The image above is from an exercise exploring how to designing for resilience in disaster preparation – years before pandemics, with climate change and the complexity of cities in our mind – how do we make sure we’re all going to be all ok?
The course in the first year – Designing for Communities in Disaster – was part of the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design, within the New School. I wanted to learn how to design for a world of complex adaptive systems and wicked problems. I will always love UX design, but I craved something more – not only to gain skills around physical products and services, but a chance to blend my strengths of analysis and creativity into shaping a newer field of design, what the school refers to as Transdisciplinary Design. There’s a great summary of what the TransD program is from Gui Curi, a former classmate in the program a year ahead of me.
As a designer, I’ve had opportunities to do UX related work with screens during my time at Parsons, but have actively challenged myself to not just design more screens – and instead to look towards designing to address both the macro of systems, and the micro of human behavior and culture. TransD means not only learning new methods, ways of thinking and technological skills, but creating new objects and ways of presenting them and perhaps even new forms of design that better address wicked problems. It’s a ‘thinking through making’ set of courese that emphasizes prototyping, co-creating with and not for clients, social innovation, community resilience and evolving our analysis and skills of what it means to be a designer in 2016. Rather than a focus on blending design and technology and putting a Chip In Everything or creating an Adaptive Smart City Mobile Predictive System-like…thing, the TransD program (in my view) seek to create a new kind of designers who can evolve their skills and approaches to design for a new kind of world and unforeseen challenges society will face in the 21st century.
It’s a program that’s vital if we want design and designers to learn how to evolve to meet those challenges in a time of rapidly accelerating changes.
Looking at all I’ve done in the span of two years, it was a busy 2 years:
First Year
First semester studio
This studio course with Matham Ratinam examined community resilience in the context of disaster preparedness and how designers can respond to creating interventions in the course of humanitarian disaster. We created 5 projects, including a field guide proposing a new community service on resilience and cultural sensitivity, co-creating a workshop on resilience and new services in the community, a future speculative design project on identity, ID cards and QR code system – and exploring designer-as-doula via 3D fabrication, the Memory Spot project. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about resilience as a goal in our work, and to focus on the emotional landscape experienced under stress – something I would take further in dealing with mental illness. It was also a course that got me interested in exploring mediums, since the ‘ingredients’ we used – paper, 3D prototyping, workshops, Web and more – served as a nice tour of possibilities to think of for the eventual thesis.
Design Led Research
This course with Mai Kobori and Raoul Rickenberg focused on learning the basic methods of ethnographic research especially as tied to design thinking and the product development lifecycle. This was a chance to both learn about the variety of methods but also teach fellow classmates during a combination of assignments, workshops and lessons we taught and push the bounds of what we understand our role as designers is or should be. I created multiple assignments, including a paper prototype of a ‘speculative design’ Lotus Flower I created to share findings from several assignments. This class helped inspire my thesis through explorations of when to conduct traditional information gathering and when to engage in more participatory design activities in order to learn and explore potential interventions.
Second semester studio
This course with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby explored how driverless technology would shape our not-too-distant world, and the intersection of speculative design and biochemistry became what I submitted exploring a future biochemical system for social control, including film (pictured above), projection mapping, digital design, performance and wearable clothing. (Yes, it was a lot). This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about the role of strangeness in objects as a way to connect emotionally to the world – that how futuristic we design our artifacts will help us understand what control, power and communities can do, especially around issues of diagnosis for illness.
Urban Interaction Design
This course with Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena focuses on how to understand designing at an urban scale within cities using design. This was a class exploring the future of Smart City technologies and their implications as well as exploring how to use existing urban interaction design work like LinkNYC to integrate with our world, including ideally for some level of social change. By the end of the 12 week class we had created 4 projects including encouraging engagement in public spaces via urban design, creating new urban furniture to support green behavior, exploring urban mapping/GIS to understand community issues and exploring the future cities and speculative design. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about issues of scale – did I want to work at the individual level or larger groups, and what role space plays in an intervention.
Collaborating with Urban Communities
This course with Cynthia Lawson and Fabiola Berdiel focused on learning how to design with communities out in the community using prototyping to affect social change, and incorporated work from community development into the design thinking methodology to evolve how we can design out in the communities we work with. This culmulated in using strategic design and product management to create a mobile app to address food insecurity for the New School community. This class helped inspire my thesis by going from research to actual prototype using a more structured framework (tools such as a log frame template), and would help be consider the role of community centered design in my work.
In my first year, there were at least 5 ‘major’ papers (including for the Design for this Century course), and 3 manifestos on the future of design, ethics and the changing role of designers, a debate (I was enthusiastically ‘for’ speculative design) and other smaller assignments. One manifesto was published by Plot(s), the Journal of Design Studies at Parsons in July 2016, and one paper about one of my studios was presented at the American Society for Theater Research in November 2016.
Second Year
Final semester studio
This studio course with Patty Beirne and John Bruce explored how design can help families with terminal illness and end of life and explored the use of strategic research, prototyping and video ethnography to create solutions to address deeply sensitive topics. This image is of one of our presentations introducing our research and storyboard for our film – and the first glimpse of our ‘users’. This class helped inspire my thesis probably the most of all of my courses, because it gave me the courage to design for a stigmatized topic and to focused on emotion-centered design as a focus, pushing me to challenge myself in a way I hadn’t ever before.
Professional Communi-cations
This course with Amanda Ramos, Clare Watson and Manuel Toscano explored what it mean to be a designer for now and in the future, and in particular what it means to be a Transdisciplinary Designer. We examined these topics in more depth during this course, including understanding our unique brands and possible directions for future work. It also involved refining our pitches, portfolios and our TransPlan – where we’ve come from, and where we’re going, something captured in the image to the left. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about how best to present my unique perspective on a topic and how to brand myself in a way that feels authentic but also proactive, assertive and authoritative,
University Trans Lab: Urban Commons
This course with Eduardo Staszowski and Nidhi Srinivas explored what the future of the Urban Commons can be as part of a transdisciplinary design lab initiative at the New School. My team’s focus was on understanding reclaimed spaces and their potential, so we created a speculative design tour company (‘Reclaimr’) to tour some of the potential spots of reclamation in New York City. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about the role of community-based interventions ‘from the bottom up’ and how communities work to protect one another and share resources – and how such systems often come as a result of systems under threat.
Thesis Prep
This course led by Lara Penin, Clive Dinot, Eduardo Staszowski and Elliott Montgomery was the first part of our thesis, and helped us explore our thesis topics in a ‘cluster’ – an affinity group where our group chose to explore identity and what it means to have a transient identity in the 21st century. Our final project was called ‘Playing Identities’, involving interactive spaces for students in high schools to explore issues related to migration, mental illness, gender, stigma and other sensitive topics. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about issues of scale and identity, and solidified some of the materials and approaches I wanted to explore for the final portion of my thesis. The end was in sight…
Thesis
The two year masters comes to a close with a successful thesis defense. My thesis explores the role of design in addressing the stigma of mental illness, and I ended up creating a micro-site devoted to this intensive 4 month long solo journey to explore design, community, resilience, identity, empowerment and the future.
Was it exhausting? Yes. Do I regret any of it? No. Does the world need more transdisciplinary thinking? Absolutely.
In my first year, there were at least 5 ‘major’ papers (including for the Design for this Century course), and 3 manifestos on the future of design, ethics and the changing role of designers, a debate (I was enthusiastically ‘for’ speculative design) and other smaller assignments. One manifesto was published by Plot(s), the Journal of Design Studies at Parsons in July 2016, and one paper about one of my studios was presented at the American Society for Theater Research in November 2016.
Second Year
Final semester studio
This studio course with Patty Beirne and John Bruce explored how design can help families with terminal illness and end of life and explored the use of strategic research, prototyping and video ethnography to create solutions to address deeply sensitive topics. This image is of one of our presentations introducing our research and storyboard for our film – and the first glimpse of our ‘users’. This class helped inspire my thesis probably the most of all of my courses, because it gave me the courage to design for a stigmatized topic and to focused on emotion-centered design as a focus, pushing me to challenge myself in a way I hadn’t ever before.
Professional Communi-cations
This course with Amanda Ramos, Clare Watson and Manuel Toscano explored what it mean to be a designer for now and in the future, and in particular what it means to be a Transdisciplinary Designer. We examined these topics in more depth during this course, including understanding our unique brands and possible directions for future work. It also involved refining our pitches, portfolios and our TransPlan – where we’ve come from, and where we’re going, something captured in the image to the left. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about how best to present my unique perspective on a topic and how to brand myself in a way that feels authentic but also proactive, assertive and authoritative,
University Trans Lab: Urban Commons
This course with Eduardo Staszowski and Nidhi Srinivas explored what the future of the Urban Commons can be as part of a transdisciplinary design lab initiative at the New School. My team’s focus was on understanding reclaimed spaces and their potential, so we created a speculative design tour company (‘Reclaimr’) to tour some of the potential spots of reclamation in New York City. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about the role of community-based interventions ‘from the bottom up’ and how communities work to protect one another and share resources – and how such systems often come as a result of systems under threat.
Thesis Prep
This course led by Lara Penin, Clive Dinot, Eduardo Staszowski and Elliott Montgomery was the first part of our thesis, and helped us explore our thesis topics in a ‘cluster’ – an affinity group where our group chose to explore identity and what it means to have a transient identity in the 21st century. Our final project was called ‘Playing Identities’, involving interactive spaces for students in high schools to explore issues related to migration, mental illness, gender, stigma and other sensitive topics. This helped inspired my thesis by thinking about issues of scale and identity, and solidified some of the materials and approaches I wanted to explore for the final portion of my thesis. The end was in sight…
Thesis
The two year masters comes to a close with a successful thesis defense. My thesis explores the role of design in addressing the stigma of mental illness, and I ended up creating a micro-site devoted to this intensive 4 month long solo journey to explore design, community, resilience, identity, empowerment and the future.
Was it exhausting? Yes. Do I regret any of it? No. Does the world need more transdisciplinary thinking? Absolutely.