Mariana Amatullo - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Mariana Amatullo
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2014
"Object: Australian Centre for Design asked me to write briefly about the concept of design ... more "Object: Australian Centre for Design asked me to write briefly about the concept of design for social innovation. In the article I provide a short historical overview and use several design projects (by Live|work, thinkpublic, Engine, Participle, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Digital Eskimo etc.) to illustrate design for social innovation. Design for social innovation draws on the process, methods and materials used in traditional design practice, such as human-centred mindset, systemic thinking, ideation, visualisation and prototyping and applies this to address and respond to social challenges."
Revista Diseña, Feb 4, 2019
Academy of Management Proceedings
Design’s evolution from a craft-based discipline in the 20th Century to strategic abilities impac... more Design’s evolution from a craft-based discipline in the 20th Century to strategic abilities impacting innovation and organizational learning in the 21st Century has recently made it a subject of dynamic research and practitioner debates. All suggest that a shift is underway, partly driven by the popularity of “design thinking” as one answer to manage today’s needs for innovation and change. Despite a significant uptake of design in strategy, product development, marketing and information systems most of the research to date is exploratory and qualitative, creating a gap to evaluate design’s inherent value towards selected performance measures. This research builds upon a novel conceptualization of the individual team’s design attitude defined as a multidimensional construct comprised of multiple cognitive abilities. We use a survey of 192 experienced design practitioners and design managers involved in social innovation projects to establish the validity of the proposed construct and determine its nomological and predictive validity towards such common measures as social innovation, process satisfaction and team learning. We control for the effects of common design techniques (prototyping and visualization) and pivotal design practices (user participation) for observed impact. Overall our study 1) establishes construct, nomological and predictive validity of design attitude 2) demonstrates that design attitude has positive significant correlation with social innovation, process satisfaction and team learning; and 3) its effect is separate from user participation’s positive impact on social innovation. These findings establish new quantitative evidence of the effects of design as a cognitive orientation towards innovation that contributes to social change.
This article provides a critical overview of LEAP: The New Professional Frontier in Design for So... more This article provides a critical overview of LEAP: The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation, a first-of-its-kind symposium, which took place at Art Center College of Design in September 2013. The symposium’s main goal was to address one central issue—career pathways for designers in the social innovation context—through a pluralism of lenses that aspired to catalyze a national conversation about this professional frontier for design. Over three days, thought leaders addressed the tensions and ambiguities inherent in an emergent field and identified five topics of relevance on which to focus. A series of proposals for future pathways generated by symposium participants serve as the empirical grounding for the analysis and key ideas that are offered in this study—one that adopts a dialectical approach to make sense of the insights gained. Two principal strands of formulations emerge, which manifest from the various LEAP scenarios discussed. First, a repeated discourse about the “need to produce evidence” or “demonstrate value” from this form of design engagement appears as a central preoccupation for all. Second, there seems to be agreement that the process of articulation and validation underway will require new models of engagement and ongoing cultural change within organizational practice. The article argues that the insights we gain from the LEAP proposals also underscore a growing awareness within this community of practice of the necessity to embrace the complexity of navigating career pathways in the social realm with tools outside design as well. In this sense, the article suggests that we are prompted to embrace an articulation of the design discipline that has evolved from a linear, deterministic causality to one that lives within a complex system.
This paper presents two case studies of social innovation projects in partnership with NGOs in Ch... more This paper presents two case studies of social innovation projects in partnership with NGOs in Chile and Guatemala that are informed by design solutions developed under the mantle of the
Water is one of the scarcest and most precious natural resources on earth. In our interlinked eco... more Water is one of the scarcest and most precious natural resources on earth. In our interlinked economies, access to safe water in one community quickly becomes a global issue that affects us all. Experts forecast that by 2030 demand for water is expected to be 50% higher than today, and withdrawals could exceed natural renewal by 60%, making water scarcity an even more dire reality for a third of the world's population. The authors of this paper, both educators in one of the most prominent art and design colleges based in the US, present a social impact design project they have helped develop which focuses on meeting the challenges of safe water access for populations of urban slum dwellers in Chile and Peru. The paper provides insight about multidisciplinary design research and co-creation methods with end users and the NGO project partner in both countries. It also includes an analysis and discussion about the fieldtesting and pilot rollout of the innovative product solutions that resulted from the collaboration. Highlights about the opportunities and challenges inherent to designing with communities across cultures for social innovation and scale are central to the takeaways from the case study presented. KEYWORDS: social innovation, safe water access, usercentered design research, co-creation, social design, products and services for the base of the pyramid.
This paper presents insights about a few of the design research strategies, pedagogical methodolo... more This paper presents insights about a few of the design research strategies, pedagogical methodologies and lessons learned from two distinct case studies for cancer prevention campaigns developed under the aegis of Deslgnmatters, the Social Impact department at Art Center College of Design.
This panel discussion brings together the lead creative team of Safe Agua, a social innovation co... more This panel discussion brings together the lead creative team of Safe Agua, a social innovation collaboration between Designmatters at Art Center College of Design and Chilean NGO Un Techo Para mi Pais (Un Techo). This unique combination of design education, design research, and social entrepreneurship aims to help families in Chile's campamentos (slums) break the cycle of poverty by developing new products and systems of storing, utilizing, transporting, and conserving water. Un Techo is run by university students and young professionals dedicated to eradicating poverty throughout Latin America via social inclusion processes and housing solutions. The partnership between its Innovation Center and Designmatters, Art Center's social impact department, provided a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students the opportunity to conduct field research with families living in Santiago's campamentos. Art Center students then designed innovative solutions at a range of scales—f...
For the 100 issue of Design For All, 10 women in design research and practice reply to the questi... more For the 100 issue of Design For All, 10 women in design research and practice reply to the question: Where can design make the most impact? guest editor: Valerie Casey
The multiple environmental and socioeconomic challenges confronting humanity today, and a contemp... more The multiple environmental and socioeconomic challenges confronting humanity today, and a contemporary context that presents the promise of perpetual connectivity and accelerated patterns in information consumption and creation, represent powerful global forces that are shaping the way we live, work and learn. Such pressures and opportunities on an international scale are affecting design education in significant ways, creating an unprecedented need to deliver knowledge, experience and sophistication upon a global playing field. The college-wide initiative Designmatters at Art Center College of Design advocates for applied research approaches to complex humanitarian issues and provides unique methodologies for creative reform and change, empowering a new generation of designers to imagine critical solutions for society’s future well-being.
The proposed explorative paper presents the vision, mission and key questions driving the formati... more The proposed explorative paper presents the vision, mission and key questions driving the formation of a new socially-oriented curricular Concentration based in the fine arts department of a prominent U.S. art and design college with an established global trajectory in social impact design. With a faculty deeply committed to creating conditions directed to the future, the institution embraces curricula enabling students to enact new forms of knowledge and aesthetic production within the global knowledge economy. This developing Concentration is anchored in a critical conception of social space, and combines theoretical groundwork with expeditionary projects that utilize the modern megalopolis as classroom. It will interrogate expanded audiences and specific sites, concrete and virtual, where the public realm is now enacted. Self-reflexively and contextually, the curriculum proposes the public staging of art education as an act of social agency in its own right. In the paper, the aut...
Global public health problems associated with alcohol consumption have reached alarming proportio... more Global public health problems associated with alcohol consumption have reached alarming proportions, and alcohol has become one of the most important risks to the global health of young people. Few prevention efforts have successfully focused on reducing the consumption and negative consequences related to under-aged drinking throughout the Americas. Typical collaborative efforts have included research teams primarily composed of multi-disciplined academicians but few approaches, if any, have combined the expertise of a college of design, an international health promotion organization and academia. In an effort to counter alcohol advertisements that appeal to under-aged drinkers throughout the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization commissioned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California to design and develop anti-drinking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for international distribution. This paper addresses the methodology, creative process, and integrated educat...
Thesis (A.M. in Art History)--University of Southern California, 1994. Includes bibliographical r... more Thesis (A.M. in Art History)--University of Southern California, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-92).
Design for Sustainable Development: Examples from Designmatters at Art Center College of Design
The growing awareness that design must play an essential role in meeting a wide range of societal... more The growing awareness that design must play an essential role in meeting a wide range of societal needs is epitomized within the core precepts of Designmatters at Art Center College of Design, a bold institutional initiative that weaves aesthetic value and business acumen with a broad social and humanitarian agenda for positive change. Since its launch in 2001, Designmatters has become a compelling case study for how an educational institution can connect academic practices to design-based explorations of real-world issues and in so doing, trans- form the ambitions and assumptions of the College’s curriculum and the community at large. A series of strategic alliances with local and international non- profit organizations, government agencies –– and, in particular, a creative partnership with the United Nations –– has yielded a remarkable portfolio of Designmatters projects driven by ethics, empathy, and a commitment to improving our quality of life. At the same time, the initiative ...
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2014
"Object: Australian Centre for Design asked me to write briefly about the concept of design ... more "Object: Australian Centre for Design asked me to write briefly about the concept of design for social innovation. In the article I provide a short historical overview and use several design projects (by Live|work, thinkpublic, Engine, Participle, The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Digital Eskimo etc.) to illustrate design for social innovation. Design for social innovation draws on the process, methods and materials used in traditional design practice, such as human-centred mindset, systemic thinking, ideation, visualisation and prototyping and applies this to address and respond to social challenges."
Revista Diseña, Feb 4, 2019
Academy of Management Proceedings
Design’s evolution from a craft-based discipline in the 20th Century to strategic abilities impac... more Design’s evolution from a craft-based discipline in the 20th Century to strategic abilities impacting innovation and organizational learning in the 21st Century has recently made it a subject of dynamic research and practitioner debates. All suggest that a shift is underway, partly driven by the popularity of “design thinking” as one answer to manage today’s needs for innovation and change. Despite a significant uptake of design in strategy, product development, marketing and information systems most of the research to date is exploratory and qualitative, creating a gap to evaluate design’s inherent value towards selected performance measures. This research builds upon a novel conceptualization of the individual team’s design attitude defined as a multidimensional construct comprised of multiple cognitive abilities. We use a survey of 192 experienced design practitioners and design managers involved in social innovation projects to establish the validity of the proposed construct and determine its nomological and predictive validity towards such common measures as social innovation, process satisfaction and team learning. We control for the effects of common design techniques (prototyping and visualization) and pivotal design practices (user participation) for observed impact. Overall our study 1) establishes construct, nomological and predictive validity of design attitude 2) demonstrates that design attitude has positive significant correlation with social innovation, process satisfaction and team learning; and 3) its effect is separate from user participation’s positive impact on social innovation. These findings establish new quantitative evidence of the effects of design as a cognitive orientation towards innovation that contributes to social change.
This article provides a critical overview of LEAP: The New Professional Frontier in Design for So... more This article provides a critical overview of LEAP: The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation, a first-of-its-kind symposium, which took place at Art Center College of Design in September 2013. The symposium’s main goal was to address one central issue—career pathways for designers in the social innovation context—through a pluralism of lenses that aspired to catalyze a national conversation about this professional frontier for design. Over three days, thought leaders addressed the tensions and ambiguities inherent in an emergent field and identified five topics of relevance on which to focus. A series of proposals for future pathways generated by symposium participants serve as the empirical grounding for the analysis and key ideas that are offered in this study—one that adopts a dialectical approach to make sense of the insights gained. Two principal strands of formulations emerge, which manifest from the various LEAP scenarios discussed. First, a repeated discourse about the “need to produce evidence” or “demonstrate value” from this form of design engagement appears as a central preoccupation for all. Second, there seems to be agreement that the process of articulation and validation underway will require new models of engagement and ongoing cultural change within organizational practice. The article argues that the insights we gain from the LEAP proposals also underscore a growing awareness within this community of practice of the necessity to embrace the complexity of navigating career pathways in the social realm with tools outside design as well. In this sense, the article suggests that we are prompted to embrace an articulation of the design discipline that has evolved from a linear, deterministic causality to one that lives within a complex system.
This paper presents two case studies of social innovation projects in partnership with NGOs in Ch... more This paper presents two case studies of social innovation projects in partnership with NGOs in Chile and Guatemala that are informed by design solutions developed under the mantle of the
Water is one of the scarcest and most precious natural resources on earth. In our interlinked eco... more Water is one of the scarcest and most precious natural resources on earth. In our interlinked economies, access to safe water in one community quickly becomes a global issue that affects us all. Experts forecast that by 2030 demand for water is expected to be 50% higher than today, and withdrawals could exceed natural renewal by 60%, making water scarcity an even more dire reality for a third of the world's population. The authors of this paper, both educators in one of the most prominent art and design colleges based in the US, present a social impact design project they have helped develop which focuses on meeting the challenges of safe water access for populations of urban slum dwellers in Chile and Peru. The paper provides insight about multidisciplinary design research and co-creation methods with end users and the NGO project partner in both countries. It also includes an analysis and discussion about the fieldtesting and pilot rollout of the innovative product solutions that resulted from the collaboration. Highlights about the opportunities and challenges inherent to designing with communities across cultures for social innovation and scale are central to the takeaways from the case study presented. KEYWORDS: social innovation, safe water access, usercentered design research, co-creation, social design, products and services for the base of the pyramid.
This paper presents insights about a few of the design research strategies, pedagogical methodolo... more This paper presents insights about a few of the design research strategies, pedagogical methodologies and lessons learned from two distinct case studies for cancer prevention campaigns developed under the aegis of Deslgnmatters, the Social Impact department at Art Center College of Design.
This panel discussion brings together the lead creative team of Safe Agua, a social innovation co... more This panel discussion brings together the lead creative team of Safe Agua, a social innovation collaboration between Designmatters at Art Center College of Design and Chilean NGO Un Techo Para mi Pais (Un Techo). This unique combination of design education, design research, and social entrepreneurship aims to help families in Chile's campamentos (slums) break the cycle of poverty by developing new products and systems of storing, utilizing, transporting, and conserving water. Un Techo is run by university students and young professionals dedicated to eradicating poverty throughout Latin America via social inclusion processes and housing solutions. The partnership between its Innovation Center and Designmatters, Art Center's social impact department, provided a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students the opportunity to conduct field research with families living in Santiago's campamentos. Art Center students then designed innovative solutions at a range of scales—f...
For the 100 issue of Design For All, 10 women in design research and practice reply to the questi... more For the 100 issue of Design For All, 10 women in design research and practice reply to the question: Where can design make the most impact? guest editor: Valerie Casey
The multiple environmental and socioeconomic challenges confronting humanity today, and a contemp... more The multiple environmental and socioeconomic challenges confronting humanity today, and a contemporary context that presents the promise of perpetual connectivity and accelerated patterns in information consumption and creation, represent powerful global forces that are shaping the way we live, work and learn. Such pressures and opportunities on an international scale are affecting design education in significant ways, creating an unprecedented need to deliver knowledge, experience and sophistication upon a global playing field. The college-wide initiative Designmatters at Art Center College of Design advocates for applied research approaches to complex humanitarian issues and provides unique methodologies for creative reform and change, empowering a new generation of designers to imagine critical solutions for society’s future well-being.
The proposed explorative paper presents the vision, mission and key questions driving the formati... more The proposed explorative paper presents the vision, mission and key questions driving the formation of a new socially-oriented curricular Concentration based in the fine arts department of a prominent U.S. art and design college with an established global trajectory in social impact design. With a faculty deeply committed to creating conditions directed to the future, the institution embraces curricula enabling students to enact new forms of knowledge and aesthetic production within the global knowledge economy. This developing Concentration is anchored in a critical conception of social space, and combines theoretical groundwork with expeditionary projects that utilize the modern megalopolis as classroom. It will interrogate expanded audiences and specific sites, concrete and virtual, where the public realm is now enacted. Self-reflexively and contextually, the curriculum proposes the public staging of art education as an act of social agency in its own right. In the paper, the aut...
Global public health problems associated with alcohol consumption have reached alarming proportio... more Global public health problems associated with alcohol consumption have reached alarming proportions, and alcohol has become one of the most important risks to the global health of young people. Few prevention efforts have successfully focused on reducing the consumption and negative consequences related to under-aged drinking throughout the Americas. Typical collaborative efforts have included research teams primarily composed of multi-disciplined academicians but few approaches, if any, have combined the expertise of a college of design, an international health promotion organization and academia. In an effort to counter alcohol advertisements that appeal to under-aged drinkers throughout the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization commissioned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California to design and develop anti-drinking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for international distribution. This paper addresses the methodology, creative process, and integrated educat...
Thesis (A.M. in Art History)--University of Southern California, 1994. Includes bibliographical r... more Thesis (A.M. in Art History)--University of Southern California, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-92).
Design for Sustainable Development: Examples from Designmatters at Art Center College of Design
The growing awareness that design must play an essential role in meeting a wide range of societal... more The growing awareness that design must play an essential role in meeting a wide range of societal needs is epitomized within the core precepts of Designmatters at Art Center College of Design, a bold institutional initiative that weaves aesthetic value and business acumen with a broad social and humanitarian agenda for positive change. Since its launch in 2001, Designmatters has become a compelling case study for how an educational institution can connect academic practices to design-based explorations of real-world issues and in so doing, trans- form the ambitions and assumptions of the College’s curriculum and the community at large. A series of strategic alliances with local and international non- profit organizations, government agencies –– and, in particular, a creative partnership with the United Nations –– has yielded a remarkable portfolio of Designmatters projects driven by ethics, empathy, and a commitment to improving our quality of life. At the same time, the initiative ...