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Wednesday
Feb282018

Design Activism: Three Areas of Impact

Image © Gensler

Not-For-Profits are intrinsically motivated; they are driven by passion for what they do and an extreme sense of purpose. Collaborating with them not only calls for a different breed of design intervention, it calls for a different type of designer as well—one who sees a calling far beyond empathy and can truly live and breathe their client’s mission. To address pressing global issues, designers will partner with other disciplines to address issues and solve problems. “Design can no longer afford to be used as an afterthought in any organization, and I would encourage all designers to take more proactive steps to redefine their roles beyond design to that of conscious and ethical decision makers,” Asta Roseway, fusionist at Microsoft, told Fast Company.

Design Thinking in Activation

To step beyond the usual practice, we ventured outside the office to work in a new way with a group of people who are on the ground making a difference. First, we partnered with social-impact driven coworking space Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) to facilitate a series of sessions called activations. These design thinking workshops were organized around three impact areas that our own teams are most passionate about. At activations, CSI entrepreneurs and startup teams have the chance to raise the real challenges they see within their organizations, are then paired up with Gensler designers to do a rapid, organic collaboration. They learn how to apply a creative lens to their thinking, and our designers got a look at the front lines of social impact work.

Second, we gathered a team of like-minded Not-For-Profit-aligned designers and strategists and participated in the Refugee Hack Summit, a 12-hour no-code hackathon where we, among 11 other teams from across the tech and media landscape, set out to prototype ideas, products, and services to serve forcibly displaced people in their transition to life in America.

In both the environment at CSI with a mixed group of startups, and the daylong challenge among competing teams from different companies at the Refugee Hack Summit, we’ve found that aligning around mission and shared goals, laying challenges bare, and doing collective problem-solving leads to innovative thinking and strategic insights. Design for good needs to be accelerated and it calls for the collective action of designers, organizations, and the constituents for whom we must advocate for.

Insights and Impact

Here are the first three areas of impact where waves need to be made. They are not only pressing, they are personal:

Image © Gensler

  1. Women’s Powerment – In our first experiment at CSI, we wondered how we might use design to support a group of woman-owned startups and gender issue-focused organizations around the challenges women face in the professional world. The discussion brought to light that perhaps the term “empowerment” speaks from a point of need rather than a position of value. Instead, the group centered on the idea of Women’s Powerment, leveraging the power of design to project the enormous value that women bring. Within CSI, The Women’s Lab provides a collaborative, supportive workspace and community for social mission organizations benefitting young girls and women. In this experimental space, organizations come together under one roof to prove that design is a means of value creation and a means for Powerment through acts of creation, visualization, problem-solving, and storytelling that go far beyond cash value.

  2. Image © Gensler

  3. Refugee Experience – Our 12-hour sprint at Refugee Hack Summit started with a problem statement: How might we design to accelerate the experience for refugee placement without compromising a person’s humanity and their unique purpose and personal mission? After conducting interviews with successfully placed refugees, case workers, and programming officers from supporting organizations, we landed on the metaphor of the college campus, and how new and innovative models such as those from The Posse Foundation have aided minority students and recently returned veterans in placement and transition to residential colleges with little diversity and non-existent veteran presences by sending them in groups as a “posse” or a ready-made support system of individuals with shared backgrounds.

    Our designers looked at the idea of the campus—a space with distributed resources and a community built for personal development—as the ideal model for the human issues at stake in the refugee crisis. Our proposal, “From Camp to Campus: A 60 Day Transition Alternative,” proposed packaging the services that agencies typically provide new arrivals within a fixed geographic location of support and growth, rather than the maze it can often be today. At Vassar College, Professor Maria Hoehn, director of Vassar Refugee Solidarity, is developing curricula for refugee classrooms in Berlin to connect with a History course at Vassar—an expression of the idea that campus resources can be distributed virtually to expand opportunity, inspire purpose, and promote development and growth.

  4. Image © Gensler

  5. Inclusionary Practice – To broach the topic of inclusion, we felt, was to privilege one group’s challenges over another. How, instead, might we design for inclusion beyond a statistical game and work toward an empathetic one? One of the first things we heard in our session was the challenge of mission creep—when a lack of focus (likely born out of earnestly wanting to solve all the world’s problems for all people at once) starts to dilute impact. In this work the need for inclusion is an intense, ongoing effort. Inclusion is not about having the right answer, or creating perfect equality, or getting percentages right. Instead, it is a practice—a way of life. We kicked the session off with a series of exercises that asked participants to leave their biases at the door, and begin to solve problems through the social, cultural, racial, and class position of pre-made personas, which we provided. That is easier said than done. Assumptions are inherently present when designing for inclusion, and we must constantly stretch ourselves—our thinking AND doing—to continuously strive for inclusion.

Image © Gensler

A Call to Action

In the Not-For-Profit world, design is a tool for advocacy. It can be used to affect more than the pragmatic and the aesthetic. It can make a positive difference in areas that need perhaps the most systemic change, and that require the most collaboration among incredibly diverse stakeholders, from all kinds of backgrounds, who should ALL be at the table doing the work and making the change.

We believe in design as a form of activism and ask that our colleagues in the firm and the field join us in collective action to leverage their design capabilities to do the most good. Design for good needs to be accelerated and it calls for the collective action of designers, organizations, and the constituents for whom we must advocate for.

Amanda Ramos
Amanda Ramos is a firmwide leader for Gensler’s Not-for-Profit Practice Area and holds a degree in architecture and building science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Through nearly 20 years of experience, she has developed innovation initiatives, organizational programs, campus master plans, workplace prototypes and change communications across virtually every industry sector, from not-for-profit institutions to Fortune 500 companies, including Ad Council, Johnson & Johnson, Acumen, Ericsson, LatinoJustice, GSK, Foundation Center, Nokia, Ford Foundation, Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Robin Hood Foundation. Contact her at amanda_ramos@gensler.com.
David Weinberg is a studio director in Gensler’s New York office and serves as the leader for the Not-for-Profit practice area in the Northeast. His entrepreneurial approach allows him to bring a high level of strategic business planning to support client objectives. As a registered architect, he is involved in all facets of a project from inception to completion. In addition, David also provides project and client services throughout North America and globally, and is a member of the board of directors of CaringKind, formerly the Alzheimer’s Association NYC Chapter. Contact him at David_Weinberg@gensler.com.