Richard Buchanan, co-editor of Design Issues, the international journal of design history, theory, and criticism, argued that designers possess skills that are useful to “discover new relationships among signs, things, actions, and thoughts.”[1] Like Buchanan, Alastair Fuad-Luke, author of Design Activism, purported that “design’s ability to operate through ‘things’ and ‘systems’ makes it particularly suitable for dealing with contemporary societal, economic, and environmental issues,” such as the design innovation firm IDEO.[2] Designers’ abilities to use visualization, divergent and convergent thinking, problem-solving activities, and user engagement research methods can certainly help provide a broad perspective of the ails of social problems. Although, design professions must reevaluate how its methods, tools, and ideas may not be broadly applicable for complex social problems since the “scale of the challenge will move us beyond our training.”[3] In particular, Meredith Davis noted that graphic design training fundamentally “views complexity as a problem to be overcome through reductivist artifacts, not as an inevitable and pervasive attribute of life in the post-industrial community.”[4] As a remedy, institutions are beginning to offer graduate education to equip students with the means to address social problems with design. However, graphic design generally lacks well-defined, scalable methodology to examine and respond to complex social problems in specific domains, such as government and health.
My thesis investigates the role of graphic design in the government public sector to deal with varying complexities of social problems. In particular, my research question focuses on,
What graphic design methods are useful to improve public health services for the homeless in Pitt County, N.C.?
My investigation demonstrates that there is no single design methodology to address all levels of complexity of a social problem. Moreover, being able to recognize opportunities for incremental design interventions may be paramount to systematically solving a social problem. Over a six-month period, the project shifted through three different phases aimed at addressing homelessness by responding to situations as they emerged rather than a pre-planned course of action:
Phase 1) Service design: Redesigning the Greenville Community Shelter Health Clinic service experience
Phase 2) Journey mapping: Mapping the complexity of homelessness public policies and strategies through collaboration scenarios
Phase 3) Responsive practice: Dynamically responding to social situations to develop incremental resolutions
[1] Buchannan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 5–12.
[2] Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London; Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2009, 2; Nussbaum, Bruce. “Innovation vs. design–the British Design Council weighs in.” Businessweek, November 30, 2005. Accessed on June 3, 2012. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2005/11/innovation_vsde.html. Nussbaum stated that IDEO has moved beyond traditional product design methods and output “to systemizing design methodology for all kinds of arenas, including social problems.”
[3] Perkins, Shel. Talent is not enough: Business secrets for designers. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006.
[4] Davis, Meredith. “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore...” Keynote presentation. AIGA Design Educators Conference, Boston, MA. April 4–8, 2008.