Research and Reveal: Designing for Change in the Community

In continuation with last week’s lecture. This week is about designing to instigate change for the better. It is about providing design solutions that help better the community. The lecture was an interview with Hefin Jones, a Graphic and Service Designer that has undertaken a number of projects in a number of communities in Wales. During the interview, he talked about how he went about such project with reference to Cosmic Colliery – one of the socially focused design projects.

The three main points that where highlighted where that of engagement, cross-benching and scalability. According to Jones, it is important to find projects that interest oneself as a designer to begin with. Finding such projects will motive one to get more involved in the project and very likely to complete the project fully. As for the community involved, it is important to get members involved. It makes the project more substantial and also easier to assign people to continue the project after the project managers (in this case it would be designers) leave.

Cross-benching in terms of service design refers to collaborative projects. Similarly to cross benching in politics – where a member of parliament does not align with any particular political party, in service design projects, whilst everyone would have their own role in the project, it is good to be versatile and be able to fill in and help out in other roles if needs be. In addition, scalability is equally important in service design projects. Scalability in such projects is important. This needs to be identified from the start to ensure how far can the project be extended and how it will be carried on. Usually it depends on the community that is involved and budget constraints.

Quite an interesting lecture and very informative. Apart from the lecture I also looked at a couple of articles in relation to the subject of designing for communities. The AIGA website is a reference point plenty of times in my research, and I came across the Design for Good ethos created by the same institute. Amongst other things, there were a few interesting points that outline the best way to going about service design projects, or as AIGA described it ‘problem-solving and design thinking for social change’. These are:

• Explore your passions;
• Design with heart;
• Be realistic and think small;
• Build relationships;
• Iterate;
• Persevere;
• Measure;
• Document your work;
• Connect online.

It was an interesting read indeed. This in conjunction with the lecture gave me further insight on the concept of service design. As discussed in the previous week, it was coined in 1991, however it is still a quite a niche field within the design industry. That said, it is an area that is worth exploring and it is something that graphic designers from various other fields should tap in.