Titles and abstracts issue 2

Titles and abstracts
Authors: please edit this page, adding your title and abstract in the table below.

contributor	title	abstract (150-300 words)
rootoftwo
Nana Adusei Poku
Harma Staal
Jan Melis
Mark Mulder
Fred Wartna
Bori Feher
Lee Davis
Thomas Ostergard
Becky Slogeris
Anne Seghers	Designers, get beyond ‘raising awareness’	On February 4, the public event Beyond Social Night: redesigning the process took place. Best practices of interdisciplinary student projects on fast fashion, health care, refugees and wheelchair users took center stage. The underlying goal of the night was to investigate the processes behind these projects on social art and design. What is the intention of this generation designers? What are they aiming for? Is their methodology in line with their goals? And is the educational system consistent with their needs? The shown best practices all act on a shared value: empathy. The designers engage with a certain social issue and want to raise awareness of the problems, challenges and opportunities linked with this issue. But ‘raising awareness’ is just the first step of the designers’ intentions. They explicitly want to do more. Their prime goal is to have a transformative impact on society with regard to the issue they’re discussing. Simply put: they want to add value. The intentions of the projects are with no exception honorable. The problem is that almost none of the designers seem to get beyond the first step of ‘raising awareness’. With exception of the project RAID, each of the best practices triggers the question what the follow-up will be. If adding value or transforming (a part of) society is your goal, you need to generate credible proof that your design proposal is provoking the desired implications. Without this proof, the impact of the project is only based on assumptions and, therefore, questionable. So, when ‘having impact’ is the main goal of a social art project, it is import to know what kind of impact is being achieved. Therefore, it is needed that designers apply tools or methodologies that reveal what the impact of a project exactly is. It is not necessary to invent a totally new methodology. Suitable methods and tools can be found in examining working processes of other (academic) research disciplines. In this, the educational system can play an important role.
Jessica Hammerlund Bergmann
Roger Teeuwen
Barbara Alves
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Bruno Setola?
Sikko Cleveringa?
Anne Nigten?