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Toward an Eco-Social perspective: How to design in time of trouble
Get PDFAs Laboratory of Design for Sustainability (LDS), our main objective is to investigate and analyse the contribution of design to complex contemporary challenges, applying the sustainable paradigm through a systemic and critical approach, i.e. in its multiple environmental, social, cultural and economic nature.
The presentation starts with a reflection on global upheavals, such as the proliferation of ecological disasters, lack of care for the Other and the Elsewhere, and growing social inequalities. We propose the need to redirect the attention of design towards an eco-social perspective as the two components are deeply intertwined and cannot be addressed individually (Armiero, 2021).
So how do we design in time of trouble? Through national and international research and development projects, we have investigated and studied how to answer this question, trying to outline and promote an eco-social perspective of a highly systemic and speculative nature. The invitation for design is to engage in critical dialogue with other disciplines; in this sense, we will present case studies that have seen the establishment of interdisciplinary design discourse, including areas relating to the Social and Natural Sciences. The aim is to compose a scientific framework of interdisciplinary methods and tools (design-driven, co-design, systemic thinking, participatory approach) that arises in the border spaces between knowledge and points of critical dialogue among academic silos. A tentacular operation (Haraway, 2016) is necessary to understand the complex challenges or missions that await the designer to explore new possibilities of applying systemic thinking to design and develop a critical point of view essential for promoting an alternative to the status quo.
The output of our critical enquiries is the development of an eco-social design framework consisting of three design formulas. They provide a possible direction for design research and practice dealing with complex issues and transdisciplinary connections. By visualising a different and critical application of the systemic approach, we intend to present how design research, practice and methodology can be enriched and “re-meant” by adopting an eco-social perspective
Developmental design for healthcare sustainability – Synthesis map 1.0
No full textThe synthesis map presented here has been developed from the designed outcomes of a workshop on systemic design for healthcare sustainability hosted by Jones and Arun Kumar (2021) at RSD10. The map is the second phase of an ongoing long-term project envisioned as a developmental design approach to engage with complex socio-technical problems of healthcare sustainability. The concept of developmental design builds on M. Q. Patton’s models of evaluation, emphasising design as a method of evaluation which is dynamic, introspective and reflective, and hence relevant to temporal systemic problems such as climate change and human health. The developmental design agenda has been elaborated as a presentation at RSD11 (Arun Kumar and Jones, 2022)
Waves of Change: A case study of Drawdown Toronto in the climate action space
No full textDrawdown is the future point when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and decline steadily. Project Drawdown is a non-profit organization that seeks to help the world reach the point of drawdown by 2050 through various initiatives. Project Drawdown conducts an ongoing review and analysis of climate solutions—the practices and technologies that can stem and begin to reduce the excess of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere—to provide the world with a current and robust resource. Their framework, solutions, and resources inspire localized groups and empower communities to come up with solutions that can be implemented regionally.
Our research addresses the following primary questions:
What are the climate challenges that need to be addressed in the next ten years?
How can we engage key stakeholders to implement actionable climate change solutions?
We looked at Project Drawdown and the local chapter of Drawdown Toronto as a case study in the climate action space. Our research culminated in a service design brief and synthesis map presenting a high-level overview of key systems models, our findings, and strategic recommendations. The full report and map were presented to Drawdown Toronto, which plans to use the information to inform its future strategy.
The map is best read from left to right. The main visual feature, and the inspiration for our title, is the three-horizon map that outlines current climate challenges in the first wave, elements of an ideal future in the last wave, and areas for proposed strategic interventions in the middle wave. While providing extensive insights, it also acts as a quick reference tool presenting a big-picture look at climate change as a wicked problem.
The first section on the top left provides an overview of Project Drawdown as an organization. Next, in Framing the System, we used an iterative inquiry tool to flesh out the function, structure, process, and purpose at each level and how they relate and feed into each other. To the right are casual loop diagrams that outline common archetypes in the system. In Uncovering Challenges, we identified key challenges in the climate action space and mapped their influence on each other from the bottom to the top, deriving key insights. Lastly, the Transition by Design approach identifies the key action areas and proposes recommendations for Drawdown Toronto’s future strategic initiatives at the micro, meso and macro levels
Curating Multisensory Experiences: The Possibilities of Immersive Exhibitions
Get PDFThe immersive exhibition is a specialized exhibition genre flourishing in the 21st century. It creates illusions of time and space by applying multisensory display methods to envelop visitors in a three-dimensional virtual world. The enhanced sense of presence facilitates public engagement. Not only have immersive exhibitions transformed audience experience, they have triggered discussions on the evolution of the museum and how curators can productively incorporate new technology. Based on interdisciplinary theory and the case studies of Grande Experiences (Melbourne) and teamLab (Tokyo), this thesis addresses issues around defining, developing, and curating immersive exhibitions. I discuss the genre’s operation from three perspectives: managing the physical space by using nonlinear thematic frameworks and dynamic displays; curating audiences’ subjective immersive experience by applying natural sensory interactions, mediator-based interactions, and collaborative participation; and identifying multisensory stimulation as immersive exhibitions’ critical attribute. These aspects hold possibilities for implementation in all museum contexts. The purpose of this thesis is to offer curators and exhibition creators practical guidelines on reshaping existing displays and collections with immersive design and technology. Immersive exhibitions encourage museums to rethink the possibilities for enabling and diversifying connections between art, technology, and the public in the digital era
Can You Hear Your Drawing? Creating synesthetic experiences through an audio-visual web interaction
Get PDFThis research focuses on creating audio-visual web interaction inspired by the synesthetic experience. Synesthesia is a neurological condition where the processing of data by one sense activates others. This project hypothesizes that interactive digital artworks enable people to touch music, hear colours and expand their creativity and senses. They evoke synesthetic associations and activate certain senses’ vocabularies, and people start seeing a correlation between visual and audio experiences. This research explores the role of metaphor as a theoretical framework, conversational tool and design approach in the multimodal digital space. This project’s outcome is a web application that opens an empathic dialogue between people who experience synesthesia and those who are eager to learn what it is and what it is like to have it. Users can map their audio and visual senses’ associations by documenting and sharing them in the digital environment. This research applied research through design methodology by expanding the audience’s role from testing and observing to participating
Rethinking qi and Tai Chi through New Media Technologies
Get PDFDue to its ambiguous nature, the Chinese cultural concept qi (also known as chi) can be confusing and misunderstood. By expressing qi through sound and haptics with the help of interactive technologies, this thesis project proposes a transcultural design approach based on the postcolonial notions of the “Contact Zone” and “Culture Hybridity”, which can potentially rectify some misunderstanding of qi and Tai Chi in a sensual “language” with the aid of interactive technologies. Motion tracking, haptic technology, machine learning for gesture recognition and sound design have been used in this translation process to provide real time feedback and enable participants to understand qi in an interactive Tai Chi performance. With this work, I hope to open up new opportunities by using new media technologies as a bridge to understanding cultural arts and practices
Representations and Reality: Defining the Ongoing Relationship between Anime and Otaku Cultures
Get PDFThis major research paper investigates the ongoing relationship between anime and otaku culture through four case studies; each study considers a single situation that demonstrates how this relationship changes through different interactions with representation. The first case study considers the early transmedia interventions that began to engage fans. The second uses Takashi Murakami’s theory of Superflat to connect the origins of the otaku with the interactions otaku have with representation. The third examines the shifting role of the otaku from that of consumer to producer by means of engagement with the hierarchies of perception, multiple identities, and displays of sexualities in the production of fan-created works. The final case study reflects on the 2.5D phenomenon, through which 2D representations are brought to 3D environments. Together, these case studies reveal the drivers of the otaku evolution and that the anime–otaku relationship exists on a spectrum that teeters between reality and representation
Concealing and Revealing: Information Design to Strengthen Civic Literacy in an Age of Digital Communication
Get PDFThis thesis work responds to emerging issues in media and civic awareness in Canada, exploring how design can be used to highlight, examine and expose characteristics of the digital space in order to enhance young citizens’ media literacy. As the opening chapters will establish, younger Canadians are experiencing a unique combination of factors that render them insufficiently prepared to participate as digital citizens. These issues are compounded by digital threats to democratic values such as the rise in manipulative or propagandistic content, as well as intellectual silos created by algorithmic filtering. The title of the thesis, “concealing and revealing” speaks to our relationship with the digital space that is all at once present, immediate and yet, invisible, and elusive. My creative work aims to illuminate the invisible power dynamics perpetuated by digital tools using information design and data visualizations, presented through a large sculptural installation and a series of illustrated notebooks. The projects’ research focuses on teens and young adults, but the outcomes provide information that is pertinent to citizens of all ages. The projects rely on critical discourse analysis, semiotics and practice-led approaches to research. The theoretical framing of the projects apply Marshall McLuhan’s media theories to explore how we as a society may begin to evaluate our political experience in the digital age, in order to better understand the lasting impacts on citizenship and liberal democracy
How to Make a Queer Counterpublic
Get PDFSituated at the intersections of ethnography, relational aesthetics, and curatorial practice, this thesis explores and promotes the radical aspirations of queer worldmaking through an analysis of COVID-19 specific queer exchange across digital spheres. Drawing from queer theorists, Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, and José Muñoz alongside the creative contributions of three fellow queer artists, Madeleine Lychek, B Wijshijer, and Racquel Rowe, a critical future – one that is ripe with queer desire, exchange, and intervention – is embodied within both the making and writing components of this project. The aim of this work is to unearth everything you wanted to know about sex (but queer theory forgot to tell you). That is, to discuss the kinds of exchange that queer theory has too often omitted from its discourse which is typically the kind that heterosexual culture is unable to name. This might be things like fucking your friends, fucking for money, fantasizing about sex with objects, masturbating with strangers online, camming, and so on. It might also be the kind of sex that doesn’t immediately read as pleasurable or erotic, but rather, perplexing or awkward. A collaborative worldmaking project that began as a theoretical query of capitalist economies of exchange, this thesis is an interventionist curatorial undertaking wherein a group of queer collaborators exhibit their sex and exchange as it is mediated by publics. From here, we can think about how proliferation of these publics might inform new modalities for queerness and what this could mean for the making of queer utopia. Though the process of creating queer worlds is never this linear, this thesis interrogates the heteronormative present, looks towards a queer future, and exhibits a host of exchanges, pleasures, and sex that lie at the center of this worldmaking process
Drop my heart like an urn; dissolve my skin like it’s clay: Dichotomies of Destruction & Creation; the Material & the Intangible
Get PDFEveryday life is punctuated by ceramic vessels, often poured into and forth from with little consideration beyond their functionality. However, when broken, the vessel’s relationship to the user is shifted. While the vessel’s maker has an intimate understanding of ceramic’s integral relationship to breakage and loss, the day-to-day user has no such relationship, making the vessel’s destruction all the more shocking. By thinking about the broken vessels present within Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Azza El Siddique’s Measure of One (2020), this paper investigates the implications of intentional breakage, the materiality of clay and the evocative presence of the broken vessel in the museum.When placed within the context of the museum, the ceramic vessel becomes ascribed with meaning typically associated with sculpture while retaining its relationship to craft, the domestic sphere and archeology. The broken vessel can be contextualized as a reminder of death, understood through a metaphoric lens in relationship to bereavement, melancholy and transformation