In the last year we have been witness to all sort of major shifts in the social, environmental and political orders of the world. At the outset of the year a tide of sweeping social and political change erupted in the Middle East, shifting long standing regimes towards more inclusive and democratic models. On March 11th, Japan experienced a devastating natural disaster, bringing the lives of tens of thousands of Japanese people to a halt while also shifting the entire global discussion about energy production. And in the fall, a small demonstration in a park in New York City gave birth to a global movement demanding broad shifts and reforms towards equal social and economic distribution. While geographically disparate, these events, and many others, reflect a global present defined as much by large scale shifts in dominant orders as by the systemic interconnections that make them shared challenges and just far off news items.

VisionArc’s ongoing mission is to confront large scale challenges like these by positioning the strength of design as a vital form of leadership and innovation. In the last year we’ve done so by developing initiatives through four key mechanisms:

Individual Tools for Collective Risks
While challenges like energy and food consumption are defining the decades ahead, new tools for linking individual behavior to collective risks will be an increasingly important nexus for social and design innovation.

This past March, in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, VisionArc and the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Design studied a concept called Teiden Kensaku. In it we proposed a social networking platform to create a feedback system, connecting daily energy consumption to its larger consequences at the regional and national scale.

Civic Practice & Urban Resilience
With half the planet now living in cities, the requirement for new modes of social and urban resilience is creating a need to redesign the civic function of everyday practices like running a business, locating resources, and engaging citizens.

This Fall, VisionArc launched a long-term initiative as part of a public workshop entitled Confronting Comfort: Visual Systems at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York. The workshop engaged participants in identifying “soft systems” in the city, such as small businesses, and social resources that represent powerful, bottom-up mechanisms for confronting shared challenges. We’re now in the process of extending this initiative towards creating programs that focus on specific neighborhoods and communities throughout New York City.

Platforms for Collaboration
To confront the interrelated challenges of the 21st century, collective problem solving will require new frameworks that replace ‘silos of expertise’ with ‘platforms for connecting’ – linking the broadest spectrum of thought leaders.

Last fall of VisionArc collaborated with the World Economic Forum and Harvard University Graduate School of Design on a prototype for extending the Forums global dialogue format into the realm of design education and research. Design and Global Challenges: The World Economic Forum at Harvard worked to develop a better understanding of the relationships that exist among key global issues and to surface points of connection through a dialogue that included varied perspectives.

Education & Visualization
With global issues such as resource consumption and climate change, shared challenges require equally shared and open educational tools: making global issues legible to the broadest possible audience.

Last Fall Visionarc launched an ongoing research and educational initiative called Water Guide. The study seeks to expand the definition of water, from a singular concept, into multiple typologies that reflect the varied human systems that depend on this resource. It seeks to offer a critical perspective into the 21st century water cycle by framing new concepts capable of contributing to future conservation and management initiatives.

These are a few of the past and ongoing projects that made up VisionArc’s 2010-2011 year. We’ll be continuing to develop some of them throughout this next year and beyond. We’ll keep you posted. We’re always excited to hear thoughts from out there in the world so if you have any feel free to drop us a line.

One last thing: if you’d like us to send you either a hard copy or a downloadable .pdf of our 2010-2011 brief send us an email by visiting our contact page. Please include your name and preferred format. We’ll send you out a nice looking fold-out for you to read on the subway, on the front porch or wherever you feel so inspired.

See you in 2012!

The B AWARDS Bilbao Bizkaia Design Festival was created in response to the need for a stable foundation for design development in Bilbao and Bizkaia. More information about the festival can be found here.

For the World Economic Forum at Harvard: Design and Global Challenges, a day-long event hosted within the Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, VisionArc contributed by curating a diverse body of participants selected from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kennedy School of Government, Law School, School of Public Health, Business School, and Graduate School of Design. Each participant was also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils. These Councils, composed of twelve hundred of the world’s thought leaders, work in interdisciplinary, multistakeholder groups to identify gaps and deficiencies in international cooperation and formulate specific proposals for improvement on more than fifty global challenges. Each individual selected to participate in Design and Global Challenges contributed to a series of panel discussions and workshops with graduate design students and faculty who acted as hosts for the program.

The event worked to develop a better understanding of the relationships that exist among key global issues and to surface points of connection through a dialogue that included varied perspectives. As such, VisionArc worked to create a platform where participants from various design discipline could highlight the potential of the creative process to spark productive and imaginative exchanges. Such exchanges encouraged global dialogue as a generative discourse that can break out of silos of expertise.

Design Blind Spots 2050 analyzes how major transitions in world economies, environmental systems and population densities have already shaped the foreseeable future. It asks how designers might use this moment as an opportunity to catalyze their own transition into new modes of practice and broader fields of engagement.

The video production of Design Blind Spots 2050 presents a further imagining of this future by ‘backcasting’ the potential role of designers within the interconnected complexities of industrial land use in the Canadian province of Alberta. Here, Oil Sands mining in the Boreal forest is used as a case to test how strategic design will become vital in addressing some of our most urgent environmental issues at the outset of the 21st century and into the coming decades.

The installation will run until the end of October and can be viewed in the Gund Hall Gallery at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA.

Gund Hall Gallery Hours are 9am-6pm Monday through Friday

As its motto states, the Forum is “committed to improving the state of the world.” With this in mind, a series of working sessions at Harvard will gather feedback from the academic community, especially the students as the next generation who will live in the world shaped by the key issues that we will address in our discussions.

Fostering a global dialogue in a place such as Harvard reflects the critical role that educational institutions play as the infrastructure of a knowledge-based economy. Universities represent intellectual continuity; they have a credible voice in society based on their independent research, and they nurture civilization via learning and teaching, cultivating the next generation of intellectually motivated citizens. They will play an increasingly important role in the future, one that is central to developing an ongoing global dialogue.

The program will focus on proposals of the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, a project launched in the summer of 2009 with the question, “How can the architecture of global cooperation be redesigned not only to accommodate our deeper interdependence but also to capitalize on it?” Twelve hundred of the world’s thought leaders have been working in interdisciplinary multistakeholder groups (Global Agenda Councils) to identify gaps and deficiencies in international cooperation and to formulate specific proposals for improvement on more than fifty global challenges.

The work of the initiative is now in the refinement and implementation stage, and the program represents a unique opportunity to gather feedback from a thought leadership community. The program will consider proposals from six areas:

• Global Governance
• International Monetary System
• Population Growth
• Skills & Talent Mobility
• Trade
• Values

Faculty from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kennedy School of Government, Law School, School of Public Health, Business School, and Graduate School of Design who are members of Global Agenda Councils will participate in the panel discussions and workshops. Design students and faculty, as hosts for the program, will be integrated into the discussions as agents of change.

The aim of the conference is to develop a better understanding of the relationships that exist among key global issues and to surface points of connection through a dialogue that includes varied perspectives. Exposing students to diverse disciplines and ideas helps them to develop the ability to address global issues in a more informed, proactive, and comprehensive manner.

Students and faculty from across the University are welcome to attend the program, which is articulated into an opening plenary, workshops/dialogue, and a closing plenary. Space is limited and advance registration required. The closing plenary, open to the public, will present the outcome of the afternoon’s sessions, featuring students and faculty from the six working groups.

Participants from the Graduate School of Design will highlight the potential of the creative process to spark productive and imaginative exchanges. Through the deployment of design thinking and visualization, we will facilitate global dialogue as a generative discourse that can break out of silos of expertise.

“The GSD proposes the discovery of intersections, interrelationships, interdependencies, and interfaces of issues. We will also ask participants to identify blind spots and look for early signs of future risks. We will look at global challenges from the point of view of models that describe scales, boundaries, space, territories, joints, surfaces, and depth. Use of spatial language superimposed on global issues will introduce dimensional vision, scalar relationships, and an understanding of sequence and time frame,” said Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and organizer of the conference.

The afternoon is planned as a rigorous but lively, engaging, and ultimately unforgettable experience. This conference is a pilot case for future Forum engagement with Harvard and other educational institutions, encouraging greater inclusion of voices from academia and younger generations.

VisionArc will be attending the event and reporting on the conversations and outcomes in the following days. Check back in soon!

For more information on this and other events taking place visit the GSD events page at: www.gsd.harvard.edu