Ahmanson Auditorium Art Center College of Design Hillside Campus

© 2013 Wendy MacNaughton for Bound Symposium

Editor'southward annotation: This is the first in our Dotted Line series of three stories from "The New Professional Borderland in Blueprint for Social Innovation: LEAP Symposium," hosted by Art Middle College of Pattern, Sept. nineteen–21, 2013.

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Can pattern propel social change? If reducing infant mortality risk from HIV in Africa or improving rice ingather outcomes among low-income farmers in Asia are any mensurate, the unequivocal respond—as participants in a three-day immersive symposium at Art Center handsomely demonstrated—is yes.

Less definitive are answers to the question that prompted the gathering: If I am a designer interested in this kind of work, what kinds of career pathways are available to me?

Organized by the College'south social impact department Designmatters with curatorial contributions from a "braintrust" of pioneers in the quickly emerging field of pattern for social innovation, the LEAP Symposium kicked off September xix at Fine art Center's Hillside Campus in Pasadena, giving more 100 invited participants from across the state an opportunity to examine electric current professional practices, values and opportunities; share challenges and successes; and envision possibilities for the future.

Why LEAP?

"To leap is not to move timidly, but to advance with great conclusion," said Mariana Amatullo, co-founder and Vice President, Designmatters, in her opening remarks in Ahmanson Auditorium. "Design offers an unmapped borderland for social innovation, and the symposium is intended to serve as a platform for creative leaps into that infinite."

Amatullo noted that the symposium would be "seeded with probes and what-if scenarios" and that honesty was the about of import element of the "genuine conversation and free exchange of ideas" she hoped to foster. She also thanked the many individuals, organizations, companies, networks and foundations that made the LEAP symposium possible, including The National Endowment for the Arts and the Surdna Foundation, along with private sector partners Steelcase, Adobe, Sappi and Autodesk.

She posed three main questions as a indicate of deviation for LEAP: What is blueprint for social innovation? How does information technology manifest? Why does information technology matter?

"This is a fourth dimension when we recognize a sense of urgency for social change to happen—perhaps on a broader scope than ever before—and with it, a call for path-creating forms of collaboration, and generative modes of intervention," said Amatullo.

Participants, comprised of threescore percent designers and forty percent non-designers, ranged from leaders at global NGOs and design firms to nonetheless-in-school designers directing their didactics toward social innovation.

Students officially made up 10 percent of participants, but at LEAP, everyone was at that place to teach, and anybody was there to learn.

Calls for humility, responsibility

"The actual brain trust is all of you, right here in this room," said Lee Davis, gesturing toward the entire assembly. Davis, scholar-in-residence, Heart for Social Design, Maryland Constitute Higher of Art, was the first of v "co-instigators" on the braintrust that Amatullo invited to take the stage, each sharing their vision for the gathering. Sounding themes that would resonate throughout the proceedings, Davis said that designers should not take a passive role but actively document and articulate the value of design practice, and "better train immature designers to be bold merely apprehensive facilitators embedded in interdisciplinary and collaborative teams."

William Drenttel, editorial managing director for Design Observer, noted that through the symposium itself, "nosotros are building a community." Robert Fabricant, V.P. of Creative, frog, said that designers not only assist unlock creativity and empathy, merely "we also create a sense of permission and so that different questions tin be asked. Jocelyn Wyatt, executive director, IDEO.org, reminded the group that, "As designers nosotros have the responsibility to ensure our efforts are first and foremost focused on improving people'south lives."

Allan Chochinov of the School of the Visual Arts and Cadre 77 observed that "designers think they're in the antiquity business concern, but they're not—they're in the consequence business. Despite the obvious allure of innovation, it'due south not the goal. We need to be humble and to larn from those who've been working in social impact." He went on to share a wide range of reflections and ideas submitted by participants prior to the symposium.

In closing out the first plenary, Fine art Centre Product Design Chair Karen Hofmann remarked that, thanks to programs like Designmatters and other social bear on initiatives, the professional person mindset was indeed shifting and designers now meet themselves not just every bit makers merely as "creative citizens" who co-design in direct collaboration with the communities they wish to serve. "We're at this tipping signal, where we're really starting to create transformation in gild for adept," said Hofmann, who, along with LEAP programming lead Sherry Hoffman, led the expert facilitator team that helped shape working grouping discussions throughout the symposium.

© 2013 Wendy MacNaughton for LEAP Symposium

Room for complexity

Participants dispersed into separate classroom studios for the outset of those smaller working group meetings—five groups of about 25 individuals each. There were no official presenters. Instead, people introduced themselves and began to analyze and prioritize some of the ideas shared at the opening, deepening the layers of insight and critique. This participant-led dialogue was supported by Art Center faculty facilitators, student TAs, illustrators, photographers and writers capturing the proceedings in Post-It notes, sketches, mind maps and video testimonials.

"In that location'south merely plenty structure," said one participant with an appreciative nod to LEAP's organizers. "I've been to events that are very rigid. This arroyo allows for complication."

I group spent the morning discussing the principles underlying social innovation pattern. Does the profession take an limited "moral duty" or might concepts like "humility" ("the opposite of an elitist 'moral' approach," said one participant) or "politics" (offered another) be more useful in attempting to define social innovation design?

Someone noted that, in this blazon of work, the community is the client even though the "contract" and its fulfillment may exist less clear. "With my corporate clients we leap jump bound till it's done. We don't have that on the social design side. Why is that?" A possible reply came from the other side of the circle: Because measurement of social outcomes must always exist negotiated. "Oft in commercial innovation the frame and goals are given to yous. In social innovation we develop it together."

In another room, a group that included Art Center department chairs Anne Burdick (Graduate Media Design Practices) and Maggie Hendrie (Interaction Design) attempted to map out emerging career pathways in social impact work. Sami Nerenberg, director of Design for America, was function of that same group and blogged about her experience for Adept mag. "In that location is no unmarried trajectory," her team concluded. "Information technology is a constellation of skills, relationships and opportunities that individuals navigate to create a meaningful life practice." Nerenberg sums up four core skills needed past designers aspiring to create social bear on.

Thinking big

Following a communal tiffin intermission at outdoor picnic tables where conversations connected and new acquaintances were fabricated, a console discussion brought the unabridged group back together in Ahmanson Auditorium. Art Center Graphic Design kinesthesia member Petrula Vrontikis introduced the panel, "Design Innovation at the Intersection of the Public and Private Sector," co-programmed with the Toyota Lecture endowed series Art Center Dialogues. Frog's Robert Fabricant served equally moderator.

The ii speakers, Bryan Boyer and Chris Fabian, injected a huge dose of optimism into the proceedings by offer concrete examples of what design thinking can achieve on a large scale when it migrates into institutions like national governments and international NGOs.

Boyer, one-time strategic lead at SITRA (the Finnish Innovation Fund) and project manager of Helsinki Pattern Lab, was just back in the U.South. later five years in Finland, where he piloted design-led approaches to some of that country's major social challenges, including aging and climatic change. While information technology may not sound sexy to young designers, he believes that they have a lot to contribute to government bureaucracies. Instead of a traditional, linear "planning" model—T hink, Practice, Echo—a blueprint-driven "prototype" model instead sets out to Think, Do, Reinvent, in a constant iterative loop that ultimately achieves greater bear upon. Although change in a bureaucracy will not happen overnight, said Boyer, gradual shifts in organizational culture can pb to social innovation breakthroughs downwardly the road.

©2013 Craighton Berman for Jump Symposium

Fabian, co-lead of UNICEF's innovation team and lead partner for kinesthesia and students in Fine art Center'southward Media Design Practices: Field program, shared compelling examples of design thinking with life-saving touch. For an organization like UNICEF that works in 135 countries, fifty-fifty modest, "fractal" changes can make a big difference, he said. For example, by using simple technologies similar texting on mobile phones, UNICEF has helped rural clinics in Republic of zambia decrease the average time of getting results for infant HIV tests from 66 days to 12 days. Through a family unit tracing and reunification system in Haiti and Uganda, lost children are now being reunited with their families in 2 hours rather than two weeks.

"But engineering is simply five per centum of innovation," Fabian cautioned. "The all-time pattern comes from a whole squad," including, he added, the often "crusty middle" in a big institutional structure.

An afternoon breakout session took people back into their working groups, where discussions became both more focused and more freewheeling. One group generated dozens of what-if scenarios:

"What if all CEOs had MFAs?"

"What if there were a Hippocratic Oath for designers?"

"What if there were a shift in values so that pattern awards were given not simply for making stuff?"

"What if we thought of design like farming? And if nosotros shared resources like a co-op?"

"What if all nonprofits had paid, 1-year pattern internships?"

"What if there were an international pupil exchange for designers?"

For the day's last plenary, participants reconvened in the Moving picture Department's spacious sound stage. Along the way they passed a table where their labors were rewarded with vegetable and fruit juices fresh-blended and served by Art Heart's chef. Lee Davis, who was joined past Karen Hofmann in introducing the wrap-upwardly session, held upwards his cup of spinach-apple tree and, with a wide smile, declared information technology "the best juice I always had!"

From refreshments, on to recaps: Over the adjacent 45 minutes, representatives of each working grouping reported on their progress, dwarfed by giant posterboards capturing their collective thinking, all of which would go jumping-off points for the next day of Bound.

Creating career pathways

As a final treat, Mariana Amatullo introduced three "surprise presenters" not listed on the plan, each of whom is successfully charting their ain career pathway: upper-term Fine art Centre student Geoff Brewerton and two returning alumni—filmmaker John X. Carey, manager of the earth'due south almost watched Internet commercial, and social innovation designer Mariana Prieto, a current IDEO.org Fellow in Republic of india.

©2013 Craighton Berman for Spring Symposium

Brewerton, an international relations major turned graphic designer, recently completed a Designmatters summertime fellowship in Myanmar where he worked for a social enterprise chosen Proximity Designs. The company, whose customers are low-income farmers, locally manufactures irrigation and solar lighting and provides micro-loans and farming advisory services. The experienced farmers on Proximity'due south advisory team would become out to run across with younger farmers struggling with low crop yields, said Brewerton, and "they had everything in their heads, but no materials to leave behind." Considering the experts' instructions were orally transmitted, "it was like the phone game" and as the information was passed from one farmer to another, inevitably it was no longer accurate. Brewerton worked with the advisory squad to develop a serial of instructional videos that they scripted and produced on their ain, and now share with rural farmers using portable digital devices.

Carey showed 2 curt films: "Illegal," raising awareness of the challenges faced past undocumented children born in the U.South., and Dove's "Existent Dazzler Sketches," his now-legendary, record-breaking Internet commercial which as well carries a social bulletin: Women are more beautiful than they recollect they are.

Prieto, a Designmatters alumna currently living in India who has led projects addressing water poverty and climate alter, among other urgent issues, gave pre-recorded remarks, final with a quote from the poet Antonio Machado: "Traveler, there is no path / The path is made by walking."

Afterwards that evening, at a reception sponsored past Sappi'south Ideas that Matter at the Gamble Firm, one of Pasadena'south great architectural treasures, Fine art Center President Lorne One thousand. Buchman welcomed LEAP participants, saluting their efforts and the decade-plus trajectory of Designmatters.

"Our students are in a process of discovery fifty-fifty every bit they develop solutions," Buchman said of the growing number of students who have embraced social innovation blueprint. "They understand fundamentally that their creativity finds its pregnant by sharing information technology with others in the world. It's all near human thriving, not about correcting some deficit, and the role that 'creative mind' can have in that process."

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Check back again, as our LEAP series continues with coverage of Solar day 2 and Day 3 .

©2013 Adriana Crespo for Spring Symposium

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Source: http://blogs.artcenter.edu/dottedline/2013/10/02/leap-symposium-new-pathways-in-design-and-social-innovation/

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