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 Architectural League:
Branch libraries are serving more New Yorkers in more ways than ever before, yet they remain undervalued by policymakers. This summer, The Architectural League is collaborating with the Center for an Urban Future on a design study that will articulate new architectural, financial, and programmatic possibilities for these essential, neighborhood-based resource centers.

The design study will culminate with a public event this fall, featuring a presentation of the participants’ work and discussion with advocates and policymakers around issues drawn from the study.

Image credit: Alex Proimos

The Sur Center for Maritime Futures is an institutional concept developed by VisionArc for a client working in conjunction with the Omani Ministry of Culture and Heritage. We were challenged to bring contemporary thinking to the historical depth and positive future for maritime activity in the Gulf state. The new Center will build upon the rich history of boat building, international trade, and coastal habitation that have shaped Omani society. Its long-term mission will be to strengthen the historic continuity between Oman’s maritime past and the future: threading together a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and technological opportunities for coastal culture in Oman.

The Center will function as a hub for maritime heritage, providing a platform for Culture, Education,Technology, and Leadership. The Center will be a robust and valuable asset to Sur, the Ash Sharqiyah region, and to the nation by building and sustaining links between these four key interests. These programs will be organized into a series of clusters capable of operating independently or collaboratively.

“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

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.

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.

The Ocean Energy Institute will be a research and investment center dedicated to the harnessing of ocean wind resources and the next generation of renewable energy technology. VisionArc produced a comprehensive report that sought to expand this agenda by locating critical challenges within the State’s energy profile and natural resources industries. The development of Maine’s offshore wind energy potential was studied as the hinge connecting these challenges to the broader goal of the State’s long-term economic and environmental sustainability. The research was used to inform the design of a robust institutional framework capable of addressing these goals within the Institute’s mission.

VisionArc is currently collaborating with Toshiko Mori Architect to develop an architectural strategy for the new Ocean Energy Institute being planned for a site in Rockland, Maine.

The BPL Central Branch is the main hub that sorts and distributes library material to the larger Brooklyn Public Library system. VisionArc studied the macro-system as well as the specific transfer nodes to identify challenges and opportunities within the materials handling process. A series of mappings and conceptual guidelines were developed to aid library administrators with system upgrades and architectural strategies as part of a larger capital project initiative.

The Council area is organized into 9 thematic clusters, each housing discussion areas for individual Global Agenda Councils. To better facilitate the interconnections between different Councils, VisionArc suggested various ways to curate the nine clusters and their respective Councils. Not only did the final layout of the Council area consider the optimal positioning of the nine clusters and their potential links, but it also incorporated more nuanced and interpretive groupings. Three guiding meta-themes were used to categorize each Council within the cluster- people, places and connections. These themes sought to find new synergies, concepts and the sharing of best practices for each Global Agenda Council within a flexible and transformative platform.