This week we looked into partnerships and interdisciplinary working. The Bauhaus is often seen as the birthplace of this as they engaged in a lot of interdisciplinary working, and its importance as a method has continued.
Lecture – Podcast with Louize Harries
Coming from a textiles background, Louize decided that she wanted to use design to look into material futures.
They discussed how students at the Buahuas used to work to a circular study plan where they studied lots of different things from materials to colours and tools. These ideas carried on in Black mountain college in California after the Nazi’s shut down the Bauhaus.
Someone historic who attended this college is Buckminster Fuller. His life statement was “he decided his life was an experiment to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
Lots of exciting ew fields of design have come out of collaborative working, including biodesign, speculative design, service design and technological developments in VR, AR and AI.
Louize worked with fellow student Katie Mae Boyd on a bio design challenge to look at the poor air quality in London. The designed a drone that would trigger red rain to fall when the pollution levels rose above EU safe limits. They wanted to make the problem visible but also ensure the science behind it is correct.
Red Rains of Change 
Red Rains of Change
To work on this project, they went to speak to a lung toxicologist at Kings College as well as speaking with London’s Air Quality Manager. He told them that issues of air pollution need the public to push them forwards before the government will act. This informed how they decided to create their design, as they needed to make it like a protest piece.
Red rain was a way to capture people attention in a striking and alarming way. To create the red rain, they had to work console with scientists. They worked with people at the synthetic biology department of Imperial College London.
Louize mentions that is was interesting to have conversations with people who look at the same thing from such different perspectives.
Designers and scientists work well together, as designers can illustrate what scientists can only publish in papers. Often their amazing ideas don’t get noticed or discovered as they need to be visualised and made understandable. Design can make complex things much clearer.
They made a working drone, and then spoke to lots of people who are done specialists.
My Subconscious Shopper. This idea came about due to thought about textile waste and the issues with over consumption. A controversial method used by companies is neuromarketing. Where brand can look at someones brain response to products and brands and use this data to make what they are selling more appealing.
Louize wanted to create a comment on this to bring it into people minds. With so much tech and advertising aimed at kids, she decided to create a selection of headsets that measured the brain activity in kids to show an example of an extreme natural conclusion and open up debate around how people feel about this.
She collaborated with specialists to allow her to make and programme the headsets.
In the design she didn’t want them to look medical or scary so she spoke to children to see what they liked.
Policy Lab is an example of collaboration within the civil service made up of a collection of designers, anthropologists, researchers and policy makers who bring design thinking into service design to give a person centred approach to policy. They also look at speculative futures in government. This needs to be a collaboration of people to find solutions to such complex issues.
Designers on Holiday is an example of creating collaboration by getting people out of their studios and together.
Precious plastics community created by Dave Hakkens is an open source project giving accessible plastic recycling tools to the anyone on the internet. This exciting idea empowers communities to combat plastic waste and turn it into profit. It shares information and calls for collaboration.
The Comedy Carpet
“Created by artist Gordon Young, and designed in collaboration with Why Not Associates, the Comedy Carpet is a celebration of British comedy on an extraordinary scale. The carpet gives visual form to jokes, songs and catchphrases dating from the early days of variety to the present. Sited in front of Blackpool Tower, the 2,200m² work of art contains over 160,000 granite letters embedded into concrete, pushing the boundaries of public art and typography to their limits.”
Why Not Associates co-founder Andy Altmann talks about how they did the research together to find the jokes to use on the carpet. They looked back at old posters of comedians coming to Blackpool to get the typography for the project. Was such a big confusing project he needed others to help to ensure it worked. Had to work with concrete so needed specialists to help create the right consistency etc. Needed chemists to get it exactly right. Needed to know about how to make the colours, what would stop the colours from fading etc. He found the processes when getting others involved and what that looked like was much more interesting than the final product.
Anab Jain
Anab Jain’s talk on designing for speculative futures is one I have watched previously but still find interesting. I think the ideas she raises are fascinating and open up a lot of questions about how we want our future to be. The things she creates are only made possible through interdisciplinary collaborations with engineers, scientists etc. She is also using her skill as a designer to show these possible futures in a way that people can understand and visualise. This empowers people, educates them and opens up conversation about how the future might be and what we can do to change it.
I think this is a really powerful example of the important of collaboration. This data, science and future casting needs a designer working alongside to make it accessible for the public to understand, and public understanding and motivation is the only way to incite change.
Workshop Challenge
For this weeks challenge I wanted to look at ‘Improving mental health in young adults’. I started by brainstorming some ideas about issues and possible way to improve the issue. This bought me round to the idea of the importance of wellbeing and time in nature.
I decided I’d like to speak with a mental health professional, with an understanding of young people and the issues they face. Need to find out more about what is impacting their mental health, how it can be improved and how they can be reached.
My initial ideas that will help me create my questions are:
- Opening up conversations, breaking stigma around this
- Getting young people to understand and look after their wellbeing
- Better education around mental health
- Creating easier access to support
However, I will also allow the conversation to move in a natural way, asking questions to gain deeper insight from the point raised by the specialist. The questions I write will be a basis in which to guide the conversation, but I think allowing the specialist to take the lead and not asking too many leading or weighted questions is important.
I decided to speak with Dan Angus who runs Mayfield Nurseries in Southampton. Mayfield Nurseries is a social enterprise garden centre. All their profits are put back into local mental health services and they also run wellbeing programmes for local residents who are struggling with their mental health.
I came up with a few questions to ask to give the conversation a bit of structure.
Questions to ask in interview
- Can you introduce yourself and your background briefly?
- What do you think are the biggest issues facing young people that are affecting their mental health?
- How do you think the mental health of young people can be improved?
- Technology plays such a big part in the lives of young people now, do you think it is the key to helping their mental health or should we be looking outside of technology?
- Do you think young people in Southampton need help connecting with nature?
- Do you think social media is good or bad for young peoples mental health?
- How do you think having an understanding of how to keep onto of your wellbeing is important to improving mental health?
- How do you think we can get young people to talk more about mental health?
- What is the one thing that you think would make the biggest difference to young peoples mental health?
- In an ideal world, if anything was possible, with no budget or technology limitations, what would you want to implement to help improve the mental health of young people?
Then I went to Southampton to have a look around the Nursery and to speak with Dan.
The full transcript from the conversation can be read here:
From the discussion I think some interesting points were made. Dan believes that incorporating nature and wellbeing into education and the school syllabus is the best way to improve the mental health of young people. He made some interesting points about the importance of technology but how this needs to be carefully balanced with nature and time away from a screen.
Something really useful that has come out of this for me is the idea of not taking something away from young people or implementing any more ‘rules’ (eg. Less screen time) but instead trying to add something into their lives. Dan believes this addition makes the experience more positive and therefore more likely to work.
“It’s about saying, here’s something even better. So I think parents, teachers, and other adults with responsibility in contact with young people need to really be pushing how important it is to connect with nature in some way or another and make it really exciting, make it interesting. Make it something that’s attractive rather than a chore.”
Dan Angus
Reflection
My research this week really highlighted the importance of working in an interdisciplinary way. Drawing on the insight of different disciplines can reveal new ideas and ways of moving forwards. Using design alongside other disciplines can allow complex information or data to be made accessible and therefore more impactful. Working alongside other industries will create more rounded and useful design that is founded in solid ideas and expertise.
My recorded chat with Dan was reasonably short as mental health services, as touched on in our chat, are incredibly busy and over subscribed. However I think due to careful planning beforehand we managed to cover quite a lot in a short space of time. Speaking to someone in a different industry and with a different background was a really interesting way of gaining a new perspective and insight into a problem.
I came out of the conversation with new ideas, a different way of thinking and an enthusiasm to push things forwards. I think this is another point not touched on so far, that simply working alongside others who are also passionate about your ideas or project can help give you a renewed sense of excitement and I believe in this environment new ideas are more likely to flow.
If I was to take this project further I would like to create a collaboration between myself, Dan, some other mental health professionals and teachers to allow a more in-depth brainstorm on what could actually be implemented to make a difference. For me personally, as someone who needs time to think and process conversations and ideas, a collaboration like this would need time and multiple sessions to create results. I would aim to meet with collaborators for discussion and idea generation for multiple, reasonably short sessions to allow time in between for each member to reflect on each others ideas, and come back with more possibilities to be discussed collaboratively.
Reference list
ALTMANN, Andy. 2012. “TYPO Talks» Blog Archiv» Dinner for One?” TYPO International Design Talks [online]. Available at: https://www.typotalks.com/videos/altmann-typoberlin2012-2/.
EDWARDS, Susanna and HARRIES, Louize. 2021 “Week 6: Lecture – Podcast with Louize Harries”. Canvas Falmouth Flexible [online], 2 July.
JAIN, Anab. 2017. “Why We Need to Imagine Different Futures | Anab Jain.” http://www.youtube.com [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYjWLqE_cfE.
Lizzie Wa Design 
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