Social Design Learning Trip to Netherlands

Social design is a burgeoning new field that looks to use design not to make products, but to solve or draw attention to social problems and ills. In 2013 I was in the Netherlands for my art practice and was intrigued how design seems to be a spectator sport there, and how it is used to promote ideas of progress, social justice, and human centered solutions. In March of 2017, a colleague and I led a group of 14 students to Amsterdam to meet with practitioners of social design: from architects printing a canal house, to designers working on educating the Dutch about their own complicated race relations, to jewelers who push the boundaries of wearable design, to organizations that work with recent immigrants to the Netherlands. Students collaborated to identify and research a tangible problem that impacted people and designed a theoretical solution to the problem. We combined the areas of architecture, science, technology, art, design, sociology, and more. I am currently designing a new version of this trip, informed by my findings while researching social design more intensively with my Parkhill Grant.

You can read more about my grant work here.