inversion of traditional Western cosmology, I sketch out an enriched role for architectural design in relation to ecological crisis, including but also going beyond mitigating the ecological harm caused by the built environment
Commoning by Design: Staying relational in conflict
Get PDFIn this presentation, we build on recent discussions of a paper presented at DRS2022 that explores the theories of the commons and their applicability to systemic design to transition existing systems from being dysfunctional to being regenerative (Schaeper, Kothari, Hamilton, 2022). As many of our social and environmental challenges have been described as a failure of design (Escobar, 2018), designers have been called to reconsider the way they work and to ultimately ‘redesign design’ (Akama et al., 2019; Irwin, 2015). We begin the presentation by sharing a case study of a marine protected area in South Africa’s oceans and how a commoning practice could be applied more intentionally to increase cooperation amongst system actors and apply a multispecies—as opposed to human-centred—perspective to the management of natural, social, and immaterial resources. By drawing on our working hypothesis of how a commons approach could open up opportunities for creating the conditions of improved stakeholder cooperation, we will propose and invite further discussion around how ‘Commoning by Design’ could be positioned as an intentional and careful design act that aims at facilitating staying relational not only through alignment but by surfacing a plurality of voices and thereby holding space for conflicting planetary stakeholder needs, motivations and objectives
Design Intent as the Driving Force for Systemic Change
Get PDFThere is an urgent need to enable designers to respond to the requirements of an increasingly complex multi-layered scenario. As wicked problems become a norm and conflicts between opposing factors emerge, there is a need for an empathetic, systemic understanding in order to arrive at effective, systemic solutions. The paper examines systems theory and the unique designerly approaches towards systems theory. The study further investigates the phenomenon of design intent and response towards systemic concerns through multiple case study analysis approaches by analysing case studies in a quasi-experimental setup wherein a group of design students worked on the same systems model but responded with varied design intent and conceptual ideas. The presentation puts forth the argument for a more focused approach towards understanding values and meanings held by designers/ design students and its impact on evolving both the design brief and solution space. Based on multiple case study analyses, methodical constructs, including individual concerns based on personal experiences and systemic considerations of multidisciplinary perspectives, developing an understanding of multiple perspectives and inclusion of points of view from multiple stakeholders are elaborated. The use of these methodological constructs derived from a systems understanding is expected to help designers/ design students arrive at diverse and holistic responses to address complex problem spaces