Change Design
Friday 22 February 2008
Bath School of Art and Design (BSAD), Bath Spa University

Speakers: John Thackara, Sheila de Brettville, Karen Blincoe, Mervyn Kurlansky and Rupert Bassett

A group of speakers with a broad range of interests in Sustainable Design were invited to offer examples of effective graphic practice in the area of social and environmental change. The symposium focussed on the contemporary setting, with each contribution highlighting the importance of locality, audience participation and real-time interaction to an understanding of sustainability today. John Thackara, Director of Design of the Times and author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, presented a no-nonsense account of the ‘real life problems’ that designers can now associate and assist with. Firstly, he advises, find the individuals and groups already tackling a problem then support them in visualising their field of action to others. This enables the social networks to grow. The main role of the design in this example is to represent the existing project to others, enabling them to see how they might get involved. Secondly, mapping was signalled as a central concern: the mapping of potential relationships being a significant step towards realization of goals. Sheila de Brettville presented her own work in the ‘public realm’, identifying the capacity of individual designers to “give form to democratic pluralism”. Her method involves identifying a community of people whose voices are yet-to-be heard, inscribing neighbourhoods with typographic traces of these diverse populations and their concerns. Again the issue is one of mapping or embedding social complexity in an accessible visual form, such as inscribing individual stories on communal stairways. Karen Blincoe, Director of Schumacher College and founder of the International Centre for Sustainable Design (Denmark), identified how design not only represents interests in visual ways, but can also explore the subtle non-representational aspects of its forms. She advanced a notion of ‘beauty’ as a spiritual effect of design, one that benefits the world by making it a place of “aesthetic balance”. Mervyn Kurlansky concluded that now – more than ever – we need to leap sideways, to challenge fixed ways of being with our wit and intelligence, and encourage a move towards sustainable living. Whilst there was inconsistency in the use of key terms such as ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’, the day clearly demonstrates that designers share an aspiration towards communicating change and representing the practicalities of action.

Julia Moszkowicz
Writer and Lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies, Bath Spa University