Give and take, a service designed social economy

Pic: ccxtina on Flickr

Christina Worsing is more than a social activist. A designer by formation, which is how I happen to know her, Christina has pulled forward this amazing initiative that is called “Give and Take”. Willing to revert object’s planned obsolescence [just a bad design strategy], they provide the service connection to recirculate “pre-loved” resources by setting the stage for “Ethical Economies” to happen. Based on the idea of formalizing “cambalaches” [how this is called in Chile] or swaps… Her initiative has created a whole rethinking of the service deployment that a social re distributed economy like this would have. This service strategy has been defined using the design process in creating touch points, diagramming system’s flow and conducting front-end research to understand all the individuals involved.
Pic: ccxtina on Flickr

So what is Give and Take?
“Give-and-Take is a community-based project that develops services, activities and events to circulate pre-loved clothing throughout the local area. Along the way we share ideas and thoughts on how to re-use, repurpose and rethink

Indigenous Knowledge and Design: interview to Dr. H. Pi’Ikea Clark, a Hawaiian talks about designing from the roots

In the frame of the summit on Design-anthropology and culture-centered innovation held in March in Italy [where Design for Social Innovation and other 18 around the World individuals and initiatives where invited]. I was lucky to meet Dr. Herman Pi’Ikea Clark. I asked him about which is the advice he would give young designers and researchers looking at indigenous knowledge as a source for innovation. He is an associate professor of the Indigenous University: Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi in New Zealand. He works at the school of Education and undergraduate studies. Pi’Ikea, how he likes to be called, is original from Hawaii [cousin culture to the Maori].This is what he answered:Pic: Hicker

“It is important that you know whom do you want to design for. What do you want to really affect. Which is the community you want to affect, advance, enhance… There are so many people that are talented and skilled but people can just become too much oriented to what their tools allow them. It is really important to know WHO YOU ARE in this”.Pic: Pi’Ikea playing ukulele [CM]

BUILDING A DESIGN CURRICULUM THAT RECOGNIZES INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Building a Design Curriculum is not something easy, and it is less easy when there are so many expectations hooked with the idea of indigenous learning.  “Basically, every student I have is Maori

When does social entrepreneurship start making more harm than good?

Pic: PF

A big part from working with social issues is to understand the pitfalls that these convey. Pablo Fernández a business-management alumni from PUC Chile and Master student from Stanford places upfront the controversy on “first world” NGO’s trying to solve some foreign problems. He reports from Kenya:

“I just came back from Nairobi, Kenya, one of the poorest countries in the world (147 of 182 according to the UN within the countries with data), where we had the chance to visit two of the biggest slums in Nairobi; Mathare and Kibera. People told us that in Kibera there are more NGO’s than toilets. Although this may sound funny, it is completely true; there is almost one or two NGO

Informed consent to do ethical design research

Pic: Informed Consent [CM]
Around April 2010, there was an e-mail sent to the PhD Design List about if Designers should go through the IRB [Institutional Review Board or "Ethics Committee" in a University] process before engaging into a research. “‘I’ve heard that some think that we design researchers shouldn’t request that because we are looking at the interaction not at the human behavior.” Should we? Should we not? In a time where we are teaching our students to go out to the field and engage in systematic field research [acquiring qualitative research methods, normally coming from the Social Sciences] , to answer some interaction design questions [for service, architecture, information, product, graphic design] , it seems imminent that we talk about ethics to our students, at least, about the “informed consent”.

INFORMED CONSENT.-WHAT IS IT
Informed consent is often viewed as the central piece of subjects’ protection. It’s main goal is to ensure that people understand what is to participate in the research and until which extent will they choose to. It is extremely important to let them know that they have the opportunity to decide freely to engage or not in the research. In the case of participant observation techniques, it is important that the researcher gets informed consent from the participants, as well as an authorization to disseminate the information in ways that are not endangering their integrity in any way. Anonymity is optional, sometimes individuals want to hide their identities. Sometimes, not.
Pic: Students G.Warner & N.Cristi making some visual data collection in the field

Some professional organizations in the US and Europe do talk about ethical practices in design.