Designmatters

A brief explanation of the project

Designmatters is where art and design education meets social change. Since 2001, Designmatters at Art Center College of Design has afforded the college’s degree students meaningful opportunities to apply their creativity and tool-box of skills to address some of the most pressing humanitarian and social challenges of our time with empathy, discipline, and unwavering optimism to effect change. Through Designmatters, Art Center students, faculty and alumni participate in trans-disciplinary studio courses, special projects and international internships that are defined by aesthetic value, business acumen and an expansive agenda for social innovation. In 2010, the department launched the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact. This formal course of study adds to the program’s trajectory with curricula encompassing immersive learning experiences with "real-world" outcomes that guarantee core competencies for students who wish to succeed in careers defined by social agency in the public and private sectors alike.

Designmatters projects and courses are aligned under four key thematic areas of inquiry: public policy, sustainable development, global healthcare and social entrepreneurship. In recognition of Designmatters’ service to society, Art Center is formally affiliated with the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO). Project partners and funders include a broad scope of international development organizations such as UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders and the American Red Cross, government agencies such as the United States Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, industry leaders such as GE Healthcare, and national foundations such as the Lemelson Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Cross-sector academic alliances facilitated by Designmatters have involved the Engineering Department at Princeton University, the Mechanical Engineering Department at the California Institute of Technology as well as the Keck School of Medicine, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, among others.

The Designmatters portfolio engages all of the disciplines taught at Art Center under the mantle of a definition for design (and industrial design) that always presupposes an actionable, positive outcome. Projects of significance have included:

• A collaboration with GE Healthcare to design medical diagnostic equipment for emergent markets in Africa in 2016;
• The Mpala Project for rural communities in Kenya and Ethiopia, which generated a solar-powered camel saddle system to carry refrigerated vaccines and public health education products for HIV-AIDS prevention and family planning;
• Safe Agua, a multi-faceted initiative which developed prototypes and service solutions to store, utilize and conserve water for slum communities in Chile, in partnership with the NGO Un Techo Para Mi Pais;
• Project Coastal Crises with the Aquarium of the Pacific to imagine new products and services for public awareness about the impact of climate change and sea level rise.

On the eve of its ten-year anniversary, Designmatters at Art Center College of Design continues to fulfill its original mission and form industrial designers and creative leaders with the aspiration and know-how to shape the futures we truly desire for a more sustainable and equitable world.

How will receiving the World Design Impact Prize raise awareness of this project and further develop its impact?

For Designmatters at Art Center College of Design, the significance of being granted ICSID’s inaugural World Design Impact Prize, “created to recognize, empower and stimulate socially responsible design projects and initiatives around the world” cannot be overstated.

First of all, the prize would shed light into a collective body of work that has already proven deeply consequential, both within the college and throughout the design education community at large. As an innovative platform for design as a force for positive social change within a leading educational institution such as Art Center, Designmatters made the commitment, since its inception, to analyze, document, and publish case studies in order to develop a vault of aggregated and shared knowledge about best practices for educators, practitioners, and students from other institutions and organizations to access as well. The ICSID Prize would represent an important validation of this documentation effort, and would undoubtedly amplify the potential use of these resources by making them accessible to the ICSID global network.

Secondly, granting the ICSID prize to an educational platform as open as Designmatters would hopefully also send a critical message to the community as a whole that it is within the education sector that we have perhaps one of the most important opportunities for re-invention and entrepreneurship in our societies. The intersections of design with the rise of social entrepreneurship and the shifts of understanding that are occurring about designers’ expanded roles in society as well as the many transformative practices and social innovation models that are underway would be underscored with a prize of this stature. What a potentially impactful message to send to the next generation of young creatives that may be contemplating design with purpose as a professional path!

What are the benefits this project has had, and will continue to have, on the community of interest and how will it "create a better world through design"?

At its core, Designmatters provokes the following macro-level question: what does it mean for art and design education to enact new forms of knowledge, and directly engage with future-oriented forms of teaching, learning and practice in the context of the global knowledge economy? Answering that question begins by proposing a pedagogical framework grounded in new forms of thinking, perceiving, and making. All are aimed at adding critical value to societal needs, indeed “creating a better world through design,” while redefining the agency role of the designer in that equation.

In our interconnected and globalized society, we are living in a moment in time where there is recognition that a stepped-up rate of innovation will be the essence of creating social impact. This entails collaboration across sectors—between design, business, government, nonprofits—and it also requires new hybrid models of enterprises that can demonstrate shared value agendas and successful triple bottom line frameworks. Creating a nurturing space that teaches students how they can become catalysts for social impact amidst these accelerated patterns of change has been an essential driver of the Designmatters educational platform. A key benefit for the students and all of the diverse participants engaged, is that the diversity of socio-economic and cultural contextual constraints that such projects entail immediately forces everyone to step out of the studio, and step into the world, learning to be with the world. The pedagogical benefit of these projects lies sometimes in the “intangibles,” those concepts such as “relevance” and “empathy,” which we are not necessarily equipped to measure by conventional rubrics. Projects in this space of social impact can prove transformative for a student and a designer at a deeply individual human level. They can be humbling. They can be freeing.

Finally, we would qualify the benefits of Designmatters as an initiative that has aspired--and continues to aspire--to push the boundaries of design education for long-term impact both from a pedagogical and social perspective. Our mandate is about educating the next generation of designers to face a broad array of economic, social, environmental and governance scenarios that may be unforeseen today, but squarely plausible in their future. It is a challenge that we took up ten years ago and that we renew today by throwing our hat into the ring with this ICSID prize nomination. We do so with the commitment to foster experimentation, creativity, and innovation through design education, and light the way forward to a more sustainable and humane future for all.