Social
Spaces

CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts invites academic and design practitioners to submit papers for a special issue. The theme of the issue is Socially Responsive Design – understanding the differences between service design, social design and social innovation and identifying tools and methods for designing and evaluating social change.

The concept of social responsibility, the notion that an individual, group of individuals or organisations has responsibility to society, may be topical but has been around as long as humanity. The benefit of such responsibility to society was described by Darwin, who argued that: “Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe…an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another (and therefore those within it).”

Darwin is talking in terms of competition rather than altruism or empathy, his argument is nevertheless clear; those societies made up of individuals that accept inclusive, collective goals and responsibilities are more likely to be prosperous and self-sustaining than those that don’t.

A century later the idea that design has a responsibility to society and environment was crucially defined by Papanek, who argued alongside contemporaries, such as Buckminster Fuller and EF Schumacher, that: “Design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).”

Given the enormous impact of design, Papanek addressed the conscience of the designer and argued that they should seek to make a positive contribution to society and the environment by focusing on six core themes:

SKOR organizes a two-day symposium on care, art, architecture & citizenship, called “Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility” on October 29-30, 2010 in Amsterdam, Felix Meritis.

“The two-day symposium Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility seeks to connect current debates about care and citizenship in contemporary art, philosophy and politics to realities of healthcare organisation in the Netherlands and internationally. With a focus on healthcare as a prime site of global market-driven transformation in governmental policies, this symposium brings together philosophers, artists, curators and politicians to question the role of art and its assumed ameliorative function.

We ask: If art consensualises the increasingly capitalised infrastructures of public care, can it still act as a critical agent?
The structure of this symposium stages theories and case studies to come hand in hand, providing a significant and radical overview of the field.”

The full programme can be found on www.skor.nl/artefact-4820-nl.html

The game Pong was released in 1972 by Atari. It showed two bats and a little ball and was inspired by the game ping pong. Later – in 1975 – it was designed as console version, so it could be played, making use of a television screen. After that, many variations were released by the computer industry, like Breakout. Not only the industry, but also “users” on the internet have adapted the game many times. The game is an exchange device, a social object (MacLeod, 2007). It is an object around which many people have gathered, all over the world. My own students have adapted the game for very different goals.

Yesterday, nursing students and occupational therapy students of Hogeschool Zuyd and products design students of KHLim Media & Design Academie Genk presented their concepts for a new bed pan. Various design solutions were shown during this meeting. This innovative project was initiated by Arion.

The synergy of three different study programs was very efficient. Students involved had a very positive experience. Working in
multidisciplinary
groups enabled the students to explore the current bed pans from various perspectives. The three groups used a human centered design method in their approaches to design a new bed pan. Students learned to be critical towards resources and processes in health care.

The concepts designed by the students were part of a first brainstorm phase. Arion will present and evaluate their concepts with field specialists to create a final list of demands concerning the productdevelopment of the future bed pan.

By ROB VAN KRANENBURG

The question of how to store, interpret, and use relevant information will be one of the most important in the coming decades with the increasing merging of analogue and digital situations, systems, and contexts. Pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), sentient computing, pro-active computing, Disappearing Computer, Digital Territory, Ambient Intelligence, all these terms point to a shared 21st century vision on computing as running in the background.

Not only computers, but our whole environment is becoming smarter because computing power and connectivity disappear into it. What will business and cultural industry look like in such an environment? How will this changing environment be translated into educational concepts?

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar changed? The oral literacy – dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall – was made redundant because the techniques could be externalized via the pencil.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century,” Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991). With changing tools, power changes.

In this workshop we will brainstorm about what a master in an IOT is. Does it visualize changing tools and relating power structures? Does it help to manage and/or reconfigure those structures? Can it be internationally organized? And if it can, how? Is it a mash-up of existing programs? Is it a new program? For who? Can Council provide a set of core modules that are generic to a global situation and by linking up with local institutions make these relevant for real everyday transactions, exchange, services?

The workshop will be moderated by Dan Calloway, Liesbeth Huybrechts, and Rob van Kranenburg

You can register here