.community design

.community design

At least he did it quickly as possible because it's a known fact that people can have similar ideas as you.

article

Definition of ephemera 1: something of no lasting significance —usually used in plural

2 ephemera plural : paper items (such as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles

merriam webster

This is not surprising at all. Funny thing is just as he mentioned that...it made me realize there's barely any black designers being known, especially around that time.

Design for Resilience

Podcast

Andrew Wilshere was working on content at Designlab when he asked me to write an article about the Bauhaus.

I ended up writing something that never got published with Designlab. Instead, it was shared by the Bauhaus Movement to their Facebook followers.

Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.

Lean Canvas

For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

I just published my first podcast episode.

Design for Resilience

Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

via Nicolás Alcalá in the Design Science Studio

The Design Problem

Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

• Figure 1: The Design Problem
• Figure 2: A Country
• Figure 3: The World

Design Philosophy

This seems to be the space that I occupy on the edges of design education and practice.

Maria Selting of Unbox Your World podcast has just shared the raw audio of our conversation to get feedback before she publishes the episode, Redesigning Design: Applying UX Principles to Design a Better Future.

Jamstack

The legacy version of the Run for Water site designed by Stephen Bau. Featured on Behance.

This version is built with Jamstack, using Harp and DatoCMS.

A similar approach could be used for the Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

A Modest Proposal

Since the Buckminster Fuller Institute is using Airtable, it would be possible to follow the CSS-Tricks article on Going Jamstack with React, Serverless, and Airtable.

(The English here sounds awkward.)

Gyuri Lajos, in the Stop Reset Go team, recommended using Materialize CSS.

If it is based on Google’s Material Design, there are a lot of resources available to explore the possibilities. If I was building a Progressive Web App, this might be the place to start.

The project appears to be at an early stage of development, with a 1.0.0 release.

So far, this is one of the most complete web design frameworks that I have encountered. The list of components is extensive.

I am curious to read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson as recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

Quoted on the Amazon product page for the book, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The book was recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

Recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

The Art of Noticing

This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

• Social: fame
• Economic: wealth
• Political: power

An Agent of Change

To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

• Personal resilience
• Social influence
• Economic capacity
• Political agency
• Ecological harmony

This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

We are the builders collective.

We are one.

If the Bauhaus existed today, what would it look like?

What would the Bauhaus do differently, learning from the mistakes of the past and how modernism was co-opted by neoliberal capitalism.

“The Bauhaus concept, as it was transplanted to the United States, was fundamentally different from the principles upon which the experimental school had been founded in Weimar in 1919. The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was to unify all aspects of art making—painting, sculpture, handicrafts—as elements of a new kind of art, erasing the division between “high” and decorative art. Explorations of materials, color, and form were important building blocks of the curriculum. The artists and designers of the Bauhaus believed that this new type of art and design would help to create a better society, and they sought commissions to design public buildings and other elements of public life (such as flags and currency). In America, however, the Bauhaus ideas lost their social and political thrust. The emigré teachers in Chicago, Cambridge, and North Carolina who had been committed to progressive architecture and design ideas in Germany were now lionized as upholders of a pure, reductivist style.”

(Stephanie Barron, page 25)

Edge Effects

It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

Today, I was reading these words:

Design for the Real World

Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

Victor Papanek goes on to say:

It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

(Page 323)

Exiles and Emigrés

The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

• Social: learned helplessness
• Economic: trained incapacities
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence

Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

Design Professionals of Canada

DesCan invites you to participate and be part of the change.

I tried to be part of that change by focusing on the process of decolonizing design. However, it seems that the community was not ready for this approach, and I was excluded.

I have learned that exclusion zones are the modus operandi of Canadian social, economic, and political systems.

Design for the Real World

You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

(Page 86)

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved the following text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion below.)

Buckminster Fuller on Design

In this book, Victor Papanek speaks about everything as design. I agree with that and will elaborate on it in my own way.

To me the word “design” can mean either a weightless, metaphysical conception or a physical pattern. I tend to differentiate between design as a subjective experience, i.e., designs which affect me and produce involuntary and often subconscious reactions, in contradistinction to the designs that I undertake objectively in response to stimuli. What I elect to do consciously is objective design. When we say there is a design, it indicates that an intellect has organized events into discrete and conceptual inter-patternings. Snowflakes are design, crystals are design, music is design, and the electromagnetic spectrum of which the rainbow colors are but one millionth of its range is design; planets, stars, galaxies, and their contained behaviours such as the periodical regularities of the chemical elements are all design-accomplishments. If a DNA-RNA genetic code programs the design of roses, elephants, and bees, we will have to ask what intellect designed the DNA-RNA code as well as the atoms and molecules which implement the coded programs.

The opposite of design is chaos. Design is intelligent or intelligible. Most of the design subjectively experienced by humans is a priori the design of sea waves, winds, birds, animals, grasses, flowers, rocks, mosquitoes, spiders, salmon, crabs, and flying fish. Humans are confronted with an a priori, comprehensive, designing intellect which for instance has designed the sustenance of life on the planet we call earth through the primary impoundment of Sun energy on Earth by the photosynthetic functioning of vegetation, during which process all the by-product gases given off by the vegetation are designed to be the specific chemical gases essential to sustaining all mammalian life on Earth, and when these gases are consumed by the mammals, they in turn are transformed again by chemical combining and disassociations, to product the by-product gases essential to the regeneration of the vegetation, thus completing a totally regenerative ecological design cycle.

If one realizes that the universe is sum-totally an evolutionary design integrity, then one may be prone to acknowledge that an a priori intellect of infinitely vast considerateness and competence is everywhere and everywhere overwhelmingly manifest.

In view of a number of discoveries such as the ecological regeneration manifest in the mammalian-vegetation interexchange of gases, we can comprehend why responsibly thinking humans have time and again throughout the ages come to acknowledge a supra-human omniscience and omnipotence.

The self-regenerative scenario universe is an a prior design integrity. The universe is everywhere, and continually, manifesting an intellectual integrity which inherently comprehends all macro-micro event patterning and how to employ that information objectively with omni-consideration of all inter-effects and reactions. The universe manifests an extraordinary aggregate of generalized principles, none of which contradict one another and all of which are inter-accommodative, with some of the inter-accommodations exhibiting high exponential levels of synergetic surprise. Some of them involve fourth-power geometrical levels of energy interactions.

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

This is the missing curriculum in design education.

This is the water we swim in.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Amy Westervelt delves into the history of propaganda to uncover the deceit at the heart of public relations, marketing, advertising, and design in an analysis of the business strategies of oil and gas companies in the podcast, Drilled.

Westervelt pays particular interest to Edward Bernays.

“Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term ‘public relations’ when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients’ favor (clients like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors).”

Experimental tools to include the environment and non-users in design-thinking and speculative design

Where my testimonial is featured on the Program page for the Design Science Studio, but attributed to Anonymous.

This made me laugh. Actually, I prefer being anonymous.

Or, maybe it is recognizing my limitations. Walter Gropius recognized his own limitations and turned that into an ability to connect with people who filled in the gaps in his capabilities. As an architect, his role was to gather people to fulfill a vision that was far beyond what he could accomplish on his own.

The Hidden History of the Geodesic Dome - Part 3: The Teamwork of Walter Gropius

Where my testimonial is featured on the Program page for the Design Science Studio.

Human Centered Design Workshop for PPE. (n.d.). Eventbrite. Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://www.eventbrite.com/e/136323937567?aff=efbneb

This New Yorker Magazine article from December 31, 1965 notes the adoption of the proposal for a World Design Science Decade from 1965 to 1975.

Shared by Curt McNamara with the Trimtab Book Club.

A conference connecting planning, landscapes, architecture and people

Yesterday, I found some books in the stacks at the University of the Fraser Valley Library to research the evolution of design from physical artifacts to living systems.

• The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design by Lance Hosey
• The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 by Victor Margolin
• Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson
• Architecture of Thought by Andrzej Piotrowski
• Exiles and Emigrés by Stephanie Barron
• Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, Edited by Vincent Katz
• Modernism: Designing a New World, Edited by Christopher Wilk

My father was sharing a book by Brené Brown, Dare to Lead. I shared this website I had created while I was an instructor at the University of the Fraser Valley.

I pointed him to the TED talk by Brené Brown on The Power of Vulnerability.

“Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI).”

— Nielsen Norman Group

We are all designers

A design brief for a project to reimagine our social architecture. The Design Science Studio is the new Bauhaus, the community, the builders collective who are building a world that works for 100% of life. The Stop Reset Go is the project that is exploring how we imagine, design, and build the kind of world that we want to live in. How do we empower humanity to be the designers who can engage in a process of bottom-up whole system change?

Stop Reset Go

How do we engage in bottom-up whole system change? Perhaps we need a model for understanding who we are serving that transcends the bias and limitations of personas as they are used in user experience design (UX).

What is a more holistic model for understanding human perceptions, motivations, and behaviours?

The book, This is Service Design Doing, includes journey maps as a method for participatory design and co-creation workshops.

I suggested to the Stop Reset Go team that we should map out the interactions and touch points to engage people with the process of bottom-up whole system change.

Builders Collective

So, they put together a team of individuals who could collectively imagine the possibilities of building the kind of world where they could all live together in peace. They made a simple declaration:

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

Design Science Studio artists and (r)Evolutionaries.

The technology in advanced cars like the Tesla can be used for repossessing them. Is this an intended or unintended consequence?

Example of how expending a little extra energy creates two more useful outputs (compostable solids, and "cleaner" greywater) as well as lowering sewage system maintenance needs. Possibly, an example of how TRIZ "separation" principle can be applied.

Mike Monteiro references Victor Papanek’s book, Design for the Real World, in his article, Design’s Lost Generation.

The Anti UX UX Club will be discussing Mike Monteiro’s article on Clubhouse.

Maxi Cohen from the Design Science Studio invited us to the Climate Impact panel discussions.

The video was live on Facebook Live.

The Pirate Book Club will be discussing this article in the Anti UX UX Club room of Clubhouse, according to today’s post on Twitter.

This is my annotation

Perhaps we need more songlines in our instructional design?

This is also a plea for a more humanistic approach to technology in general.

I'm reminded of Lynne Kelly's use of Indigenous Australian memory techniques which do both of these things at the same time: https://www.lynnekelly.com.au/?p=4794

I love this logo

Which of the projects listed on this webpage that you have liked? and why?

Haber, N. A., Wieten, S. E., Rohrer, J. M., Arah, O. A., Tennant, P. W. G., Stuart, E. A., Murray, E. J., Pilleron, S., Lam, S. T., Riederer, E., Howcutt, S. J., Simmons, A. E., Leyrat, C., Schoenegger, P., Booman, A., Dufour, M.-S. K., O’Donoghue, A. L., Baglini, R., Do, S., … Fox, M. P. (2021). Causal and Associational Linking Language From Observational Research and Health Evaluation Literature in Practice: A systematic language evaluation [Preprint]. Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262631

See also: the decision by every Web browser vendor's devtools team to make their viewers modal (in the 21st century!) and then add injury to injury making the monolithic implementation a "UI singleton"—so you don't even have the choice to open another instance!

Thanks Think!

Thinkerer Melville captured BSG with style and a thoroughness few appreciate, much less could match.

The design of Carl Linnaeus' specimen cabinets mirrored that of the bilateral tables and the ways he arranged his heads in his notes and books.

And yeah, Space Flight Simulation!

How do players play and make money?

How Star Atlas' Grand Strategy implemented?

Star Atlas's grand strategy.

Star Atlas design mimics how a blockchain network functions.

Community, Springer Nature Sustainability. “Six Modes of Co-Production for Sustainability.” Springer Nature Sustainability Community, August 9, 2021. http://sustainabilitycommunity.springernature.com/posts/six-modes-of-co-production-for-sustainability.

[nightmare involving a user-friendly bicycle]

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2020/08/27/semistructured-interviews-stick.html

https://benmyers.dev/blog/on-the-dl/

Curious double entendre title here.

Note to self: I should use these patterns more.

«Design» anachronically

Another find, demo for six videos and a wrapper taken to Nepal.

Videos here.

Instructional design in virtual worlds reveals many, many challenges. Asking an in-world friend or colleague to visit a build can be a big ask, given that most are engaged in building and design, themselves; still, a fresh look is likely to bring good feedback.

All platforms. Professional features. Beautiful UI. Totally free. FontBase is the font manager of the new generation, built by designers, for designers.

This is one of the biggest underlying problems that centralized platforms often have. It's also a solid reason why EdTech platforms are pernicious as well.

Where are the empty spaces on the internet? How can we design them into existence?