Design amid Emergency (original) (raw)
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From Emergency to Emergence: re-think design approach in a transition age
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2021
This paper intends to reflect on the questions that, in relation to the current COVID-19 emergency, invest design and its new cultural, social and political role. The undoubted impacts that the pandemic has produced in many spheres of our lives should not only be intended as an "emergency" to be quickly responded to, the virus allows the "emergence" of the opportunity to dispel some contradictions of our time, with critical, problematic and lateral questions. In its meaning of "emerging phenomenon", the virus opens up conceptual and operational scenarios that deserve to be actively investigated, also by trying to force the project's capacity to intervene in everyday practices. In this sense, the paper highlights the "political" action of design as an "attitude" to generate a questioning urge that is actively inserted into the world, looking at and investigating the concepts that shape a vision of constantly changing design. Through four case studies, the paper carries out "practical theories" capable of broadening the field of intervention of design, incorporating multiple contextual relationships and outlining a geopolitical dimension within which to identify new forms of dialogue with the "real world".
2020
The global crisis around the COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about our societal conditions while amplifying the challenges of our existing multiple crises to wider questions of sustainability. Such crises, which are both threat and opportunity, have been highlighted for 50 years within the design domain which has re-orientated towards ideas of ecological, social and economic transition and transformation. Against this background, a 7-year old conference series, presciently called By Design or By Disaster, had to convert to an online format during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Applying eco-social and participatory design principles the participants of the conference, Beyond Crisis, co-created 21 parallel workshops tasked with the aim of each generating three actions on diverse topics reflecting the interests of the participants. Live reports and synthesis of the actions generated a broad mapping of the situation to help build a spirit and momentum for social-ecological transform...
Design Research-in-the-Moment: Eliciting Evolutive Traces during the Covid-19 Crisis
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2020
This paper presents a chronological account of design’s response to the Covid-19 crisis as it unfolded globally. From January to May 2020, we documented over 500 design interventions that have been created by individuals, networks, amateurs, professionals, and public and private organizations and institutions. This international response witnessed the rapid design and development of products, networks and systems such as facemasks, hospitals, infographics, respirators, sanitizers, and virtual communities all created in an effort to save us. In response to the Covid-19 virus the problems that the world faced were highly complex, interdependent, and could not be addressed by conventional means. As such, this paper presents over 500 design-led responses that illustrate comprehensively that when pressed we can find new ways of designing. In short, this work outlines what we might think of as a new model for designing. This new model does not describe a new condition to come after what w...
2021
A Pandemia forçou a mudança, levantando questões sobre modelos de design, modelos de business, incentivos e educação comunitária. A urgência das medidas de contenção redefiniu o rol da saúde e destacou o rol do Design, que está envolvido em situações de emergência, na concepção do universo dos dispositivos de protecção, intervindo com metodologias de Design Centrado no Homem, propondo estratégias partilhadas que traduzem o conhecimento e a experiência da investigação mais avançada em produtos. O artigo recolhe os resultados obtidos com a elaboração do projecto de investigação financiado pela Região da Campânia, “Smart&Safe”. Design para novos equipamentos de protecção pessoal” submetido ao edital para aquisição de serviços de investigação e desenvolvimento para a luta contra o Covid-19. A investigação constitui um estudo substancial dos problemas relacionados com as emergências sanitárias e propõe uma actualização na reformulação dos Dispositivos de Protecção Individual (EPI), agora...
Design in the Pandemic: Dispatches from the Early Months
Design and Culture, 13:1, 2021
Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue (free access) This special issue of Design and Culture emerged from a call released in May 2020 while we were still in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noting that the pandemic had radically altered our relations with things, spaces, and one another, we called for dispatches that would register and articulate its immediate and unfolding experience. In particular, we wanted to pay attention to the dramatically deepening systemic social and geopolitical inequities and new territorial divides it created, seen through design perspectives, approaches, and sensibilities. Our editorial brief was not specifically geared to collect examples of design “solutions” to identifiable (and obvious) design “problems” related to the pandemic. Rather, we aimed to convey a more nuanced and expanded notion of design as a social sensitivity, critical lens, and proposition of tangible values and aspirations. We were also interested in experiences from various subject positions, from those who spent the quarantine working or studying from home to essential workers and frontliners, aware that the virus was far from a “great equalizer” and that “risk is not equally distributed” (Jones 2020). In terms of format, we sought a variety of responses – from text to audio and visual work – that would capture the different affective and material dimensions of the pandemic experience.
Design for Resilience: Mapping the Needs of Brazilian Communities to Tackle COVID-19 Challenges
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the urgency in the search for innovative solutions in different areas of knowledge to mitigate the effects and impacts of the disease, whether on health, social or economic terms. Urban and socioeconomic determinants of informal-settlement communities make COVID-19 challenges even harder to be overcome, requiring local and situated solutions that consider their livelihood diversity. This manuscript shows the results of an exploratory pilot study which addressed the potential of participatory design to contribute to mitigating COVID-19 effects and impacts, identifying the problems, adaptative strategies, challenges for and needs of Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte communities. It was drawn from triangulation of methods and analysis of multiple (primary and secondary) data sources. The needs of communities were raised through online roundtables with community members, representatives of NGOs, designers, architects and researchers. Analysis of the roundtables was conducted collaboratively by the researchers through online tools, including Affinity Mapping, and 5 Whys. The findings point out the needs of communities clustered in 6 major themes, five of which indicate potential areas in which participatory design can play a meaningful role and need to be further investigated.
AHFE International
This project aims to identify, document, interpret and disseminate current self-regulated community practices in social housing neighborhoods in the city of Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, in 2021. The main, specific case study is the neighborhood of Balteiro. We present methodologies and the first outcomes of the ethnographic work developed at Balteiro, namely an analysis of the origins, dynamics, needs and current challenges in face of post-pandemic scenarios in the present and future of two local initiatives: Associação Recreativa Clube Balteiro Jovem (ARCBJ) and (School Workshop of cartoning and sewing (Escola Oficina); additionally, it presents a first set of hypotheses on how Design may contribute to the resonance of these initiatives in other, equivalent similar social contexts.We argue that COVID-19 pandemic regulations, as well as their economic consequences, have had a significant impact on the nature and viability of the aforementioned practices: as a consequence of social d...
Strategic Design Research Journal
This case study aimed at mapping initiatives of social innovation that have promoted positive social capital during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. To this end, information about the actions and their developers were collected online and further described using the forms "Light Format" and "In-Depth Format", from the toolkit developed by the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Network. In addition, interviews with the people involved in the projects were carried out in order to obtain further details. From the promising cases mapped, 15 were selected and categorized according to their field, coverage area and target. Finally, the initiatives were assessed based on the concepts of design for social innovation (Manzini, 2008) and design activism (Fuad Luke, 2009; Thorpe, 2012). The analysis showed that whether the actions proposed had the design framework conceptions as a theoretical basis or not, the projects indeed adopted design strategies t...