Change is palpable. We intuit today’s shifting complexities as a state of continuous transition. Design, designers and societies are carried along together, but little eddies are growing just out of the mainstream. Here, design’s orientation towards people, our collective perception of our problems, processes and solutions, are being gently interrogated. Design, itself, is being de-coded, re-coded and hybridised…offering new ways of storytelling and persuading. How do we spread and encourage this debate, this design ‘potentiality’ and (perhaps) new wisdoms?
Everybody has existing and latent design agency. The ability to imagine and dream is important to envision possible futures together, to achieve dialogic progress. We should all be taking part in shaping our world, but it seems like we struggle to bring all the actors, stakeholders and communities of interest and practice together… So how can we encourage empathy between professional, pro-am and citizen designers? How can we find new ‘relatedness’ with each other and our wider environs? We hope that our quest through this blog will answer some of these ponderings, but most of all we hope that we (the writers, the readers, the doers) will share our ‘poly-disciplinary’ musings on ‘emerging design practices’, because we believe that mutuality and conviviality lead to a common flourishing where all benefit.
This current journey started in July 2011 when I (Alastair Fuad-Luke) took up a new post as Professor of Practice, Emerging Design Practices in Aalto University, Finland. Aalto is putting up new shoots from the roots of three old, established, respected universities in Helsinki. I am collaborating with the city of Lahti, just one hour north of Helsinki, to explore how design can re-invigorate and regenerate a city from the micro- to the macro- level, focusing in particular on how design contributes positive societal impacts. The ground is freshly broken, fertile and ideal for exploring how we accelerate, amplify and evolve the thinking and application of Design Activism, which I first articulated in my book in 2009.
Since moving to Northern skies, the dialogue has encompassed Design Activism in Barcelona, Design for Social Well-being in London, Designing for New Realities, and 365wellbeing project in Helsinki.
I (Katharina Moebus) joined the journey as Research Assistant in March 2012 having returned from Laos, where I worked as a designer together with international (such as World Education and New Zealand Aid) and national aid organizations and NGO’s (such as the Quality of Life Association) to improve the livelihoods of local people. Design came in as a tool to build advocacy, foster and inspire creativity, build pride, enable cultural exchange and mutual learning. In a similar way, past and ongoing projects such as ‘Stadin Uuni’, and ‘5 – The dish‘ contribute their part to the ongoing quest of finding new possible roles for design and the creative arts to create a long-lasting positive impact on our world.
The paths of our journey crossed and now we came together in window874, our new base for the current quest… and we hope to inspire and engage our readers and possible contributors!
AFL and KM, 24.04.2012
window874 - Dialogues for emergent design 