Impact-Consciousness

author: Anne Seghers

On February 4, the public event Beyond Social Night: Redesigning the Process was held. Best practices of recent 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?

WdKA’s best Social Design practices

The best practices that took the stage, represented different thematic approach within WdKA’s Social Practices: Open Design, Cultural Diversity, Sustainability and Gamification. The project Wheelshare of Wietske Lutgendorff, student Open Design, offers an online platform on which wheelchair users can share images and short video clips, shot by a camera attached to their wheelchair. The videos show the inaccessibility of public space, which wheelchair users have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. According to Wietske, the Wheelshare project will lead to a broader consciousness on current bottlenecks in the accessibility of The Netherlands and, eventually, will bring us a step closer to a more inclusive society. Ghada Al-Saoddy, student Cultural Diversity, documents a self-reflective process of her being a former refugee herself. She relates this to the issue of the current influx of refugees. Her video project, entitled We have planted the love for Iraq in your hearts, searched for ways to give the refugees a face Dutch people can relate to. By carrying out this project, Ghada subconsciously tries to nuance the current refugee discourse in a very natural and unforced manner. In the project RAID, students Sustainability Kelly de Gier, Domino Koopmanschap and Gina Willems address and alter the fact that many fashion consumers are aware of the unethical aspects of fast fashion – for example the inhumane working conditions in the low wage countries the clothing industry is doing business – but they don’t act in accordance with this fact. One of the reasons for this is that a proper alternative for these consumers is non-existent. RAID aims at offering an ethical alternative to this fast fashion consumer. A smart collaboration with the Salvation Army enables the development of very fashionable recycled clothing for a price that competes with the fast fashion industry.

Common ground

These 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. However, ‘raising awareness’ is just the first step of the designers’ intentions. They explicitly claim they 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 and have impact.

Get beyond assumptions

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 first of all 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, if ‘having impact’ is the main goal of a social art project, it is import to know what kind of impact is being achieved. Designers need to apply – or at least be aware of the existence of – tools or methodologies that reveal what kind of impact a project is creating. It is not necessary to invent an entirely new methodology. Suitable methods and tools can be found in examining the way other (research) disciplines are mapping their effects and results. Let’s for example take a look at CAL-XL and the Mapping Impact initiative.

Tools to identify impact

CAL XL is a Dutch laboratory for arts and society. In this laboratory, among other things, community art projects are being investigated. One of their research projects is POMICA: an applied research that aims to provide insight in the functioning of community arts projects. The goal was to get designers become more aware of the meaning and outreach of their project, so that every stakeholder can act upon this. Obviously, evaluation of and reflection on the project took a prominent place in this research. CAL-XL emphasizes that it’s not their intention to call to account the artists, but to make the value of community arts projects understandable and self-evident. To find out the outreach of a project, CAL-XL uses different instruments and methodologies, but they focus on qualitative research. An important tool CAL-XL has developed to evaluate a project is called the Project-scan. This instrument is to be seen as a form of self-evaluation. Designers describe the ambitions and realizations of their (design) project. To get a more accurate idea of the outcomes and impact of your project, it’s preferable that the scan is being made at the start of the project as well as at when the project has been finished. The Project-scan makes explicit what choices have been made and therefore increases the designers’ insights in their own project. As the scan clarifies intended and realized ambitions, it simplifies the process of optimizing the project and it makes it easier to open up the project for discussion with (potential) partners. And, to end with, the scan makes it also possible to compare similar projects. Tools to identify impact – Mapping Impact (SVA) In 2010 the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York started a program, called Impact! Design for Social Change. In March 2015 they organized a panel discussion called Mapping Impact. Three experts in impact measurement came together to explore what designers can learn from how other fields think about impact measurement - from public health, impact investing and poverty reduction, to city government, design, and social science. New York’s Visual Arts School felt the urge to organize this discussion to explore what the result can be of incorporating impact assessment into the design process. They claimed that it has the potential of strengthening the position of best practices, lead the field to new insights, and help avoid making mistakes in de future. ”We don’t question the power of design to improve daily life. But we must avoid that only to find after days, months or years later the interventions the designers implemented, actually did more harm than good. We must avoid mistake as these, based on the subjective approach of designers to solve real world problems. Impact assessment leads us towards a more evidence based practice, rooted in a deep understanding in the way communities work. Impact assessment isn’t something new, it’s already common in many other disciplines, such as economics, public health, international development, impact investing, public policy just to name a few. Also collaborations with disciplines as anthropology, environmental psychology and social work can help build legitimate approaches to impact assessment.” In the panel discussion Rachel Dannefer of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene explains how they use the Logic Model to map out what you’re hope to achieve and how you’re planning to do this. Key to make this model work is that it’s reasonable to expect your design strategies lead to the identified outcomes. Sasha Dichter of Acumen calls himself an ‘impact investor’ in the field of poverty. He sees impact not as a Yes or No question. Acumen started to use the Lean Data Initiative. “Randomized control-trials used in (academic) researches are incredibly expensive and take sometimes longer than the project itself. That’s a disadvantage.” He pleads for creating short but constant feedback loops in design processes. This generates better understanding of the effects being created and enables the possibility to intervene in time to adjust the effects of a project or product.

Make impact-consciousness an intrinsic element of the design process

So, as a designer, if you want to conclude something that holds water concerning the effect of your intervention, experimenting and evaluation need to be present in your process. Without this, the anticipated impact of a project is only to wobble on assumptions. These examples mentioned above show that impact-consciousness could be helpful to optimize the design project and to generate proof that intended effects are to be expected. At the moment, however, many social designers lack knowledge of experimenting and different types of evaluation. This is where the educational system has an important part to play. They can provide social design students with the required knowledge and tools, so that impact-consciousness becomes an intrinsic element of the social design process. So, the ball is in the educational system’s court now.

Anne Seghers (1982) is an urban designer. She works on urban research, theory and design. She focuses on innovative ways of urban development in which socio-spatial issues are being addressed. Anne is also editor of Blauwe Kamer, a professional magazine on urban design and landscape architecture.