The practitioner conference was devised to give voice to designers, artists, architects, students, performers, activists, observers and users of socially and/or environmentally committed creative practices.
The key aim of the event was to encourage the exchange of experiences and knowledge between practitioners of design activism. In particular, it was expected that this conference would facilitate the sharing of knowledge and understanding of practical engagement in design activism.
Rather than a traditional conference format of lecture theatre/ powerpoint/ speaker/ questions etc., this event was imagined more like a trade fair colliding with a participative symposium. The design ‘disciplines’ included in this event were interpreted broadly. Participants were involved in academic, professional or voluntary practice in one or more of the following sectors: architecture, design research, digital media, community activism, development work, interdisciplinary creative practice, landscape architecture, service and product design, urban design, visual arts, visual communications.
Presentations that share insights into practical experience of ‘design activist’ type activities were invited. Since this was a powerpoint-free practitioner conference, presentations were to be supported by: instant exhibitions, posters, screenings, or other support.
The venue was specially fitted out with exhibition, screening and presentation areas so that participants could move through the event, engaging with presenters according to a timetabled structure. Presentations were 15 mins while support material remained on show throughout the day.
Presenters included:
Jody Boehnert - EcoLabs
EcoLabs are a network of designers and visual artists addressing systematic environmental and social problems. Their work revolves around the concept of ecological understanding - 'ecological literacy' and uses visual imagery to investigate and communicate systemic issues lying at the root of the ecological crisis. For this event, Jodi Boehnert of EcoLabs brought artifacts from various projects such as EcoLabs Climate Road show; EcoMag No. 1; Eye over Fishing; Transition Town graphic.
Sarah Butler - Urban Words
UrbanWords specialises in projects which use creative writing as a way to explore, question and strengthen our relationship with place. By putting the voices and stories of individuals and communities at the heart of our projects, platforms can be created for those voices to be heard throughout the process of regeneration and change. Sarah Butler talked about her work at Urban Words and outlined some recent projects, including projects with muf Architecture/ Art and public art commissioners Insite Arts.
Jen Conway & Jess Young - Conway & Young Design Collaboration
Conway and Young are a design collaboration focusing on the intersection between design and other disciplines. Working within Leeds, they develop local projects combining education, art and community engagement. They exhibited and discussed the rationale and negotiation for their projects exploring the use of public and private space in projects such as 92 Shops; Stall 133-134; Open and This Space is your Space.
Dr. Karen Dennis - Ketchup Clothing
This presentation was about waste and, in particular, one enterprise's use of this waste. It was about a collection of garments made from recycled materials and about the highs and lows of running a social enterprise seeking to engage the local community in the design and manufacture of goods from waste. It was about reflecting on the journey so far, contemplating on the future of designing 'on the edge' and discussing the way forward for Design Activists.
www.ketchupclothes.com
Dr. Teresa Dillon - Polar Produce; Pop-Up Landscapes: Survival + Interdependence
Pop-Up Landscapes is an arts and research project about survival and interdependence. Survival in this respect is expressed as understanding the elements that remain, disappear and extend as we construct our experiences of a place. The first phase of the Pop-Up Landscape project expressed through public art installations, a seminar series and community activities has just been completed (May 2009) and took place across Spain, Finland, Portugal and the UK. This session presented a brief overview of the initial outcomes of Phase 1 of the project and will lead participants in two short activities relating to the concept of survival and interdependency.
Peter Eyres - GREEN Consultancy
GREEN employs brand communications as a catalyst for social and environmental change and offer in-depth strategic sustainability insight, coupled with creative thinking and a passion for making things happen. In combining appreciative inquiry with participatory rapid appraisal to look to what is; what could be and what's next, this interactive process designed a set of norms of interaction which is best placed to put design at the heart of social and environmental change.
Simon Thomas Downs - Politicised Practice
Politicised Practice is a new research group including artists, curators, designers, researchers and academics in the School of Art and Design at Loughborough University. The group is interested in the relationship between the political and art, design and theoretical production asking the question, what is a politicised practice and how can art, design and theory operate politically to affect change. Their involvement with the Leeds Festival of Design Activism was aimed at making a rich variety of working connections with politically engaged actors within the design community, bringing a rich collection of projects details and publications, symposia and awards.
www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ac/
Naomi Shinkins (Architecture sans Frontiers - UK) & Dr. Alexandre Apsan Frediani (Development and Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL) - Radicalizing Participatory Planning: Supporting grass roots organizations in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
Mapping and participatory planning strategies have been used as mechanisms to enhance the responsiveness of urban development projects in the global south. Such approaches are seen as de-politicizing in that they use participatory strategies merely as a tool for reducing costs of development interventions rather than supporting grass roots activities in engaging in decisions that directly affect them. This presentation will review a process and lessons learned from engagement between the UK based NGO, Architecture Sans Frontiers - UK, and an urban social movement in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.
www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu and www.asf-uk.org/home.htm
Dr. Jan Hadlaw - Department of Design, York University, Toronto
This presentation focused on the evolution of York University's "Design for Public Awareness" course. The course is intended to provide students with the opportunity to produce more socially-orientated forms of visual communication. Links are created with local community organizations with an ongoing goal to develop additional courses to introduce graphic designs' often underestimated potential to articulate and animate political and social debate.
Dr. Monika Hestad - Monika Hestad Design
This presentation looked to what designers do to create relations between brand elements and individuals' brand perceptions and how consumers add new dimensions to the brand by being active in their consumption. An educational tool was proposed with the purpose to create awareness of four main stakeholders in creating meaning to a brand: organization, product, marketing and people. The tool is aimed at design students on undergraduate level, in classes or courses that provide an introduction to brand building, design responsibility or cultural studies.
www.monikahestad.no
Cigdem Kaya - Istanbul Technical University
This presentation introduced the idea of design and activism in Turkey. A short film described a one thousand year old fragmented Romani neighborhood called Sulukule as representative of the complexity of issues in which designers engage. The film looked to the role of designers in intervening in such an area and to the role of ethnographic research methods in such a practical design process.
www.otherdesign.blogspot.com
Katrien van Liefferinge - Leeds Metropolitan University
Using her involvement in the production of a Neighborhood Design Statement as a vehicle to explore new and innovative approaches to consultation and engagement Katrien van Liefferinge's presentation illustrated a practitioners perspective and experiences in the field of socially engaged design whilst interrogating some of the current practices, policies, models and expectations which currently inform community engagement and participation.
Dr. Raquel Pelta - University of Barcelona
From the start of the 1990's, a political and social activism has been growing outside the legally recognized parties in Spain. This has been closely related to a broad spectrum of artistic practices: interventions in the public arena, edition of franzines, poetic networks directed to reconstructing the links between artistic practices and social movements that were broken in the 1980's. Since 2000 we are witnessing the appearance of groups of designers involved in diverse causes, especially social denunciation. Dr. Raquel Pelta presented a current panorama of graphic activism in Spain and examined the role of designers in it.
Benedict Phillips - Objects of Engagement
Can an arbitrary object play a catalytic role within a debate or process? Does the design of the object affect its capability to embody, retain and communicate narrative or meaning? Can an object be more than a symbol, and can it play an active role in sustaining and perpetuating debate? Through this interactive session, artist Benedict Philips invited the audience to explore some of these questions in relation to the role and power of the object. He presented some of the curious objects that have had specific facilitative functions within his own practice, and which continue to operate even after their initial perimeters of use have expired.
Dr. Liz Stirling & Laura Robinson - The Den Project
The Den Project looks to communication through Design Activism. This workshop involves using limited materials to create new spaces to inhabit or observe. Using the spaces created and the new designs found through the limited materials, delegates collaborate to create a new space to inhabit together.
Dr. Rachael Unsworth - Leeds Love It Share It (LLISI)
'Leeds Love It Share It' is a collective made up of two geographers, an architect, two design researchers, a Permaculture expert and a media and arts commissioning specialist. The Margins within the City project involves designing tolls for the mapping of social networks, skills and land use in a 'marginal', deprived area of Leeds in order to influence regeneration policy and provide enabling solutions for social innovation.
Co-Design workshop by Alastair Fuad-Luke
This workshop is for everyone who wishes to acquire new design thinking and design strategy skills. Co-design is designing together. It is a holistic and inclusive approach based upon collective intelligence, giving a real voice to stakeholders. This workshop will propose 'mootspace' as a means to debate contemporary issues using the co-design approach allowing us to comprehend how our collective 'experiencing' can lead to a deeper understanding of our inter-connected problems to encouraging the development of new concepts and to creatively designing solutions together.
Participants of the round table discussion:
Jody Boehnert is graphic designer and founder of EcoLabs (www.eco-labs.org). EcoLabs is a network of designers addressing sustainability and systemic change. EcoLabs develops projects to communicate complex environmental information. Major projects this year include the Futures Scenarios: The Climate Roadshow exhibition, EcoMag No.1 and the 2012 Imperative Teach-in (see: www.teach-in.co.uk).
Boehnert is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton researching the visual communication of ecological literacy. She occasionally writes in the design press and recently published an article on 'Design Activism' in Creative Review. She works with Climate Camp on communications and designed 22 A0 posters for their 2008 travelling exhibition. She is also co-founder of Transition Town Brixton, the first urban space to have started work on the collaborative design of a 'Local Energy Descent Plan'.
Sarah Butler is a writer, and director of UrbanWords, a literature consultancy which actively explores and develops literature projects that engage with regeneration and urban renewal. Recent projects have included work with muf Architecture/Art and Insite Arts. Sarah is currently based in London.
www.urbanwords.org.uk
www.sarahbutler.org.uk
Dr. Teresa Dillon is an intermedia artist, researcher, producer and director. Her work explores the human-environment relations that emerge within specific locations and which give rise to meaning and expression. Thematically this has lead to a body of work engaged with ideas of consumption, survival and the limits and affordances of different tools for communication. Since 1999 her work has been shown internationally at various festivals (Pixelache, Enter_, In’fraction) and conferences (Virtual Platform, ISCAR, Earli). She is director of the UK-based arts collective Polar Produce with whom she creates and produces transdisciplinary, mixed media works. In 2007, she set up N.I.P. – New Interfaces for Performance, a distributed research and touring network of media artists from across Europe. She also directs the UM Intermedia Festival, Lisbon, Portugal and the OFFLOAD-Systems for Survival art-research programme. Alongside her arts practice, she also works as an independent consultant and freelance producer/researcher (BBC) and lectures and supervises students on the Arts, Culture and Education, MA, Cambridge University. She holds a PhD in psychology from The Open University and has published internationally on various topics including creative collaboration, open source, educational design and location media.
www.polarproduce.org/
http://www.pop-up-landscapes.net/
Andy Edwards is one of the UK's most innovative graphic designers specialising in community and public sector engagement. Based in Leeds, he has undertaken award-winning work with Heads Together and Bauman Lyons Architects.
Andy Edwards Design Ltd
Alastair Fuad-Luke is a sustainable design facilitator, consultant, educator, writer & activist who has contributed since 1997 to the international conversation about Design(ing) for Sustainability. His most recent book, Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (Earthscan, May 2009) encourages designers to examine how they can lever more positive social change, environmental regeneration and alternative enterprise models. He is also the author of The Eco-Design Handbook (2002, 2004, 2009) and The Eco-Travel Handbook (2008) where he celebrates diverse eco- and socio-entrepreneurs in design, manufacturing and eco-tourism. An advocate of ‘slow design’ from 2002 onwards he sees design as controlling flow and metabolism of people, place, nature and resources. With a passionate drive he embraces eco-design, sustainable design, co-design and slow design as synergistic design approaches to explore new opportunities. He believes we need to evolve a new era where design is re-democratised with professional and citizen designers coming together. www.fuad-luke.com