Stories

Earlier this year, a team from the Design Institute for Health began working on improving social service coordination in affordable housing communities in East Austin. They soon found themselves needing to pivot from in-person to more frequent virtual services as stay-at-home orders rolled out locally in March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced needs from community members who had not engaged in the previous months of the team’s services rollout. This article focuses on the role of trust and relationships within the community and low-tech solutions as a means of increasing access to and engagement with newly designed service offerings.

The core of the Gembah mission is to demystify and democratize the product creation process. They believe product innovation shouldn't exist only in stuffy boardrooms or behind the closed doors of heavily capitalized companies. Their process allows bootstrapping entrepreneurs and small businesses alike to innovate alongside Gembah's team of deeply experienced product designers, researchers, and manufacturing experts to bring their product vision to life. The beautiful thing about e-commerce and product development is its borderless nature. Gembah's workflows leverage resources internationally, including boots-on-the-ground experts worldwide, to help people turn concepts into a workable, market-ready product.

How might we design spaces to be inclusive for all? Society is scrambling to accommodate the needs of post-pandemic functions while at the same time satisfying health requirements. This challenge coincides with a movement towards greater humanity and equality among all people — a push to truly confront racism at the root. Drawing from his research designing and managing creative spaces, Smith ponders the ways we can lead societal growth through redefining the spaces we form and occupy.

Good design happens when there are more constraints as it forces the designer to focus on what is essential. Social good has been a recurring theme in modern industrial design and serves as a constraint that forces better designs. Industrial design came about in the 20s and 30s and replaced the bespoke, handmade products of the previous generation with mass-produced, accessible products. Thinking about the end-to-end lifecycle of a product, this article examines an industrial designer's ability to make design decisions that account for global sourcing, the environment, and current social trends.

In this article, designers Gray Garmon and Katie Krummeck explore how to build capacity in people new to the design process in order to empower those closest to the challenges facing communities to make change. In the fall of 2019, the Aga Khan Foundation asked Garmon and Krummeck to create a design-based innovation process for schools participating in the global Schools2030 initiative. The resulting process, led by teachers, is open-ended and adaptable for the cultural contexts and resource constraints of each unique school. In response to the global shutdown, Krummeck and Garmon pivoted to create an online design sprint organized around addressing the challenges to learning that arose during the coronavirus pandemic.

Santa Monica College’s Interaction Design (IxD) program was created to fill an equity gap in the emerging field of interaction design. Students apply to the IxD program because it makes financial sense — and because it might be their only option. The program attracts diverse students who, given their circumstances, might not otherwise be able to pursue tech-focused careers. Yet while the school is surrounded by tech’s biggest companies in Silicon Beach, many of these companies have failed to embrace the program and its students. Why? This paper focuses on the semester-long Design Challenges the program has done with tech neighbors in Santa Monica’s Silicon Beach (including Hulu, Bird, and Red Bull), highlights what works and what doesn’t, and offers a call to action to big tech to do even more in diversifying their workforce.

For the past four years, designer Jared Culp has been carless by choice. But COVID and several months of mandatory isolation shined a new light on the dirty car dependence he had been avoiding. A car is a source of freedom. It brings people together in a time when we can only see our neighbors through mask and shields. What was once a source of luxury is now mandatory in most states and cities. In this article, Jared explores how we got here and the possibility of how we get around in the future in the wake of the current pandemic.

It is time for a reckoning in the United States around our violent past and painful present regarding racism, discrimination, and systemic oppression. It is time to realize that systems of oppression and inequity have been designed, and must therefore be re-designed. Design thinking has recently been criticized as a methodology that perpetuates systemic racism and white supremacy. We believe that this oversimplification misses the whole picture. While design can be and has been used to build inequity and injustice, we believe that with the right mindsets, approaches, and sensitivities, it can also be used to help dismantle the very systems of oppression that it is (rightly) blamed for helping to establish.

Learn how two design firms — Dalberg Design and argodesign — partnered to help Mimsi, a pop-up maternal health clinic serving Haitian women, collect much-needed data. When COVID-19 hit, the program was defunded, adding urgency to Haiti’s maternal health needs. While we search for new funding — and face our own challenges in America — how can designers play a role in shaping the conversation around resiliency and inspiration for a better future?

A welcome message for the Journal of Design and Creative Technologies by Doreen Lorenzo, Associate Dean for the School of Design and Creative Technologies in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin.