I took a quick trip to home fields this September to confer with my people about our work here in Maputo, how the strategy is going, how to change course and what the next steps should be. I also attended the annual Cirrus Conference that took place in Copenhagen this time. I am the leader of the Cirrus Network, which is a network of the majority of Design and Art schools in the Nordic and Baltic countries. That work has given me great pleasure (and obligations) since I really enjoy working for design internationally, especially promoting it as something of value for society and with the other institutes influence national and Nordic design policy, education and research.

I gave lectures in Oslo and Reykjavik about our work in Africa and the establishment of ISAC to make sure that a wider group of people participate in our effort. Surely a larger group has the ability to find wider and diverse possibilities that just the two of us. We have also always considered ourselves as representatives of the networks of designers that we belong to like KHiO, LHÍ, Cirrus and the Cumulus Association. The objective of meeting up with friends in the North was to look out for possibilities of cooperation in the coming very sensitive years for the new school. It pleased me greatly how many came to my presenatations, especially to the Reykjavik lecture and it was fun to meet many friends and participate in discussions about possibilities. Now I have returned to the busy life of getting things further off the ground, participating in the World Wide Views workshop and exhibition that Sóley has been running here and get on with the many tasks of creating strategies for the coming months and years.

We have been developing a project named SRVD for almost five years now. The seeds of the work came up when I met Lorraine Gamman, a researcher at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design during a conference in Oslo. We were speaking in the same forum about social responsibility and design. Lorraine is the director of Design Against Crime Research Centre in the Innovation Centre  at St. Martins and runs projects there with Adam Thorpe, who is the creative director of the same unit. We started talking about how irritated people and thus designers have become of the world as it is, systems, things, environment etc. Their good friend Maziar Raein, who used to work in St. Martins is also a good friend of ours and co-worker in the Oslo National Academy. Together we decided to look into these issues, as very many other designers were also doing at the time as has transpired. I invited them to Oslo for a seminar that we ran to discuss the issues over two days, and then we met on a kind of a regular basis over the years, trying to define what we really meant with social responsibility and then later responsivity. Out of this came our name of SRVD (Socially Responsive Design), an umbrella covering the many projects that want to address such issues. Well, to make a long story short, we have now at last completed the second phase of our research bid to HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, or to be more specific with Alison Clarke in the Papanek Institute there. The research project is named:

How are we being served? Understanding/defining Socially Responsive Design (SRVD) in relation to Social, Economic and Cultural (SEC) Innovation Success in the 21st Century, and reviewing its impact, particularly on the Third Sector.

Now we have to wait until Oct-Nov to find out if our bids becomes successful, but I know that there is stiff competition in the field. What I like is the fact that we have spent lot of time to think and discuss. SRVD does already exist as an umbrella and we are all working under that flag, like for example the DiG-Equality project that we are running now in conjunction with the EDDA program in Iceland  that has the sub-name: Center of Excellence in Gender, Equality and Diversity Research.

Fingers crossed

]]> http://nordicdogs.com/2009/09/05/hera-bid-completed/feed/ 0 http://nordicdogs.com/2009/05/16/social-engineering-and-service-design-in-maputo/ http://nordicdogs.com/2009/05/16/social-engineering-and-service-design-in-maputo/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 07:35:30 +0000 dogs http://nordicdogs.com/?p=612

Here is a link to a photo album on facebook about this project

Evangelican service designers talk like they have invented something new. I really do not care if people think they have invented the wheel again if it works and they are happy. But military planners, society builders, philosophers and architects (sometimes all in one and the same person) have been planning services and social solutions for as long as society has existed. There have been techniques, rules, solutions and problems that we had to learn about while studying architecture. Some successful and unfortunately many bad cases of social problem solving that has resulted in more disaster than was foreseen. My upbringing in architecture and design happened in one such historical moment when we attacked Modernism as the dogma of our forefathers and decided to address context again and named it Post-Modernism.

All this is fine and why do I divulge into my past? Because I am interested in service design as a way of contextualizing design problem solving. To move design away from the formalistic laboratory of the design (school) studio to the ethnographical contextualization of design problems. In that light, service design (can also call it social design) is architectural design, communication design, interaction design etc. The visual communication design students in ENAV here in Maputo have been given the task by Soley to create a tool that will explain to the Maputo citizens how the public transport system works. This has to be explained somewhat further.

Most of public transport here in Maputo is run by very entrepreneurial young men in small vans named Chappas. These are predominately second hand (actually 8th hand) Toyota HiAce vans that would not pass a control test on other continents. The cars, made for maximum 8-9 people transport up to 25 people at the time, each passenger paying a 5 meticas (ca 0,15 dollars) per trip. Since this public service is a private enterprise they race each other to pick up the most number of passengers (trying to overtake each other), and the routes they take are really only known to the driver who most often has installed a super, super active sound system with huge base boxes and the Marabenta Drum and Base runs to cover the noice of the falling apart car. There is also a semi-public driven bus service that is slow and unreliable and needs not be explained here.

Since we came to Maputo I have gone through the experience to take the chappas, sometimes for specific transport and also to gain experience of this public service. There is no way to understand how the system works, one just has to jump aboard, read the name-sticker on the car and hope it passes close to where one is going. Of course not speaking the local language yet does not help. We have also realized that flat maps that we Western people are used to are not common and many friends have difficulty in using them, relying rather on landmarks and mental mapping systems that are more linked to visual and experiencial memory rather than to a Cartesian grid system.

The students are to come with proposals that serve the local public and visitors to the city so that it is possible to understand clearly and use the transport system effectively. There are of course many famous such system in the world, maybe the best known the London Underground Map designed by Harry Beck, actually an engineering draftsman, and the Paris Metro profile including the stations designed by Hector Guimard.

The task for the students I have seen as fourfold primarily.

a) to simplify the everyday (efficiency)

b) to create a collective profile for the whole service and unifying element for the city

c) to divulge information clear and fast

d) to make the mundane more ejoyable

Friday May 15th was the first presentation by the students of the research group work. The research is more complicated than in the normal Western design school since the information is not available through Google, but the students had to do more ethnographical work on their own every day, relating directly in themselves to the current problems and issues that could be addressed. The discussion during the presentations was actually much more about social engineering than graphic design. That was very stimulating and the teachers made some very good comments to the students about such issues. I saw a realization that graphic designers can be fundamental in social engineering and political motivation. This is good for young design students and for the school environment that is mostly arts and crafts orientated and not with proper design entrepreneurial perspective.

So, is the project a service design project? Dealing with logistics and processes? Using people as prototypes for checking social engineering? In my opinion it is although the project is just a simple graphic design school project. It is a project that is fundamental to society here in Africa, while much of graphic design understanding is more geared towards advertizing campaigns and posters for commercial enterprises. More news later when the project unfolds, but we are discussing now how to continue over the next weeks. All suggestions thankfully received.

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Satu Miettinen (link)

Hi Dori,

totally agree with this, world was already invented…

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Uma V Chandru

Dori- your inclusive and contextual concept of “service” design that includes the ethnographic makes sense-but I curious to understand how you and the others view- public/service/social and also “cultural design” – are they all inter-disciplinary and interchangeable terms?

On another note pertaining to your blog- In Bangalore too, we have had privately owned (private entrepreneurs addressing the lack of adequate public transport) vehicles called tempos driven by young men with a helper who hangs at the edge of the open door and pushes passengers in and out and collects the money -Like our public transport bus drivers, these tempos also cause accidents. The latter also stop suddenly to drop and pick up people and don’t stop in the right places, Both drive like crazy and the latter play loud music/videos too- they usually connect the rural/peri-urban with the urban – Given our massive population-The tempos as well as the govt buses transport more numbers than they are meant for.

Reading flat maps is also something these drivers can’t do -if technology were to be introduced-they will need voice activated systems for directions (but wonder if they will hear it over the noise of the loud music/videos)-looking at maps and trying to figure them out would certainly cause more accidents.

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Uma, you pinpoint the problem (or the task). Your description of the chappa service is exactly the same as here. The other guy hangs on the sliding door, and if the van is full they hang out of the window.

But about mapping. This is something that I am especially interested in. Why do we impress our flat Cartesian maps onto everything? Me, being an architect know from experience that people generally do not understand geometrical maps/plans. See for example my video of the new proposed premises of the art school in Oslo. I made it as an animation after frustration in meetings where my co-workers did not understand the drawings and kept arguing about things that are not in the pipeline. So, how do we map?
This is a long subject, but my hunch is that there might be a possibility of illustrating landmarks? Mentally map the most important places. The safety instructions in aeroplanes (that I have collected for years) do not include maps. Ikea does not supply maps for furniture, but simple illustrations of how to use and behave.
I have no idea how the information should be communicated, but am excited to see the work of the students in the coming weeks.

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Adam Thorpe (link)

I think the bus project is an information design project. The project is similar to service design in that it requires the designer to understand the ‘user journey’ (in this caes litteraly) and create a design that facilitates this journey to be delivered more efficiently, safely and enjoyably. Although the task requires the designers to understand the service provided in terms of a complex system does it require them to/or give them the opportunity to change the service in terms of setting the rules that the drivers adhere (no overtaking at bus stops) to or getting them to keep to timetables, or agreeing set routes and stops etc? It will be interesting to follow what happens next with the project. Its almost as though the current service is somewhere between a bus service and an ‘open’ car sharing scheme. Are the driver-entrepreneurs involved in the project? Does the system work despite the apparent safety concerns of competitive driving and overcrowded vehicles? What do the drivers and users want more of and less of? How will the driver-entrepreneurs benefit from changes to the current system? Do they have a central representation that enables consensus to be negotiated in terms of how the overall system may be re-structured, and this restructuring applied? What are the distances travelled by the buses? Are buses the answer of could it be bikes?
Who sets the briefs for the projects – how are they scoped? Look forward to seeing/reading more.

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Uma V Chandru

I am sure you have seen this description of Cultural Design at RPI’s CCD program.

Btw-Enjoyed your animation was fun and did wonder why there were no maps and floor plans

Regarding maps-they have been critiqued for being instruments of power in the hands of the State, Empire and Capital (Habermas)

John Pickles has an interesting chapter in his book -A history of spaces on Counter mapping where he briefly discusses Habermas and also Brian Harley’s view of maps and their hidden agenda. Harley was opposed to digital cartography and GIS and saw maps as “instruments of power and embedded in social systems of ethnocentricism, privilege and control.”-but perceived paper topographical maps to be more democratic and humanistic forms of geographical knowledge.

Pg. 185: Bill Bunge’s (nomad cartography or insurgent cartography)- community-based maps embedded in the local needs and struggles are interesting -for him science was a tool of progress or “critical modernism” – founder of the Detroit Geographical expedition – where radical geographers worked in ghettos etc in the inner city to support local groups, human rights, environmental and civil rights struggles. Community-based mapping brought geography to the service of the poor and powerless. – repositioned the cartographer vis a vis the poor in the maps which included abundance besides lack, super abundance next to abject poverty etc- Shifted away from urban planner type of maps-mapped children’s safety, raised questions like why were children going hungry in detroit when “overabundant” food in warehouses was rotting, etc.

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Dori Gislason

Thanks for the comments. I must make clear that the group of students are really on Foundation level, since there is not higher education in art and design here. The project is written by Soley with my inputs, and it seems complex for the students while it is also very near at hand for them since it is part of their everyday. The chappa drivers are not included yet but we wonder if it is possible to invite some for review. It has been complex to discuss the map of Maputo, but this morning we turned the angle and decided to concentrate on just separate routes to go further. We did follow the path of one Chappa to find out how it is possible to represent the landmarks on that route. Soley presented a series of images, a video through our car windscreen and I drew a kind of a simple map of the route on its own. Now the students are working on separate routes and it will be interesting to see how it goes. But surely I agree that this project is an information and profiling project, not having resources to do changes to social and infrastructural issues. It is interesting to reflect that two years ago when a master student from my faculty Vanja, spent five weeks here and asked the students to address social issues that they then also selected the chappa phenomenon then concentrating on the safety issues.

Further development will be reported.

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Uma V Chandru

Will be more interesting if it goes beyond an information design or simple way finding exercise to the students meandering through the marxist history via the street names as you indicated it might.

Having ridden those tempos from rural to urban areas during my doctoral fieldwork in the mid 90s, the luxury of an “enjoyable” ride is far from the mind of those who are simply happy to get into the tempo and reach their destination.

With regard to including drivers & users in the design team-would be great if possible. Not sure one can get them to follow rules & time tables unless there are some sort of incentives built in or union created for this informal sector. The aim of the drivers & owners of tempos in India is to make the maximum profit and in the fastest time. Driver/helper are given “baata”- a per diem, which is usually a fixed amount. Some may also get a percentage of day’s earnings. If not related to owner, helper & driver often take cuts from the earnings.

To Do Good!

To do good projects have been on the increase recently. Social responsibility and ethics have taken over from profit and business innovation as the most discussed issues in design schools. The world of Al Gore, Bono, Architecture for Humanity and Design Without Boundaries has entered the design schools and even to some extent the design centers and media. Today, when visiting design fairs one wonders about the motivation of designers and producers displaying things that not many have use for (see previous blog about the Stockholm Furniture Fair).

Implementation of Doing Good Design

But many projects wanting to do good for society and the environment have landed in difficult pitfalls during implementation and execution. The utopian driven Romanticism that one senses in the studios meets trouble when it hits reality. I wonder if we do not need to introduce a different working environment and competence into the design education.

Short Design Perspective

I am not going to disseminate design history here, but a stepping stone history can be seen this way: Design gained its independence trough the work of William Morris and many others in the end of the 19th century. It was born out of manufacture and mass-production of every day things that previously was made by local craftsmen. The manufacture was based on the philosophy of the crafts, maybe culminating in the Bauhaus ‘crafts to industry to multi production’ musical.

National Design Policy (Bella Centre, Norsk Form, Design Museum, etc)

After the Second World War national design activism gained momentum resulting in the establishment of design councils, design centers and national design policies. I remember the Design Centre in Haymarket, London displaying ‘good design’ items, various exercises in form with application to function. Now, most national capitals and major cities have design centers that promote something that is named ‘Good Design’ based on advice from people that had the licence for proper form, proper materials and proper designers. All very boring. 70’s, 80’s and 90’s design fashion then developed into a celebrity culture of faces on covers of magazines, more idiotic designs like a sofa for stupid prices designed by Saha Hadid, Pawson etc. Everyone competed to outdo the others in extravagance. I am not blaming people directly but the zeitgeist. I was an architect in the late yuppy 80’s and did some rather cracy things. My only excuse is that it is possible to change. We have many examples of the same like Tim Brown talking about toothbrush design in the Intersections conference 07: “When I think about this, I kind of get a little bit depressed. It makes me feel less great about what I do as a designer.” Same goes for Philip Starck in Ted Conference apologizing for his actions in the Nineties.

Romantic Socialism

Morris was of course a socialist, meaning to make the world better and more beautiful for the middle classes, like IKEA has managed to succeed with. Le Corbusier was a devoted salon communist, proposing social solutions in the city and the home while working for the affluent. The 60’s and the 70’s were dominated by architectural projects in housing and urban planning wanting to create social solutions for the every-man (whoever that is?). This all culminated in determinism for the masses and architects and planners became the most hated professions in the late Seventies and ultra self indulgent Post Modernism took over. I was one of them. I remember a slogan in our office: ‘If you can make it more complicated, do so!’

Innovation

Around the millenium  commerce came into the force in the design field and innovation became the most used word. Governments started to look at design as part of innovation, we were courted by business and industry as the new way to make profit. And designers and design theorists participated in this, we took part in many projects and research into innovation and the creative industries. Out came the Cox Review, funds from the Nordic Innovation Centre, co-projects with the business schools became the norm. I have participated in such projects, sometimes being surprised that I was the only designer in the group! The US magazine Business Week asked recently ‘Are the Design Schools the new Business Schools?’

Environment, Society and the Developing World.

But underlying the Noughts has simmered the realization that things are maybe not going so well, and the small group of eccentrics actually might be right. With awareness of global issues like climate, developing countries resulting in organic commerce, ethics, fairtrade etc has come into force. I have been running projects where my students of design have worked in groups with students from business universities since the beginning of this century. The orientation of the projects has changed dramatically in the direction that now over 90% of the projects involve ethical, social and climate issues while the early days the projects were much more commercial. The worst case being a project in producing and selling stencils for the barbering of ladies pubic hair!

The Global Scenario

The  futurist H. G. Tibbs proposed in 1998 how things might happen in the years after the millenium. The diagram shows his ideas, and it seems that his proposal was quite right. There has been an underlying anxiety about where we are heading and many spontaneous activities have resulted. This spontaneous activity that he proposes results for example in various ‘To Do Good’ projects. They are driven by Utopianism. A need to be nice to ‘the other’ like Madonna and many  celebrities adopting African children etc. My opinion is that very many of these projects do not succeed because they do not have anchored strategies and do not know how to act in complicated political situations and cultural diversity. The actors struggle and in many cases decide to do ’safe’ projects like helping South-American women in making toys for children. But the toys have no way of reaching the market that needs them and much of the Western market has actually no need for the products. This results in disappointment and Western subsidy of products that just increase the rubbish in the modern Western home that is full of Playstations and mobile phones.

It is fine to walk around with a basket made by African women. It is fine to eat organic Kenyan beans. It is fine to adopt third world children. These are all small acts of good, but the task is so much bigger and time is too short and most of these acts are self indulgent and in some cases reinforce the differences between the rich and the poor. They are bread-crumbs from the affluent.

Friend Richard Kroecker in Halifax came for a visit to tell us about the Pictou Landing Health Centre he produced in a remote village in Canada. Most of the difficulties that they came against and the tricks they had to do were to deal with Canadian government standards and procedures. Kate Stohr from Architecture for Humanity came here to tell us about their work and in her explanation about the project in post-Catrina she told about planning laws, financing, governmental agencies. The house design was actually not the most important task!

Design and Infrastructure

The design schools do not consider infrastructural issues very important. The schools are still based on the old Form/Crafts/Products principles. The teachers are many educated in art schools where the idea of the Renaissance heroic artist still prevails. The design centers are similarly driven by the same policies and design agencies that want to do social projects do not realize the implications of complex politics, marketing and cultural differences. The design schools have more focus on entrepreneurship, but mostly towards business and industry. This is good, but issues of social entrepreneurship are needed. I have been involved in service design projects and they, while they are about people and services, do concentrate on profit for the service provider more than the benefit for the user.

I have made two diagrams of project development. The first one shows the ideal project where the process goes from start to end in a beautiful direct line representing actions and results. This is a possible scenario for the individual craftsman who through rigourous training can be trusted to deliver results, like a good piece of a ceramic pot in the controlled situation of the ceramic studio.

The second diagram (inspired by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and furniture designer Bernard Cache) shows the actual process, where external factors direct the project off course to various problematic situations. For those that are not driven by vision and with entrepreneurial skills it is a difficult process, lots of anxiety and trauma, with pitfalls and trouble all the way. No wonder many of the designers do not risk taking on such a project. It is better to create simple projects that can be proudly displayed in galleries rather than implemented in society where often the results are invisible to the design media. Those designers have less chance to have their face on a cover of a magazine, given prices for ‘Good Design’.

The design and crafts schools and the practical reality after school are seen as protected studios and worshops, almost like sheltered work place for handicapped people rather than social, political and entrepreneural activities for the good of society.

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Dori Turnstall  

It has to do with the fact that designing ends at the prototype (whether it is an object, or a concept, or a “transformation”) as such it often fails to fully engage with the complex processes and issues of implementation.

Socially responsible project “failures” that I have experienced have often had one of two sources: the failure to be implemented or the failure to scale the implementation in order to have measurable impact.

My health financial information project for Chicago Cook County Bureau of Health Services failed because the employees directly blocked its implementation through stonewalling. Why did they act that way? The project would have made more transparent their processes, which they wanted to keep private, so they sat on the warehouse of designed artifact systems and processes until I ran out of energy trying to both adapt the design to the bureaucratic culture, yet bring about change in the culture. As an anthropologist, the most challenging thing to do is to change institutional cultures.

Thinking of the Design for Democracy example, it is mired by the fact that it cannot scale to have national impact, although it has been approved by the Fed gov as the national standard for ballot design and polling place information and the templates to implement the system is widely available. AIGA, the sponsoring organization, does not have the resources (staff and money) to convince all 3,421 counties to adopt the standard. The Fed government cannot mandate the changes due to the Constitution. So even though it has been successfully implemented, it will lag in its ability to scale.

But failure is always a question of for whom and under what time frame. Is DforD a failure because it will take 10 years to have full acceptance instead of 2-3 years? If Cook County rolls out the design system because a new Lt. Government applies pressure, will it still be a failure?

Perhaps socially responsible projects “fail” because the temporal scale of change is longer than the temporal engagement of designers.

John Wood

Brilliant question and response, so far – I agree with Dori T. insofar as timescale…this is not confined to socially-oriented projects – it is also true in many governmental projects [e.g. the last 7 major computer systems in UK] that failed through their complexity<?>…..also because small deceits, optimisms and incompetences remained invisible or seemed trivial until the whole scheme was switched on. We are looking at a redesign of design to include self-steering of the whole co-design system…..[must get some sleep now:)

Maziar Raein

I wonder if this is to do with the how design has been implemented previously in society. 
Very practical implementation of a logo, or here is a new chair. These are easy to understand, but not necessarily easy to measure the effect. (Does a new chair really make the world a better place? etc.) Well there has been some quantitive measurement of the effects of design as well national feedback from things like the Cox Report etc.

However, Socially Responsive Design, or the implementation of ideals is harder to measure. How do we measure design that changes our behavior as human beings? Where is the evidence for the effect of this sort of intervention?

Kate Stohr

Well…ok. Let’s talk turkey. 

If you look at the batting average of commercial firms– how many designs they take through schmatics vs. how many they see through fruition. I’d wager it’s about 10 unrealized projects to every 1 realized project. 

At www.architectureforhumanity.org, we have the same batting average. We’re about 10 to 3…and then only because we don’t have the manpower to take more projects through pre-development. 

So, i think you have to look at it from a different lense. 

Also many projects do good without being do-gooder projects. We should not underestimate the value of sustainable design in the construction of offices, warehouse space, and the manufacture of products. 

We’ve seen a seachange in the way the industry works. We are helping our clients become better stewards… so again, look out outcomes not output. 

kas

I am an architect. Architecture deals foremost with people, not buildings. Architecture deals with how people live, interact, protect themselves etc. As an architect have I never been able to create structures and plans without people. Since I am brought up in theater my way of designing has been to make up plays of life; theatrical events and actually sometimes based my private houses on well known plays that I sat under as a child while my father, an actor in the Reykjavik City Theatre, was rehearsing. One of my better known private house designs in Iceland is based on the play by Anton Chekov: THREE SISTERS, because the family that I designed it for felt like that play.

Why do I have to say this? To clarify the fact that architecture is Social Design. The first town planners were creators of societies, looking out for infrastructural and political solutions for the good of the people. A good example is Pericles, the architect of the Acropolis and an influential developer of the society. Often these early planners were military leaders and city planner in the same person. But the situation is more complex today.

The newly named field Social Design bases its existence on doing social good, for the benefit of society, human relations and sturctures. As stated in Wikipedia: “as the creation of social reality; design of the social world and the shaping of products and services.”

The fundamental definition of design is: “To make the every day easier, simpler and more beautiful”. It is about humanizing processes like technology, communication, services and strategies. As such, design is fundamental to all human activity. Design has always a social agenda, but this has sometimes been forgotten, for example when services and structures have been created by industrial designers, architects, city planners creating structuralistic solutions based on technical expertice or theoretical functions where relations between structures and processes has become fundamental and not the relation of people. In a sense, the receent term Social Design has come up, to differentiate it from technical design that has often evolved in technical design schools located in engineering faculties.

All design is in its essence active, it thrives on doing, it is visionary and solution oriented – to quote the designer Richard Seymour in the 2007 Intersections Conference: “If you are not positive and with a belief in the future then you should do something less dangerous than design“.

Relational design. In his book, RELATIONAL AESTHETICS, Bourriaud says ‘Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts’. The case is the same with many design solutions, especially those that deal with situations, like the design of events, space, products and furniture. I am very excited about the development of furniture/product design and interior architecture over the coming years, because the fields seem to have come to saturation. No more of these things are needed in the Western World at least, people are sick of new products every year, extreme makeover shows etc. (see previous blog) There is a need for things and spaces that have stronger emotional values. Thus the interest in relational design and art. I have been following various projects that could be classified as Relational Design, where peope gain attachment with products and services resulting in social contentment and often improved social interaction. I will tell about some of these projects later.

Images: Three Sisters / Pericles / Richard Seymour / Grass chair that will only last through emotional attachment to the owner

In this presentation in Business Week he explains his vision and tools.

Soley has collected a short report from the visit, and many pictures of the various craft activities. Here are albums from the visits.

Black Currant and Black Smith

Maple Syrup and Cabinet Maker

Workshop and Cheese and Paper makers

Outside the Benrath Senior Centre in Düsseldorf there is a phantom bus stop, looks just like any bus stop, the only difference is there is no bus coming. The shelter is there to stop Alzheimer patiens on their way ‘home’! In many cases there is no home and they wouldn’t remember how to go there and get lost. The Alzheimers long term memory is still working so they know that a bus is a way to get home, so they sit and wait in the bus shelter. The personell at the Centre then come and tell them the bus is coming later and they would like to come in for a coffee… and by then they have forgotten all about going home. Here  is the article from daily telegraph. Such a soft and beautiful way to handle this. No scary police or guards or rough confrontations of having done something wrong… just a nice bus shelter. I would say this is a human centered design solution!

CARL A GURGENS

CHRISTINE SVENDSEN-PART ONE

CHRISTINE SVENDSEN-PART TWO

HENRIETTE NILSEN PART ONE

HENRIETTE NILSEN-PART TWO

IDA K LARMO

INGVILD WOLLSTAD

JON DIDRIK RASMUSSEN AND TRUONG VU PHAM

LINN BREVICK

MAX CHR SCHRODER

RONJA BERGE

SIV BEATE FARSTAD