Book Proposal by Randy Gener | DIPLOMACY BY DESIGN — REINVENTING U.S. SCENOGRAPHY ROUGHING IT — ADVENTURES IN DESIGN (OriginalWorking Title (original) (raw)
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BOOK PROPOSAL | "DIPLOMACY BY DESIGN — REINVENTING U.S. SCENOGRAPHY"
PROJECT SUMMARY ASSETS — ¾ of the book has already been written and/or transcribed CHALLENGES — To find funds and resources; To cut through my bullshit writing to achieve " Less is more " TRUE GOAL — To complete a series of engaging travel narratives (as opposed to an academic book). To seek financial subsidy and peer-review support from U.S. universities and colleges, Warhol Foundation, USITT, visual-art foundations and angels in funding. INTRODUCTION/ABSTRACT Imagine, as you leaf through this sundry collage of words and images, an impressionistic composite. Picture a young artisan at once technically proficient and intuitively creative. This storyteller must be so visually oriented as to have a strong flair for the theatrical, a detective who uncovers the clues that reveal the inner life of a play's characters and the exterior environment in which they live. Imagine an inventor of made-up worlds so transparently constructed as to look and feel deeply real or symbolic or poetic or abstract — a communicator of clear ideas who somehow enhances the points of view of other dreamers involved in a project. If you can piece together all these facets, you will begin to discern a portrait of the stage designer as thinker.
M.H. Feldman, Diplomacy by Design. Chicago (2006)
2011
Feldman's claim to give a new definition and interpretation of the phenomenon called "International Style" by a multidisciplinary approach initially raises high expectations but fails to fulfill.
Design and Culture journal on 'Design as an object of diplomacy post-1945
Design and Culture, 2017
This is a special issue of Design and Culture journal, co-edited by Dr Harriet Atkinson and Dr Verity Clarkson. The introduction argues for an expanded understanding of design’s role in diplomacy since 1945, looking beyond “soft power” or “cultural diplomacy” to designers’ potential to shape government systems and provision and to play a wider role in transnational diplomatic exchanges. The papers gathered in this volume explore diplomacy through the work of philanthropic foundations, design networks, sites of art and design education, as well as manufacturers and retailers of furniture and product design and craft producers.
Trying It on for Size: Design and International Public Policy
Design Issues, 2011
Before we begin we should note that we are not here speaking on behalf of either the UN generally or UNIDIR specifically. As researchers at UNIDIR we are afforded a valuable space to both generate ideas for the improvement of UN operations and a chance to look and comment upon its performance with an interest in doing so. So if at any point we seem less than fully impressed by UN conduct you should think of our comments less as criticism and more as … tough love. This event is quite exciting for us. It is the first time that we have ever had the opportunity to talk about design to a room full of actual designers and people concerned with design questions. Normally the people that we talk to about programme design are diplomats, practitioners in security, development or humanitarian action, academic researchers, or field staff of the United Nations.
This article explores the Cold War context for the relationship between India’s National Institute of Design and its US funder, the Ford Foundation. Drawing on Ford Foundation archives to examine the complexities of philanthropic funds for US diplomacy with India, this article acknowledges US hegemony in design and modernization discourse, while also balancing it with attention to the reciprocal flows of knowledge between the West and the global South. This article examines the impact of design networks and expertise on international political and economic negotiations, and argues that Indian nationalism, both at the government level and in the design school, influenced Ford Foundation activities.
Making International Things: Designing World Politics Differently
Global Studies Quarterly, 2023
Can we make international things—maps, algorithms, museums, visualizations, computer games, virtual reality tools? Objects that criss-cross global space, exert political influence, and produce novel forms of knowledge? This article, and the special issue it introduces, suggests that scholars of international relations can and should engage in the task of making concrete material, aesthetic, and technological objects that exceed the epistemic, logocentric, or textual. It joins a growing conversation focused on the potential of expanding the praxis of the social sciences into multimodal formats of design, craft, and making. In this article, we explore the intellectual, social, and political stakes of beginning to make international things, unpack the disciplinary reticence to engage in this task, and the potential dangers it entails. Most importantly, we suggest five central benefits moving in this direction holds: (i) generating a future-oriented social science; (ii) cultivating an “atmospheric” social science faithful to new materialist, feminist, and practice theories; (ii) embracing a radical collaborationist ethos more-suited to the demands of the day; (iv) investing us in sociopolitically committed scientific praxis; and (v) inaugurating a radically new disciplinary architecture of scholarly praxis.
Design in the Middle: A New Approach to Collaborative Socio-political Design in Conflict Areas
Design in the Middle gathered together, for the first time, a group of designers and architects from around the Middle East/Euro-Med region in an extraterritorial place where they could engage in dialogue and perform collaborative processes over the course of one week. Working in five transdisciplinary groups, they generated alternative near-future scripts and design proposals to address challenges relevant to the Middle East, such as borders, religious diversity, migration, water and food sources. To enable large-scale collaborative teamwork, the project's design curators, two educators from the Middle East, applied an experimental methodological approach they coined " Problem Probing, " a composite toolbox carefully incorporating diverse design practices and mentalities. The paper will present the composition of the first workshop, elaborate on the project's methodological and theoretical framework, and discuss its contribution to our future thinking about the socio-political role that design can claim as an instigator of public discussion outside the design realm.
2018 NATION BRANDING THROUGH TRAVEL WRITING (in IJCR, vol. 8, issue 4)
Our intention in this article was to display the way in which travel writing can be used by governmental institutions, and not only, as an instrument of nation branding, by focusing mainly on Peter Hurley's travelogue about Romania, The Way of the Crosses (2013). Our assumption was that Romania is in the position of struggling to craft an improved image in the eyes of its Western partners and outline a profile framed around motifs such as unspoiled rural landscapes, which have inspired foreign visitors during the last five centuries. Travel writing itself has raised controversy, as some consider it as a literary work while others assign it to journalism. However, although there are indeed many elements which are also found in journalistic products, a certain consensus has been reached, that travel writing represents at least a literary subgenre with the main feature of disseminating ethnic and national images and, thus, 'culturally translating' a distant, exotic place. Moreover, we shall see that such governmental attempts in nation branding through travel writing are not really an innovation, as similar efforts were made, in the case of Romania, no less than eighty years ago.
Going Global - Avoiding ‘Design Tourism’ in International Collaborative Design Projects
This paper considers the planning, methodology and pitfalls in creating an educational collaboration in an international design project that deeply engages students in their new translocated context whilst avoiding surface-level engagement with the host community. Projects such as these offer many benefits to those involved, however could be accused of 'Design Tourism' -where the primary purpose of the project is the educational or personal development of the visitors, and the resulting ideas are left without any potential for realistic implementation. This problem is of critical importance for design and engineering educators who both want their students to learn and want their students' projects to have genuine legacy and impact. This paper explores this tension, and how this relates to the role of the designer working and learning across local and globalised contexts, and the role of an educator in designing an appropriate and effective learning experience. Building upon a legacy of annual international design projects, this paper uses 'GoGlobal Chile 2017' as a case study. The context and educational design of the project are outlined, and the resulting projects are presented, where 74 designers from the United Kingdom and Chile worked together to develop a series of innovation projects exploring the topic of food security. This paper concludes by considering factors for creating successful international design projects through a focus on building team cohesiveness and setting appropriate student expectations of legacy. By balancing these factors, students can be empowered to co-create impactful, contextualized projects whilst developing key skills to collaborate internationally in the future.