See the text from VisionArc’s ‘On Visualization and Social Impact’ below:

When doing things in the world that involve communities of people, social impact is inevitable. However, the nature of that impact is ultimately a matter of design—it can create a positive difference, or a negative one.

Since 2009 I’ve had the opportunity to direct the efforts of VisionArc, a New York-based design think tank that works on social and spatial challenges. Central to these efforts, the visualization of complex systems and the design of collaborative frameworks are critical for developing actionable opportunities for systemic change. Visualization is often used to make the facts of the world visible, but at VisionArc visualization is used as a way of making new interactions, discussions and actions possible. We think of this as creating micro-fluencies—or the ability to speak a little bit in a lot of different languages—and find it to be an essential aspect of leadership in projects attempting to create positive social impact. Visualization is one of the ways that we empower others to develop micro-fluencies, and by doing so to gain new tools to grapple with the systemic challenges affecting our communities, economies and the environment. Two efforts illustrate how visualization and local participation can be used to align city investment priorities with local needs or even reconstitute a relationship between a city institution and its immediate neighbors.

Envisioning Resources
In 2013, VisionArc initiated a partnership with NYC Parks to explore ways for connecting local residents to new resources at a Bronx neighborhood where programming and staffing had been impaired by budget cuts. Filling this void, local residents had begun to self-organize, donating their own resources and time, offering free public programs that included wellness, childcare, recreation and educational opportunities. For many local families and young people, this was a lifeline in a community where many of these types of resources are in chronic short supply. For VisionArc this was an opportunity to ask: how might visualization, communication and active engagement with the community fill in the gap between local needs and civic priorities?

Working with municipal stakeholders, local residents and civic groups, we developed a visioning process using a playfully analog wall graphic that transformed the community center into a crowd-sourcing platform to match community needs with existing capacity. At the local scale, residents visualized the inventory of skills, services and other resources already available in their communities. At the municipal scale, the process generated the first in a series of briefs designed to help the city evaluate a new breed of program investments tailored to the hyper-local dynamics of a particular neighborhood.

Working with local stakeholders, the visualization process redefined the community center from a place to receive public services into a leadership platform for empowering communities to envision them on their own. For example, some children imagined a park community center that could provide opportunities beyond recreation, such as learning new technology or language skills. For some parents this meant imagining ways to assist in the day-to-day challenges of parenting through a program such as a young father’s support group. While changes in elected leadership ultimately limited the reach of this initiative, the process illustrated the role that visual tools can play in fostering social capital and networked communities. With a few hundred dollars of material costs and a small amount of time, visualizing local needs and resources creates not only dialogue but also an artifact of public record. Visualization extends the reach of collective voice. It builds a coherent language in place of the complex threads of social life, enabling portability beyond the community where it will inevitably need to be represented as resources are fought for.

A Shared Platform
In a 2015 collaboration with the local advocacy project “96 Acres,” VisionArc developed a participatory event at a Chicago county jail that examined the impact of incarceration on a local community. Located on Chicago’s west side, the Cook County Jail is the largest of its kind in the United States, occupying 96 acres of land within the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Little Village. The jail houses around 9,000 men and women on any given day, 50% of whom hail from adjacent neighborhoods. For many local residents the jail is omnipresent, symbolizing the prioritization of incarceration policies over investment into programs aimed at improving life and creating opportunities. Moreover, for residents who open their front doors to the sight of the vast complex every day, the jail is an enduring reminder of the disproportionate impact that incarceration has on people of color in our cities and across the country.

PARK was a large-scale data visualization, public art and radio broadcast event designed to occupy one-half mile of residential street parking adjacent to the jail. Individual automobiles were crowd-sourced from local residents, prison staff and other volunteers and parked alongside the wall and barbed perimeter fencing in colored groupings of black, brown and white. Together the cars visualized the racial statistics of the current inmate population proportionate to the communities inside its walls: 67% black, 21% Latino and 12% white.

Collaborating with Chicago Public Media the event featured a live broadcast of B.B. King’s 1970 performance “Live in Cook County Jail,” which played through the radios of the parked cars. Visitors to the event were invited to record personal memories and stories related to the history of the jail and Chicago’s west side communities. The voices of local residents, community stakeholders and elected officials merged with the sounds of King’s historic performance, permeating the neighborhood and echoing along the jail perimeter. Here, visualization, in the form of the “bar graph” created by parked automobiles, and an audio broadcast connected the shared experience of past and present, inside and outside, creating future links between local and civic communities who have historically been without a common ground. This included intimate interactions among local community and block organizers, County and Sheriff’s office officials, and the Executive Director of the jail. Together these exchanges initiated new ways to confront the vast physical and conceptual space of incarceration in this part of the city and beyond.

On Chicago’s west side and in the Bronx, exploring complex social, economic and political dynamics through participation and visualization strengthened connections between local and civic stakeholders. In these cases, visualization was used to move beyond the representation of static facts, instead becoming common ground for dialogue and debate. Cast into urban space these experiments in visualization created opportunities to build new fluencies that could empower communities in assuming important leadership roles. Here, positive impact by design is not defined as a received condition but one that is built through shared processes, perspectives and voice—the “matter of design”—without which positive social impact is only a remote possibility.

Excerpted from LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation, 2016

Lead Editor Mariana Amatullo
Editors Bryan Boyer
Liz Danzico
Andrew Shea

Funder & Content Partner Autodesk Foundation

Funder VentureWell

Book Designer TwoPoints.net
Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz

Managing Editor Jennifer May

Publisher Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design

Printer AGPOGRAF Impressors Barcelona, Spain

Distributor DAP/Distributed Arts Publishers

“From the discussion, there was a prevailing sentiment that the traditional top-down approach to city design is outdated in an increasingly complex and urban world. Over-determined policies and master-designs which have attempted to reduce complexity have “de-urbanized” the city and resulted in the loss of knowledge and spontaneity which form the essence of the city. In place of the top-down approach, some participants called for a “democratization of design” which puts citizens at the heart of the design process.

Participants debated whether democratic design could actually work in cities. The outcome was an overarching call for balance. Participants resisted the temptation to say that democratic design is the only future. They acknowledged that some of the best urban spaces – the grand boulevards of Paris – were the result of grand-scale master-planning, and recognized that design by consensus can often fail to yield badly needed sweeping changes for pressing social problems. The future must accommodate both approaches. The role of the specialized designer and citizens must thus must be recognized for their potential in the city design process.”

*Text courtesy of The World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation

From the organizers:
“eco.villages focuses on finding a sustainable future for Switzerland’s mountain villages – and by extension for rural communities around the world – with a focus on simultaneously meeting environmental, social and economic needs. We see plenty of potential growth industries for villages : sustainable agriculture and tourism, education, clean energy production, home-working services, education.”

There Mori and Brown presented a vision for sustainable rural development entitled “Après-ski”, or “After Skiing (and beyond)”. Culled from an ongoing design research initiative in collaboration with stakeholders from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Ecos, and Liebreich Foundation, “Après-ski” represents a new vision for economic, environmental and social sustainability in rural communities at a moment when much of the ambition for design innovation has shifted towards urban contexts.

See VisionArc’s contribution to the Arena Calcetto installation here and check out the text to “Ultradisciplinary Futures” below or find it online here

Features
Ultradisciplinary Futures
June 19, 2013
Issue: AR 130 Pawn

Lucy Humphrey and Claire McCaughan of Archrival explore an ‘ultradisciplinary’ future, which surpasses the previously specified extent and limits of practice.

Author Lucy Humphrey, Claire McCaughan

Architecture is a relatively newly defined profession and the practice of architecture, historically, is not a precisely defined term. ‘The architect’ has drifted between master-builder, engineer and artist for centuries, and it was not until the 1800s that the modern day profession was established. Today the profession of architecture has been described as being in a state of crisis and Archrival considers this to be the result of an ill-defined contemporary profession, one that is further limited by reinforcing ideas of practicing ‘within’ or ‘outside’ of a professional boundary. Without actively promoting a broader idea of practice, we fuel an ongoing identity crisis; and without challenging contemporary practice we cannot realistically define a strategic response to the discipline’s crisis.

Documents such as ‘The Future for Architects?’ report by Building Futures provide background and statistics about how architectural practice will operate or decline in a changing world. In response, many architects are developing ‘new practices’ and expanding their reach by working in ‘interdisciplinary roles’. As an exhibitor in Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale, Archrival strategically concerned itself with exploring and challenging traditional practice boundaries.

In seeking co-contributors for the Arena Calcetto installation, Archrival connected a field of international collaborators that revealed their own strategic responses to the forecast crisis. Business consultancies such as McKinsey & Company argue that with clear strategy there is no reason to fear uncertainty and responding to change can be used to one’s competitive advantage. In examining key projects by four of the Biennale collaborators, we consider that by utilising realistic and accurate strategies, these practices are able to look beyond the self-governed boundaries of practice, and ahead to new opportunities for the discipline, by actively contributing to a redefinition of the scope of architectural practice. Rather than being seen as interdisciplinary, these practices capitalise on their design expertise and reveal the potential for interdisciplinary work to become critically ‘ultradisciplinary’. We might define the ultradisciplinary architectural practice as one that is beyond or surpassing the previously specified extent, range or limits of practice.

In creating unique fussball players for Arena Calcetto, four collaborators linked to Gap Filler (Christchurch, NZ), Diatom Studio (Wellington, NZ and London, UK), CAN (Critical Architecture Network) (London, UK) and VisionArc (New York, US) offer exclusive insights into their own expanded views of practice. The first example occurred in the strategic pairing of Mark Leong (Gap Filler collaborator) and Tiago Rorke (Diatom Studio), who simultaneously explore new digital fabrication technologies and community activism. In their first joint venture, a hardwearing concrete and steel fussball team was created and shared online as open-source material for future replication. Leong is a collaborator with Gap Filler, who activate urban spaces in post- earthquake Christchurch. As an architectural ‘free agent’, his social-minded focus has been played out in renegade community works such as The Night Club for Gap Filler’s Playtime project (2012), a competition-winning scheme for a temporary outdoor cinema designed to activate one of many vacant blocks in a city undergoing a painful transition period.

The project is a critical urban intervention in Christchurch where, in the wake of the earthquake, architects wait for the ‘gold rush of reconstruction’, but neglect the urgent need for an immediate renewal of public space to avoid alienation from their own city. In his strategic involvement with the Biennale, Leong paired with Rorke of Diatom Studio – a small practice with a dual base in Wellington and London. Diatom’s interest lies in open-source digital fabrication and the potential to integrate designers, academics and online users with the design and making process. Echoed in the aesthetic of their metropolis- like fussball series, online projects such as SketchChair present cutting edge technology that embraces new opportunities for user-driven design, fabrication and customisation tools. Developed in collaboration with JST Erato Design UI in Tokyo, the project provides an open-source software tool that encourages the emergence of the user as co-author, while promoting the necessary role of the designer as facilitator, synthesiser and editor. Although operating at a small scale, both Leong and Rorke proactively explore potentials for community engagement and activation that preserve a critical future role for designers. Their facilitation of diverse community projects, whether urban regeneration or open-source digital design, strategically promotes the valuable application of their professional skills in response to contemporary conditions.

Working at a similar scale, CAN is a young, entrepreneurial practice within London’s bleak financial climate. The single object produced for the Australian Pavilion was a playful expression of CAN’s bold multidisciplinary approach, integrating fine art, architecture, furniture and graphics. Entitled Made by Many, the fussball object presents a meticulous composition of 1:100 scale human figures. Led by Mat Barnes and Eddie Blake, CAN mobilises specialists on a project-by-project basis. In creating the temporary signage system entitled Barbican Weekender Scenography (2012) CAN playfully implemented their spatial expertise within Europe’s largest multi-arts venue. Describing the graphic product as ‘scenography’, the project explored the creation of signage using ‘playful swarms of lo-fi electronics and parasitic floating signage’, juxtaposed against the Brutalist context of the Barbican. Having previously exhibited with other cultural giants such as Dezeen with Dezeen Platform in 2011, CAN demonstrate an atypical application of architectural skill, paired with their strategic alignment with dominant cultural institutions, in well-marketed public forums during an economic downturn.

Beyond the strategic effectiveness of these emerging practices, the final collaborator demonstrates the extraordinary potential for ‘interdisciplinary’ projects to increase the architect’s professional value. VisionArc’s graphically didactic fussball team represents the studio’s strategic global reach through cutting edge research projects. Design thinking has emerged as a valuable skill in the last decade and yet architects have been slow to understand or capitalise on the market. Founder Toshiko Mori and director Landon Brown operate VisionArc, a think tank dedicated to exploring ‘how designers might use this moment as an opportunity to catalyse their own transition into new modes of practice and broader fields of engagement’. Strategically operating as a research and visualisation consultancy, VisionArc mobilises design initiatives and fosters new and inspiring design futures through the integration of landscape, architecture,politics and science. Research is presented through engaging films such as Design Blind Spots 2050, commissioned by the DesignSingapore Council in 2009 as a speculative research project for the ICSID World Design Congress. The project coins the term ‘design blind spot’, a concept defined as ‘fields not currently known to integrate design thinking or strategy’. VisionArc outlines the enormous potential for designers to reframe global issues and new models of design practice by identifying and presenting solutions to global design blind spots. By designing how to facilitate collaboration itself, VisionArc suggest the key lies in the architect’s ability to operate across complex networks of stakeholders and policies, as well as to integrate competing ‘information silos’.

In dissecting the issue of oil sands mining in northern Canada, Design Blindspots 2050 presents a critical design future for architects, where by 2050 designers are sought out ‘as intermediaries capable of identifying blind spots across a wide spectrum of issues all crucial to the future of production, mobility and resources’. The project convincingly highlights the architect’s valuable role in global policy-making and development initiatives, demonstrating a critical future for architectural practice through extensive ‘ultradisciplinary’ projects.

The spectrum of practice represented by these studios underlines an expanding architectural profession. Instead of portraying a practice as outside of a professional boundary, we might consider the strategic value in actively promoting a wider and more marketable view of our discipline – one with greater opportunities for engagement. By determining realistic and strategic responses to economic, political, environmental and social conditions, and by operating in an ‘ultradisciplinary’ format, these practices are actively redefining the constructs of the profession and expanding the agency of architectural practice. Gap Filler, Diatom Studio, CAN and VisionArc are leading examples of professional advocacy and disciplinary adaptation across a range of scales, bringing about change from the level of the individual practitioner to the profession as a whole. The evolving profession must celebrate these examples as they walk the tightrope between artistic endeavour and business success.

As Archrival describes it:

“Arena Calcetto explores the theme of ‘Formations’ and was conceived to represent Archrival’s practice ideals; to engage a wide number of collaborators and to create new connections between the audience, exhibitors and curators at the Biennale event. Our vision is to challenge existing practices in architecture and to expand the practice of creative professionals by harnessing the potential of design rivalries.”

For the installation, VisionArc produced a team of 11 players that were milled from 35mm pieces of corian with colored pictograms laser etched into their surfaces. The set sought to ask: How can we think of a “game” where individual players are instead replaced by some of the most wicked issues of our time- water scarcity, food crisis, energy and natural resource depletion, education, healthcare? How does this ask us to redefine the concept of the “common goal”? What is the nature of competition and collaboration on a playing field in this context? The answers to some of these questions may very well describe the nature of 21st century design. In other words, the practice of architecture in the 21st century has emerged as an increasingly issue driven endeavor- expanding its field perhaps more so than at any other moment.

Whereas in the past, the architect’s “material” palette may have been mostly defined by physical matter, today our practice operates more and more in what has been called that “dark matter” of design- matters of collaboration, policy making, negotiation, research, and advocacy. These broader, underlying systems and mechanisms are less about creating stuff and more about constructing contexts. In the coming decades architects and designers must demonstrate an ability to deftly navigate and negotiate these areas both tactically and strategically. Perhaps the athletic analogy can teach us something after all!

For more on VisionArc’s and others’ work on this collaborative effort check out Patrick Fileti’s short film here.

(Text from Storefront for Art and Architecture)

What is it that an architectural drawing does and how does it do it? How can we distill beauty from cosmetics? How can new modes of representation produce new architectures and new sensibilities?

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a collection of 30 newly commissioned architectural drawings. Each drawing depicts the Storefront Gallery space at 97 Kenmare, from the perspectives of a diverse group of emerging and established architects worldwide. The drawings reveal a different aspect of the space and are representative of the generative properties of the architect’s drawing. The gallery space, wallpapered with sourced images of birds, axonometries, children, green and comics cut from drawings produced in the past five years, reflects on the specific graphic devices used by architects to ignite certain feelings and properties in their drawings that the architectural drawing itself is unable to convey: skies filled with birds to portray movement, axonometries as a mode of applied intellectuality, children as life generators, green surfaces as magic ecological surfaces, or comics as prosthetic communicative devices.

Storefront for Art and Architecture is first and foremost a center for the exchange of ideas, agendas, challenges, confrontations; it is a part of a larger infrastructure for dialogue about the role of art and design in the city and beyond. At the same time, one might argue that all storefront’s in the city possess that kind of cultural, economic and political power. They are often the nodes that localize the exchanges and interactions between individuals and communities, expose and facilitate patterns of behavior, commerce, and many of the frictions (and fictions?) of our day-to-day lives in the city. A storefront might be a place to practice religion or slaughter a chicken; a conduit for illicit trade or creative destruction. Storefronts are both wallpaper and newspaper.

VisionArc’s contribution to the Storefront exhibition sought to communicate this complexity and this vibrancy by subsuming the presence of the gallery proper (and it’s always recognizable movable facade panels) into the larger matrix of associations, events, spectacles, and mysteries emanating from this 1-story landscape. The news clippings, headlines, and stories are all culled from New York City’s circulars and tabloids and are each presented as snapshots of a moment where a storefront became a stage. In so doing we are giving a nod to the contribution of Storefront makes to the critical and creative landscape of New York City while paying equal tribute to the (sometimes unexpected) role that our less rarefied storefronts play in the ever evolving shape of the curious life of our city.

In the weeks leading up to our visit to Helsinki we sent teams of students out into their city to explore how notions of, “soft-systems”, community infrastructure, and urban resilience play a part today- and in the future of- the characteristically-and often assumed- “crisis free” city of Helsinki. Here are some quick summaries of what the students observed.

Mobility
Our urban mobility team reported on the ways that a mode of transportation like cycling in Helsinki represents both a “hard” system- the network of travel paths, repair stations and parking points- and a “soft” system- the city’s community of cyclists and bike commuters. Through spatial mapping and on-the-ground urban mobility was framed as a “context that has two dimensions, both social and physical” as Aslihan Oguz , MA in the Creative Sustainability program said, “one supports or opens up the potential for the other”.

Food
Food and food availability in Helsinki was identified as a multi-scale challenge revealed through the relationship between Helsinki’s open markets, connected to local growers and regional food varieties and the country’s small number of retail chains who dominate the majority of groceries sold on the Finnish market. While Finland is known as a country with an abundant supply of fresh, local and organic food options, the team, led by Bianca Byggmästar, speculated on the apparent absence of adequate and affordable food options: how, she asked, might we be able to reconsider the meaning of the term “food crisis” in the context of overly centralized food systems and the shifting relationship of food as both a social good and a commodity.

Communication
Communication, as a research topic, was framed as a spatial question in Helsinki. The team set out to ask what are the urban conditions that facilitate and prefigure meaningful social exchange between individuals, groups, and stakeholders in different communities? By identifying a range of typologies: gardens and parks; liminal circulation spaces; local businesses and shared interest areas, the team sought to position communication as a product of shared geography as much as shared language. With new and emergent models in Helsinki such as equipment and skills share programs beginning to reprogram and occupy parts of the cities physical and social fabric, they speculated on the potential for new forms of resource distribution as well as collaboration functioning as a powerful form of urban resilience to address shared challenges in the future.

Safety
Our team tasked with looking at the concept of “safety” in Helsinki noted (rightly) that safety must be understood as a relational condition mediated by a range of factors from gender, race and age to more abstract factors like cultural and spiritual values. Nevertheless, their groundwork allowed them to identify a range of safety systems- from conventional “hard” safety infrastructures such as evacuation shelters, police and fire stations to more diffuse- yet vital- systems such as public assembly zones, urban architectural and spatial strategies, events and visual language. Their two-pronged investigation led the team to project beyond a city perpetually defined by stability and security while generating broader thinking about hidden vulnerabilities ranging from climate events to stresses caused by future migration patterns or energy shortfalls.

Our exercise with the Aalto students was designed as a micro-studio and used to inform their individual research. In the coming months VisionArc will be continuing to develop similar research and workshop initiatives with some of our partners in New York City and abroad. Keep an eye out for future news and happenings.

Recently, the Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation asked VisionArc to help map out and illustrate the breadth of cross-council connections established through 5 of their initiatives during the last year. These included: a plan for a Design Innovation Policy, who’s aim is to create a new values system for design integration in the global community; a Visualizing Complex Systems initiative that creates tools to inform society through transparency and participation; a Reciprocal Design Index for sustainable social and urban design policy; an Environmental Index for creating a shared information platform for resource consumption awareness; and a Safe Water Project that entails the design of an inexpensive, hand-held filtration product to serve the needs for drinking water in environmentally challenged and under-served communities.

VisionArc’s mapping helped communicate the broad reach of design and its relevance, through the Design Council’s efforts, to the larger World Economic Forum community.

“Over the past two decades the prevalence of the design practice as ‘Think-Tank’ has become an increasingly common model. Whether this approach is born out of survivalism amid economic crisis or it is a more intentional shift on the part of designers to generate agency in the world as ‘thinkers’ not just ‘makers’, it is clear that the current generation of design practices face an imperative to organize in ways that allow them to address broader issues through a range of outlets including media, technology, visual art, journalism, branding, and politics. For disciplines like architecture, what appears to be at stake is the need to cultivate a more pro-active engagement beyond the immediate boundaries of the profession in order to drive decision making and maintain relevance. If it is true that the traditional practice of building is simply ‘too slow’ to keep up with the pace of change in private enterprise, then how has the design Think-Tank model increased the agility of designers in the marketplace? What are the direct results and residual effects of these strategies? How are design thinking and research methodologies evolving?”

For our part, VisionArc discussed our involvement in a 2011 energy monitoring and conservation initiative that was launched in the immediate aftermate of the March 11th tsunami and earthquake in Japan. This was discussed along with our ongoing work studying the design of urban resources and strategies for risk response in cities ranging from New York to Helsinki to Tokyo.

The roundtable discussion was guided by moderator and partner of Leong Leong Architecture, Christopher Leong. Other panelists included Troy Therrien, Partner at Th-ey and Curator at Experiments in Motion, Columbia University, New York; Adam Greenfield, Founder of Urbanscale; Ken Farmer, DoTank Brooklyn; Georgeen Theodore, Partner at Interboro Partners; and David Benjamin, Principal at The Living.

A video of the discussion can be seen here.

VisionArc’s analysis illustrated the interconnected environmental, economic and political dimensions of the regeneration plan. The analysis formed the basis for a series of proposals that were designed to negotiate multiple stakeholders and scales of concern. The proposals offered strategic design as a vital tool for moving beyond conventional urban typologies towards more holistic standards for urban development in ecologically important regions. Taken together VisionArc sought to create a picture of Pasaia as a place that can become a model for regional innovation and economic growth while also reinforcing an ecologically vulnerable but culturally rich locality.

Recommendations for the Bay of Pasaia regeneration plan are currently under ongoing consideration by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.