TESTIMONIALS

TESTIMONIALS
STUDENT PERSPECTIVE BY DIAMOND JAMES

“There isn't A pathway”: Finding your ‘how’ in design for social innovation
By Diamond James

Diamond James is a 2016 alumna of the Master of Arts in Social Design (MASD) program at The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). A native of Los Angeles, her work explores the intersection of race, space and class and design in American cities.

As an economics major turned design student, Chris Kasabach realized there was a disconnect between his newfound passion and the big, wide world of people who excluded from it. Taking a page from Victor Papanek’s seminal text, Design For The Real World, a young Kasabach didn’t want to design for a “thin subset of users that didn’t take into account cultural context.” As an inspired designer, he needed a way to bridge innovative theory to practice.
           “Here I was staring at a discipline I loved and a profession I disliked, and wondering what to do in between,” Kasabach said. “And there was social design.”
           Decades later, as the director of the Watson Foundation in New York, Kasabach is still defining how new designers can arrive at a successful social design practice. I sat with him and 29 other innovative practitioners attending the LEAP/2: Value of Design Symposium held at MICA in April. The conference, which continued the momentum of 2013’s LEAP I: The Professional Frontier, attracted international designers and related professionals to discuss obstacles to viable career pathways, and articulate the value designers have in addressing the world’s complex social challenges.
           Kasabach is certain “the path will be meandering and that’s OK.” The pathway is based on a personal journey rather than prescription. “Your interests will change,” he said. “The field will change and you’ll find your unique way.”
           This might be disconcerting for some looking to find parallels to a corporate ladder approach.
           “There isn't a pathway into the field,” said Christine Gaspar who is executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy in Brooklyn, New York. “Everyone is shaping their own path.”
    The design discipline “is not like law or medicine,” which has standardized, explicit steps for advancement. Gaspar, who started as an undergraduate student interested in policy, debunks the idea of a linear, clear-cut career trajectory, and views a “successful career” as relative. Instead, she encourages people to pursue work in many sectors, from government work to traditional design to enrich a career .
    “I think if you just follow your passions, and do different things that are interesting to you, [your career] is going to meld together in a way that’s coherent eventually,” Gaspar said. “Follow things that are of interest to you and know they’re going to lead somewhere really awesome.”

“Here i was staring at a discipline I loved and a profession i disliked, and wondering what to do in between,” Kasabach said. “And there was social design.”

           Design Lead of emocha Mobile Health, Inc., Amanda Allen, is more absolute about entry points for practitioners. “You’re not going to get a job as a ‘social designer’,” she said. A 2013 alumna of MICA’s MASD program, Allen previously worked at a global design firm in the Baltimore area.
         “Make sure that you have other solid hard skills that get your foot in the door hopefully somewhere that you’re passionate about,” she said. “Then bring in the social design through the back door.”
          However scary that may sound, Kasabach finds “it’s very refreshing and it reduces the anxiety in students to know that it’s not a linear or vertical path, and that there are many ways to enter the [design] field.”
           As daunting as an organic path might be for students and new design professionals, Kasabach’s approach was echoed by others as the symposium continued through mid week.
           Courtney Spearman, a design specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., recalled her own “circuitous path” through landscape architecture before considering design. Based on her experiences, she cautions people “not to worry so much about exactly what your path is going to be.”
           “You may have a very specific way of working that you want to do, that you want to achieve, but I don’t know that that always translates to a very specific job,” said Spearman, whose current work supports community-engaged designers.
           Instead of looking for job titles to bulk up a resumé, students should craft fluid careers based on opportunities that develop the unique process and values social designers possess.
           “Being open, and trying to be less anxious about exactly what the ‘thing’ is” are what Spearman advises. It’s “more the ‘how,’ not the ‘what’” when thinking about career development she said.
           Finding your ‘how’ of social design should be individually tailored, but there are common characteristics that define the practice and the best of professionals.

“Make sure that you have other solid hard skills that get your foot in the door hopefully somewhere that you’re passionate about, then bring in the social design through the back door.”

           Empathy: What differentiates social design from many other disciplines is its commitment to understanding the context, feelings, and significance of someone else's lived experience. Mariana Amatullo, Director of Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, had been doing field research in Chile for community workers living in housing without running water. Although the outcome was to create a portable shower for a woman bathing with a “wash-by-parts” workaround, Amatullo says the value that design brought was “about giving her family the sheer joy and dignity, the opportunity to have a warm shower” which is something we take for granted.
           “The value of design is this humanistic quality that designers bring to key societal issues,” Amatullo said. “We can look for an added moment of empathy and dignity. It really was a turning point.”
           As a designer working to create a day laborer station with Public Architecture in 2006, Liz Ogbu experienced her pivotal moment while advocating for dignity at informal hiring sites. There were many questions she asked during the creative process to get to the deeper value in the space and advocacy campaign. For her, it was “not just presenting the architecture of it, but really presenting the goal of it — what it was really about — at its very essence how do we bring dignity to this space?” said Ogbu, who is now the principal/founder of Studio O.
           “And how do we make the hardworking ethic and the desire to just be able to earn a place to, earn a way to have a living and a better life for themselves and their children? How do we translate that into an active design? And, how do we take something that had been invisible and make it visible?”
           Although the site was never built, “it was in that moment, I saw the power of a group of people who were used to never being acknowledged, and more often being ignored or treated badly feel that an act of design had acknowledged them,” Ogbu said.
           Empathy is inextricably linked to the value of social design. However, if a design process starts getting too complicated, take Ogbu’s simple advice and “be human.”

“The value of design is this humanistic quality that designers bring to key societal issues,” Amatullo said. “We can look for an added moment of empathy and dignity. It really was a turning point.”

Simplicity: “Social designers bring this value of explaining things that are very difficult to grasp for people,” said Kehinde Bademosi, Senior Manager for Social Innovation and Marketing at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. A 2015 graduate of MICA’s MASD program, Bademosi prefers a simple label for the profession: Visual Storytelling.
           “Data can be hard to understand,” he said. “All these figures cannot stay with people. But when you tell them stories — images in color and shapes — this thing’s going to stay with people.”
           Bademosi, who had a previous career in advertising, explains the expertise designers have to simplify complex issues such as climate change, gender inequality and healthy living which are difficult things people need to understand.
           “If you want to be a great social designer, learn storytelling,” he said. “Learn how to perform stories.”
           Design as a performance of framing social challenges for stakeholders is a primary skill.
           Sonia Sarkar, Chief Policy and Engagement Officer at the Baltimore City Health Department, knows social challenges can “feel so big and expansive.” As a student at Johns Hopkins University, she expected to be a biomedical engineer, but was drawn to the aspect of designers’ ability to dissect deep systemic issues for problem solving.
           “What design enables us to do is to take something that is really intractable and really abstract and, I think, boil it down to something very concrete, to something that is solvable and actionable for people now,” Sarkar said.
           Sarkar and Bademosi both share a communal approach to their work around public health in Baltimore City. Sarkar “realized that the aspect of that problem solving that I really loved was getting to go out into the community and understand what created the problem in the first place.”
           Bademosi’s tool kit includes going back to traditions of oral history and storytelling in villages to engage with people. “At the end of the day it’s all about explaining the unexplainable.”

“Data can be hard to understand. All these figures cannot stay with people. But when you tell them stories — images in color and shapes — this thing’s going to stay with people.”

Critical Curiosity: Design is as much about asking the right questions before answering with creative solutions. Because new questions might arise in the problem-solving process, “the designer is an individual that can address this uncertainty with a lot of fluidity and ease,” Amatullo said. Designers can “get to value by defining the problem anew and sometimes coming up with new questions that might push the inquiry forward.”
           Gensler Senior Associate and design strategist Elaine Asal says designers’ value is in pushing conventional ways thinking. After choosing to get a degree in architecture over journalism or political science, Asal is confident that in addition to research and synthesis, “the other thing that designers are really good at is sort of not accepting the status quo and kind of trying to disrupt whatever it is,” she said. Beyond curiosity, Asal finds there is opportunity to turn that disruption into something tangible and meaningful.
           “Design as a field for me is meaningless unless one is able to articulate clearly the questions that one’s trying to address,” said Sanjit Sethi, director of the Corcoran School or the Arts & Design in Washington, D.C.
           “Design for me is about an articulation of significant and critical questions that can have a profound and lasting impact not only on the individuals and communities that the process is supposed to help,” he said, “but also about the key stakeholders and the individuals that are trying to execute the solutions to the problem.”
           According to Roger Teeuwen, Head of School of Design & Social Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in the Netherlands, asking the hard questions in order to design well begins with self-reflection. The graphic designer says students and professionals should have a “critical attitude” about the structure and influence of design work. “I think that we should always critically discuss the tools we bring [to] the table,” Teeuwen said.
           With a mind for always critiquing the discipline, Teeuwen charges designers not to accept the world as it is, but to “be subversive in how you perceive the world.”

“Design for me is about an articulation of significant and critical questions that can have a profound and lasting impact not only on the individuals and communities that the process is supposed to help, but also about the key stakeholders and the individuals that are trying to execute the solutions to the problem.”

Transdisciplinarity: Will Schmitt, Innovation Services Officer of Innovation Labs at World Bank Group, doesn’t consider himself a designer. As someone who helps people use innovation and design processes better within the international development space he is “an open innovation person,” and sees global problems as complex and interconnected.
          Schmitt, who is based in Washington, D.C., identifies a key to establishing value is the designers’ ability to “engage in radical, multidisciplinary practice.” He has no formal design education, but has gained an understanding from previous colleagues at IDEO and IDEO.org that influence his current work. Schmitt has helped lead innovation units within a couple of major development institutions for about 10 years.
           The more he has moved forward in a career that attempts to drive good innovation practice while crossing sectors, Schmitt finds, “it’s really important to broaden your horizons constantly and to stretch yourself beyond comfort zone, and to engage in things that you know very little about.”
           Having experience across sectors is helpful because, as Charlie Cannon says, “we are trained to solve for more than one thing at once” and “we are asked to create solutions for things that address lots of different pieces.” Cannon is an associate professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, but an inspiring anthropological trip in Alaska and environmental activism have shaped his practice.
           “Any good designer is trained how to come up with a synthetic solution that addresses many different registers simultaneously,” Cannon says. Like Schmitt, Cannon knows that “wicked problems” require tackling smaller “component parts with lots of different kinds of people, with lots of systems, with lots of tensions and complexity.”
           Moving between clusters of related passions can create a wide understanding of a community, neighborhood, city or region. Director of the Neighborhood Design Center in Baltimore, Jen Goold, has had a varied career scaffolded on her initial study of historic preservation. Without an explicit goal, she tried to do what she cared about the most, but then bring that perspective to whatever she was doing, Goold said.
           “You can work in any field and bring these values and it will make you a far more employable and valued team member,” she said.

“It’s really important to broaden your horizons constantly and to stretch yourself beyond comfort zone, and to engage in things that you know very little about.”

Humility: While recalling a memorable experience working on HIV issues with South African men, Robert Fabricant, Co-founder of Design Impact Group and partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, says it’s important to deconstruct formal training into human qualities.
           The average person without a design vocabulary are “people [who] have strong feelings about their world” and aren't often asked about it. Fabricant, whose first career was in criminal justice and community organizing, says designers should think in terms of creating environments where people can share feelings and stories, and make and learn things to address situations.
           In such environments, it is good practice for designers to always be in a position to learn. “Don't teach social design to your clients,” said Bori Feher, who is a research fellow at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. “Don't try to sell your story or how good you are, but learn from [clients] first, and be open” because there is opportunity to take what is learned into future projects, she said.
           Feher cites her own “bad experience” as an architecture student designing a homeless shelter in Central Eastern Europe that was “only about façade of the building.”   She realized the building alone “wouldn’t have changed a thing in society.”
           Although there is a formal language to the what students learn in the classroom, designers have to think in basic terms of exerting “energy in caring about people,”
Fabricant said. “There is a huge gap between the potential value you see of going about solving problems this way and the value that most of the people you’re going to interact with see,” he said.
           “It’s not just that people are stupid, or don't understand design, or aren't creative” Fabricant said. “It’s that you really have to start from where they are and build trust and be humble enough to understand that along the way a lot of what you’ve learned here in terms of the language and the practice, and what you think you know about it may not be that important.”
           A great design practice is built on the very “fundamental human quality of trust and engagement,” he said. “If you've got that down, and you know how to create that with people, there’s no end to the sort of direction you can take the work.”