Reference Publications

Designing citizens: excerpted from a short talk with Carnegie-Mellon University's Industrial Design Faculty

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1995 by Wendy E. Brawer

ONE

Don't check your citizenship at the studio door. Take part in the bettering of the country by involving your students in the examination of bigger problems and conditions plaguing our society. Are domestic disarmament and child abuse design problems? Industrial design skills are well suited to developing solutions to more challenging problems than those raised by most products. Help set the stage for deeply motivated citizen designers.

TWO

Most Americans are aware of their rights as citizens; a design school teaches us about our design rights, and how to safeguard things like our intellectual property rights. But what about our responsibilities as citizens and as citizen designers? Do we owe anything to our society beyond the pleasure and status an elegant widget can give? Is quality of life being sabotaged, corrupted, or improved by industrial design? Can designers take heart and become post-industrial? How can designers help create an America where stewardship and being an asset to the community are enjoyable and natural parts of our profession?

THREE

This nation of rugged individuals needs better tools for collaborating with others. Teach us to communicate with engineers and scientists, politicians and business people. Help us work fairly with people, regardless of stereotyped differences. Part of this is de-emphasizing ego and competitiveness in design education. Please teach us to respect heroic deeds above heroes. We need to look beyond Western culture and encourage a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural approach.

FOUR

We can't guarantee a life of sufficiency and dignity to each human in America, let alone the rest of the world, until we understand the fundamentals of restoring and maintaining a sustainable society. One of the first steps toward that is to expand our definition of home, and use that broadened definition when assigning class projects. We must think and talk about where and how we wish to live. What do housewares look like when we include our whole bioregion in our definition? Students must have a better understanding of the upstream and downstream effects of their work on our environment. We must rethink the role of natural systems and cycles in our designs, and understand how permanent even our most disposable products really are.

According to Paul Hawken, the average American adult can recognize approximately one thousand different logos and trademarks, but can name fewer than ten plant species. Designers have had a lot to do with this unbalanced view, the positioning that has made Americans view environmentalists as extremists and weirdos. I compare this position to where computer nerds were a short time ago. Now they are leading us all down the information highway, and today's job market demands that designers have well-developed computer skills. Likewise, without the ability to integrate environmental considerations into our projects, we will not become leaders, and we'll be much less employable in the near future.

FIVE

Don't fear the sun. I'm talking about renewable energy now, and the opportunity this constant source of power affords designers. Don't continue to buy the illusions created by cheap fossil fuels. That's the blood of dinosaurs, and it will drive us to extinction too. Investigate the scientific and political reality of oil and learn about the tremendous strides renewable technologies are taking. Don't make America dependent on old technologies, and stop waiting to put the emerging renewable dynamos to work. Many options are cost-effective now, and a tremendous range of other sustainable technologies are near term.

Design = Power. We are in a great position to design innovative infrastructures, applications, and systems.

SIX

Please teach us that learning never ends. Don't send us out into the world thinking that we are ever done being students. Everything is evolving too fast to permit us to rest. Encourage curiosity and the questioning of authority, even yours. Get us to consider design a continual quest, and get us to decide what the quest is for. Designers need long-term goals for their lives' work.

If we start now, perhaps by the millennium we'll have developed the ability to plan and design in a more holistic, democratic way. Perhaps we'll be ready.

Wendy E. Brawer is a post-industrial designer in New York City. Since 1990 her company, Modern World Design, has created services and products that promote ecological stewardship, such as the Times Square Deposit Banks and the Green Apple Map (which is currently being expanded into a global Green Map System). You can find Brawer on the Web at http://www.interportnet/~webrawer/web.html.>