I am using an online service called Wordle to create the below images. These word clouds are from my experience at the Chester Hill Neighbourhood Centre:

Word cloud of entire blog entry "A youth worker with a camera"

Word cloud of my perceptions of good design

I’m going to be comparing these images across each of the reflection blog entries to see if any patterns emerge.

Up until this point in my career, I’d had a range of experiences that had helped me formulate my understanding of the social impact of design. I had setup my own design agency, ilk media, through which I had cultivated my interest in working for the ‘right’ clients and printing on the ‘right’ kind of stock and so on. I’d setup a social enterprise that enabled me to expand on this basic understanding and appreciate the value of community contribution. These experiences combined, enabled me to reflect back onto past work and analyse them with a new perspective. The Sri Lanka experience for example, shifted my focus onto the power of co-design and the value of community contribution. My understanding was becoming more complex.

By 2007, when the Oxfam role showed up, I felt very confident about my understanding of the social impact of design and my role in it. When I saw Oxfam Australia’s Youth Engagement Program (YEP) Coordinator position being advertised, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine my skills and interests. This role, I thought, would enabled me to be the social designer that I wanted to be. Within this newly established role, I was to design and then implement a national youth program for Oxfam Australia. The story about what the role entailed and what we achieved is far too big for this blog entry. The short version of it is that it was an exciting opportunity within an amazing organisation that was willing to try new things. What I will focus on here is one element of the program – the Design4Change project.

Design4Change branding designed by UTS students as part of the Community Project subject

Design4Change was one of the first pilot projects I set up in my new role at Oxfam. It was an obvious direction to head in considering my previous experiences and connections. The idea behind the project was simple. When dealing with issues of global poverty and injustice, it isn’t enough to work directly with communities that are impacted by poverty. You must also influence ‘actors’ in the equation – those who are doing the impacting. Our government and big corporations can, and should play a pivotal role in this area. And to convince them to take action, we need the support of the broader community. In this context, Design is a powerful profession that can play an influential role. Design4Change responded to this call by collaborating with design students through existing curriculum. Oxfam provided the context and the students provided the creative response. Through this collaboration we aimed to support the students to understand their impact as designers and hopefully influence them to contribute to positive social change in the future. We developed the project over three years of iterative pilotting, where the nature of collaboration shifted with our learning.

Through the evaluation process, we learned that the students best responded to project briefs that were accompanied by rich immersive experiences. On a project focusing on Labour Rights, we organised for the students to meet with a home worker based in Sydney. On a climate change project, we introduced the students to community members from the island nation of Tuvalu who spoke about the impact of climate change on their community. These meetings were supported by Oxfam’s community development workers who provided context and further support on the thematic areas.

The project seemed to be going well. We expanded the project over the years and partnered with UTS, Billy Blue College of Design and UWS. The students produced strong design responses – some of wich we moved into production. Two examples are below:

Education cards produced by UTS Community Project students

T-shirt design produced by UTS Community Project students

We were pretty excited by this project. The evaluations were showing that the students enjoyed the projects and they valued the experience. They seemed to get a lot out of it. And from our perspective, the project was a success as the students’ understanding of the social issues shifted as a result of the project.

The limitation of the project started to surface when we started asking deeper questions. Did the students believe that the project impacted them professionally? Many told us that this was their first experience of working with a real client and they valued that. They enjoyed the immersive experiences and felt impacted by them. I started to question the project when a student told me that personally they got a lot out of it – but professionally, they weren’t interested in working for a charity so they didn’t see any benefits there. Further analysing the evaluation responses, and from the anecdotal conversations, a pattern started to emerge. The students had a narrow view of how they could professionally contribute to social change. They believed that to have a positive impact, they had to either do pro-bono work, print on recycled paper or work for a charity. If they didn’t fit into these categories – then being ‘social’ wasn’t for them. It was a shock to discover that as a community based organisation who was acting as a client, and in effect asking students to do pro-bono work, we were reenforcing this misconception.

In the following phase of the project, just before I left the organisation, I tried to counter this effect through introducing a guest speaker series. We brought in speakers from the design agencies Digital Eskimo and Republic of Everyone. By showcasing their work, we wanted to show that you didn’t have to work for a charity to be socially considerate. We had a good response to this strategy. Nonetheless, it made me realise that the problem is much bigger than I had realised and headed into a PhD to explore it further.

The Design4Change project still moves forward, facing the many challenges ahead.

Do you know any projects that attempt to broaden design students’ understanding of their social impact?

The Designathon was an event held at DSI in September where DSI faculty worked one on one and in teams with 6 businesses, taking them through innovation around and  rapid prototyping of solutions to their problems.

For more information please see dsi.sva.edu/designathon

Trash Bags was one such venture. In collaboration with community based organisations overseas, we set out  to import bags made from recycled materials. The plan was to establish a social enterprise that supported communities internationally, used consumerism to talk about sustainability to the community and made a profit for us in an ethical way.

A range of Trash Bags products. Row one shows bags made from recycled juice packets. Row two shows bags made from recycled newspaper (left) and plastic shopping bags (centre and right). the third row shows products made from rolled and woven newspaper.

Doing the branding for Trash Bags was an exciting opportunity for me. For the first time I could deliver a design response without feeling limited by others. It was a good feeling to be able to dedicate enough time to a project and have a chance to play with imagery. I spent a lot of time thinking through the design elements needed for the project. I had an opportunity to research stock material to find an appropriate solution to our needs. The end results were focused on two factors. Firstly, to facilitate a process whereby the communication with our stakeholders (clients, consumers and producers) minimised the amount of paper waste. And secondly the branding attached to our products used sustainable resources.

Recycled paper was applied to art board to produce the cards. We printed one set of cards that were individually hand stamped as product tags or business cards. Hemp string was used to apply the tags to the products. We also created ordering forms that attempted to facilitate a smooth ordering system without the need to print. Our catalogues were constructed of a visual language that helped identify the products and orders could be input digitally.

Reflecting back, I have to question the sustainability of the processes we had in place. They were environmentally sustainable. But if the business was to grow, we would not have managed to hand stamp the cards or tie on the tags individually with the hemp string. I never lasted in the business long enough to have to deal with these issues.

Entering into the Trash Bags business, I was so focused on recycled paper, vegetable inks and long lasting design solutions. But partnering with the community made me see things differently. We started off thinking about the value we could add to the community by supporting improvements in their product design. And although in some ways we managed to do this, it wasn’t long before I realised how simplistic and misguided this ideology was. There was a lot to be gained from the partnership also. We learned a lot from the way in which the (mainly) women from the projects applied traditional weaving techniques to new materials and their ability to develop new products was amazing. This new found relationship made me reflect on past experiences and see them in a new light. Specifically, I thought about the photography project I had undertaken in Sri Lanka and the value of the designer in this context.

The experience here helped me expand my notion of what it is to be a ‘good designer’. I began to value the experience of the people around me.

I’ve just started listening to a series of lectures by Sean Dorrance Kelly as part of a philosophy course being offered by Harvard University. At the moment I am letting the ideas being presented wash over me. Even at this early stage, I am finding that some of the concepts ring true in the context of how design’s social impact is considered – and more specifically, I am finding that it is giving me a framework through which I can begin to understand my personal experience of this.

Below I’ve summarised the lecture, but before I get there, I wanted to draw a connection between some of the points being presented. It is the latter part of this first lecture that I particularly connected to. Kelley starts the lecture with presenting Heidegger’s articulation of various understandings of beings across time, including that of the current technological age. He follows this with Heidegger’s criticisms of Descartes and Kant’s notions of being and after characterising the technological age of being, offers strategies for ways in which we can get beyond this understanding. Heidegger’s interest in ways in which we can shift away from the current understanding of being is what interested me the most. There are three points of connection to my current thinking:

1. Kelly talks about the fact that there is never a unified notion of being within a culture. There are central and marginal understandings – and both play a critical role in helping us to understand what has come before and what may come after. Kelly explains that we often ignore the marginal, not being able to explain it – until its effects begin to accumulate. In the lecture he describes it as a ‘revolution’, at which point the marginal becomes the centre of a new understanding. I really connected with this idea. I felt that while I was going through experiences such as establishing ilk media and the Trash Bags project, my understanding of the social impact of design was within the current central notion. The experience of Design4Change was my moment of revolution. Things that I’d experienced, but had never made sense were pushed to the margin until this point. The evaluation process for the project focused my attention on the anomalies that have now become the centre of this study. I am now trying to make sense of this new way of thinking.
2. Kelly’s description of the central and the marginal can also be applied to the subject at hand, that is the social impact of design. At the moment the central understanding, I believe, is focused on outlining a number of categories of action through which designers can improve their social impact. In finding a way to shift away from this – perhaps we need to look at the marginal. I’m not entirely sure about what that may be – but it is an interesting way to look at a problem in the context of this PhD
3. The third element that I thought was interesting is Heidegger’s The Thing. He explains that part of the problem we face today is that our culture does not have a work of art – to guide our sense of identity and actions. He then goes on to say that we do however have ‘things’ such as community events where people have specific roles to play and that these can help us see the value to life. Drawing a parallel, the profession may be seen as a ‘thing’. Here we have distinct roles to play and it is the frameworks set by the profession that help us comprehend what is of value. This makes me think about the responsibility of a profession that sets values within the community? And can we put interventions in place to shift a community’s values?

Lecture Summary

The introductory lecture examines the meaning of being in a secular age from a Heideggerian perspective. Kelley explains secular age to be one where belief in God no longer defines us as human beings. He contrasts this with the example of Homeric Greeks, where the belief in Gods underpinned the understanding of being and gave meaning to life. Without a relevant notion of being for our time, we are left in a nihilistic world. Kelly believes that an examination of Heidegger is critical for understanding who we are and that it can provide us with a strategy for moving away from this existence towards living a meaningful life.

The lecture outlines the work of later Heidegger, ‘later’ being after his writing of Being in Time,  into three phases. Heidegger was interested in:

1. Articulating the various understandings of being at key moments through the history of time.
2. Providing a criticism of these background understandings of being
3. Providing a strategy for overcoming our current background understanding of being

Articulating the various understandings of being

• Medieval time – Human beings were understood as entities created by God and in the image of God.
• Descartes – Human beings were understood as subjects. This is very different to an entity that is created by God and in the image of God. Here, Descartes believed that the inner states of human beings were very clear to them and they were Indubitable and Incorrigible. Kelly provides the example here of someone being in pain. If you feel pain, then you are in pain.
• Kant provided an articulation of Descartes’ concept and described human beings as a mature autonomous agent. This background understanding of being enabled human beings to be in control of themselves. To create laws to live by and to judge ourselves against these laws.The next epic according to Heidegger is our current time – the technological age. Kelley explains Heidegger’s view that we are “essentially beings that optimise and order resources”.  Although this characteristic is essentially hidden from us in the context of our everyday existence, our culture is committed to it. We are committed to the notion that everything is a flexible and interchangeable resource that needs to be optimised and ordered. The fact that nothing is more preferable than the next leads to the nihilism that we are experiencing.

Criticising the background understandings of being

• Descartes view of the being as a subject – Heidegger says that there are moments where we are not indubitably and incorrigibly aware of our inner states. He uses the example of hammering, where our awareness is focused on the external.
• Kant’s autonomous agent – Heidegger believes that there are moments where we act without being in control of ourselves. Kelly uses the example of Wesley Audrey, the ‘subway hero’ who jumped onto the train tracks to protect a person who had fallen there as a result of a fit, from an oncoming train. When later interviewed, Audrey claimed that he just did what anyone would have done and that it wasn’t a conscious act. This explanation is common amongst individuals who do heroic acts. Here, Kant’s notion of a conscious decision about the act does not happen.

Kelly goes on to explain that some of these ‘unexplainable’ acts are easily understood in the context of a different epic. During the time of the Homeric Greeks, Audrey’s response would have been central to their understanding of being – that the relevant God called the action out of him. Hearing the story, we feel a sense of familiarity and can comprehend how this story is in conflict with Kant’s understanding of being. But we have marginalised these understandings and try to provide explanations within the context of the modern technological age.

Getting beyond the modern technological age of being

Heidegger believes that there are some strategies that can support a transition out of the modern technological age of being. Modern technological age of being does not have a work of art – a central aspect of the culture that organises all the practices that the people are engaged in. Kelly explains that in a later lecture he will cover Heidegger’s The Thing, where Heidegger outlines a local rather than a universal thing that is available to us – something that organises a local community such as a celebratory meal, where everyone has distinctly different roles. If organised properly, Heidegger believes that we can derive value from these kind of events. The value may not extend past the event. But in that moment in time, you have a sense of what is valuable.

We no longer have the ability to understand ourselves in terms of our ability to respond to something outside of ourselves. Here, Heidegger believes that poets have a special role to play. He believes that it will be the poets that will respond to the marginal to reveal the path forward.

Kelly then explains that historically there is no unified understanding of being. There is a central understanding and there are marginal understandings. It is very important to have both these understandings as the marginal allow us to understand what came before or what might come after. At any moment, it is hard for us to understand the marginal, they make no sense and we often ignore them. But once the marginal repeats itself enough times, it will draw attention to itself, becoming the centre of a new understanding. According to Heidegger, we need to pay attention to the marginal, if we are to get out of the modern technological age.

Heidegger believes that we need a new beginning. He is not sure when or when this may occur but believes that if it does, it will include the belief in a certain type of god. He further states that within this new beginning our focus won’t be questions about what beings are. Instead we will focus on what being is – being as not an entity.

To get things underway, I decided that working for other agencies would be too much of a compromise for me. So I negotiated with a friend and we decided to set up our own design practice – and so, Ilk Media was formed. We had each come to design as a shift in career and therefore we both came with existing professional experiences. I was heavily influenced by my years of work within the community sector and hoped to combine this with my newfound skills in design to setup a niche practice that satisfied both my professional and personal interests.

Setting up your own thing is common in the design world. That’s one benefit of the profession. All you need is a computer, your software packages and a good coffee shop to meet potential clients in. There are some deep rooted problems that come with this of course. Knowing how to design and use a computer doesn’t necessarily make you a good business person. My university degree had given me the right design skills. Practicing design through Ilk helped  me realise that there was much more to design as an industry than I knew and understood.

Nonetheless, this is where I was – and I started with the client list. I was determined to minimise my corporate clients and saw them as ‘paying the bill’. My focus was to develop a relationship with organisations that I saw as having a positive impact on society. We were lucky enough to work with the ABC as one of our first clients and this paved the way to collaborations with a few big institutions such as the University of NSW and the Queensland University of Technology. We also collaborated with smaller community based organisations such as the Australian Association of Bush Regenerators, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Sydney Environmental Educators Network and Dhimurru.

Exhibition design for the ABC

In addition to the importance given to the client, we had an emphasis on the type of work we produced. Our design work was underpinned by appropriate research as we attempted to produce work with longevity. We were also concerned about the modes of production. At this time I believed that good design had to consider the type of resources it utilised. We’d recommend the use of recycled paper and vegetable based inks, believing that this would resolve the issue. The clients always rejected this as an option, citing the price difference as the cause. Believing all this didn’t stop me from including a die cut, scoring and fluorescent ink as part of my first design of a business card for a client.

Over four years of practice, I managed to develop a strong connection with small non government organisations (NGOs). The trouble was that I was more of a social worker at heart than a business person. As my relationships grew with the agencies, I felt compelled to take them on as pro-bono clients. Towards the end the ratio of pro-bono clients to paid clients was something like 80:20. I think I had the numbers right – but just the wrong way around. I knew there was something wrong when I received a call from a farmer who was looking for a website. He was into sustainable farming practices and he was part of a collective that wanted to support other farming community to sustainable farming. I remember the conversation clearly. He explained his needs and then he told me the reason why he was calling me. He’s heard I did design work for free. I was shocked – but not enough to say no. I told him to send me more information, which he never did. A blessing in disguise that was one factor that made me rethink the direction I was heading in.

I didn’t change tact for a while longer. I set up other businesses on the side as a way of gaining more control over what I was producing. Trash Bags was one such venture. A story on its own, I’ll write about the Trash Bags venture in the next entry.

By this stage of my career, I remember feeling unsure for the first time. The confidence with which I had started with was dissipating. I knew then that it wasn’t about the client list and not getting paid. But I needed a few other experiences to help me expand on my notion of ‘good design’.

Have you had similar experiences? It would be great to hear about moments when your perceptions have been challenged.

1999: Sri Lanka Interactive Media Group

What I was doing: My interest in visual communication had increased to the point where I decided to take it more seriously. I wasn’t sure what direction to head in so after a short course in photography at TAFE, I applied to study B Design (Visual Communication) at UTS and also registered to partake in volunteer work overseas with Australian Volunteers International (AVI). I got accepted into both so decided to defer university and took up a role with the Sri Lanka Interactive Media Group. I spent one year in Sri Lanka on a photography project with homeless children, advocating for child rights within the framework of the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child.

What I was experiencing: In the context of my work in Sri Lanka, visual communication played many roles. It was the language of research, the language of our practice and the language of the delivered outcome.

We began our project by an investigation of child rights issues. We explored the rights of children, as they were articulated through the UN Charter, and compared these to the reality for the homeless children that our organisation worked with. Having the capacity to capture the voices of the children we worked with was very important. Visual communication served two purposes here. For me personally, it bridged a language gap. When I first arrived in Sri Lanka I did not speak either of the two local languages, Sinhala and Tamil, and the children spoke broken English. Photography and other visual formats became a bridge that allowed me to connect with the local communities that we were partnering with.  More importantly, visual communication acted as a form of art therapy through which the delicate subject of child rights abuse could be explored with the children.

The preliminary research pointed us towards running various education campaigns to broaden the community’s understanding of child rights. A co-design approach was adopted where the children impacted by the issues partnered with the practitioners in arriving at the final outcomes. Two examples best demonstrate this:

• I designed and implemented a photography project with the homeless children that we worked with. Again, within the framework of the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child, we set out to explore and contrast the children’s reality against the rights set out in the charter. The children decided to either stage images or use documentary style photography to depict their reality. We worked towards an exhibition of the children’s work and the design of a range of products, such as greeting cards, that promoted the message and raised much-needed funds for the organisation. The photographs carried the voices of the children to the broader community. Despite speaking the same language, there was a socially manifested communication barrier between the homeless children and the decision makers and affluent members of the community. The photographs served to bridge the communication gap here also. The exhibition brought the two groups together and became the site for new conversations that were then carried forward in various ways. I never kept any of the images that the children produced. Below is one of my photographs taken at the same time.

Siddhi, aged 4, is pictured here in front of her home, which she shares with 4 generations of women from her family.

• A second component of the organisation’s work delivered an education campaign targeting schools. We started the project by asking an artist to visually represent each of the articles within the UN charter. Then we asked the children to respond by depicting their own reality. The paintings were taken on a school tour around the country. They were part of a comprehensive program that included a lecture series, an exhibition of the paintings showing the contrast between legislated rights and the children’s reality and a staged simulation where the children impacted by the issues acted out their own realities.

Left two columns: students visiting the exhibition. Right two columns: A homeless child acting out impacts of child labour. The far right image shows the students engaging in a dialogue with the child labourer.

Upon completing the journey through the simulation, the students were ask to create their own response through drawing, writing or painting. The dialogue being generated in the community continued in this way, keeping the process iterative and ongoing.

My role as a visual communicator was ambiguous in my mind. I was at a road cross. I had come into this role as a social worker and had definite intentions of following this experience up with formal studies in visual communication. The fact that the project I was implementing was photographic in nature meant that I could no longer look at the medium as a passive tool. I was more deliberate about trying to identify what photography could contribute as oppose to other visual forms. I saw photography as the bridge that would connect the homeless children with the decision makers. There were also the practicalities – photography was something I felt I could teach the children. I had specific skills in this area and I had the ability to support the participants in producing images that could be exhibited.

Other design needs arose around the photography project. As mentioned, we created a range of greeting cards as a fund raising tool and also produced various printed publications. In each case we were responsive to the needs of the organisation and the community. In the case of the greeting cards for instance, we were conscious of the fact that the organisation was resource poor. They did however have a strong sense of support within the constituency that they served. Accordingly we decided to collaborate with the local community and together we hand made the cards from paper that we recycled by hand.

How I defined good design: There was a communication barrier between the children that we worked with and the decision makers that could impact their future. Good design, for me, was something that made their voices visible. It was something that enabled a connection between communities. I also felt that good design had to be very conscious of its context. It had to be sustainable in the sense that the project had to continue on without my input.

Whilst doing the project in Sri Lanka, I had a more deliberate collaborative approach to practice. I saw my role as a facilitator who brought together the contributions of the various stakeholders – including myself.

Main influencers: I mainly drew upon my experiences as a social worker to guide my practice. This was supplemented with knowledge I had gained through a short course in photography at TAFE prior to starting my role at the Sri Lanka Interactive Media Group. One of the volunteers in our group in Sri Lanka was a trained graphic designer. She worked with Motivation, a not for profit organisation that worked to enhance the lives of people with mobility disabilities. They designed and produced wheelchairs from locally sourced material. I got a lot of inspiration from her work and was encouraged to see the positive impact of their work on the community.

1996: Chester Hill Neighbourhood Centre – Youth Worker

What I was doing: I was a social worker for a number of years before studying and practicing design. Even without the professional training, I had an interest in various forms of visual communication and could see the benefits of using these as a support tool for the social work that I was engaged in.

In my new role at the Chester Hill Neighbourhood Centre, I was responsible for establishing a youth program. A generalist service was required which included a drop-in centre and specific programs that dealt with relevant issues impacting local youth.

Visual communication was used to facilitate a connection with the young people attending the centre. Projects that we ran included:

• A video project on youth violence where a group of young people from our centred collaborated with a group of young offenders from the local juvenile detention centre;
• A photography project exploring the impact of alcohol;
• A graffiti project where local youth ran a graffiti training workshop for the local police in an attempt to bridge the divide between the two groups.

What I was experiencing: My main focus was the social work and the visual communication tools seemed secondary to me. The initial use of photography and video, for instance, were as a result of access to equipment and my own personal interests in these media. The centre owned two video cameras and I had just purchased a Canon SLR. But the more I used these visual forms, the more I came to realise that they opened up communication on a level that differed to the traditional methods of program delivery.

I can best describe the significance of visual communication in this context through an example. We received funding from the Arts Council to run a project around the issue of Youth Violence. In collaboration with the local Juvenile Detention Centre we brought together a small group of young people, half from the detention centre and half from our youth centre, with the aim of instigating a dialogue on the issue. Under normal circumstances the three days we had to run the project would not have been long enough to build relationships and bridge the gap between these two groups of youth. To overcome this, we turned the focus onto the documentary making process.

The shift in focus delivered a number of benefits. It lifted all participants onto a level playing field – on the surface the project became about making a documentary rather than about who had committed an offence and why. The process of making a visual outcome, the documentary, created a framework through which the young people could explore the issue together and decide how it was to be represented. The interview process helped generate a dialogue between the participants. It only took half a day and a couple of boxes of pizza to get everyone to connect and talk through the issues. The process was the significant factor here. The planned final outcome, the documentary, was never made due to the fact that we had no experience in this area and had not obtained the appropriate releases. This did not matter so much though. The documentary as an outcome was secondary and the project was still deemed a success. It was the process that enabled the interaction between the stakeholders and led to the generation of a meaningful dialogue. The process of developing a visual language enabled us to talk about issues in a different way.

How I defined good design: At this stage of my career, I defined good design as a process that dissolved barriers and enabled new ways of seeing. Good design enabled connections within the community and facilitated social innovation and change.

Main influencers: My personal interest in photography was the initial driver for my use of visual communication as a support tool for my social work. I was interested in photojournalism and collected various magazines on the topic. I was attracted to its capacity to tell a story and believed it to be a powerful communication device. Despite the shallow level of knowledge I had in this area, my readings around photojournalism made me think about how the camera could support rendering the practitioner as invisible, challenging some of the power dynamics that exists in traditional workshop facilitation.

The process by which visual communication was used within my practice was informed by my experience as a social worker and by my studies in the behavioural sciences. My approach was human centred and, where possible, the practice moved forward in an iterative manner in response the participants’ contributions.

By David B. Berman
Click to view on Amazon

Do Good Design was one of the first texts I picked up when I was looking for guidance on how to be a ‘good designer’. David Berman’s book certainly answered that call to a certain degree. This small volume is accessible in its approach to the topic. It articulates the power of design as a profession and outlines the responsibility we have as designers to take a step in a positive direction. The anecdotal stories told by David, as he talks of his own personal experiences, helps to give a practical dimension to the book.

I appreciate certain elements of this book. It can be of use to a reader who is in search of the kind of rhetoric contained in this book. But over time, and as I have developed my thoughts on the issue, I am becoming more critical.

I can now see parallels between this book and the Design4Change project we ran through UTS. By categorising and listing the common possible responses designers can have to social change, the content becomes appropriate for the converted few who believe that they can make a change and are looking for ways forward. My concern is around the rest of the crowd, whose misconceptions may be reaffirmed, pushing them further away from recognising that we all have social impact and need to find a way forward.

This is an issue that has become more of a focus for me since my experience with the Design4Change Project. We found that the students are aware of the common surface actions that they can take to contribute to positive social change. Pro-bono work, much like the book’s suggestion of spending 10% of your professional time helping repair the world, features high on the list. When the students we collaborated with felt confident that their reasons for rejecting these actions were justified, for example financial hardship which is common amongst students, they felt a sense of disconnect with the ownership of design’s social impact. This is of course anecdotal and I hope to use this research as way of further analysing the data we collected through the project.

I wanted to be a ‘good’ designer. The problem was that I wasn’t entirely sure what this was exactly. Considering the context from which I have come from, it’s no surprise that social impact had to be present in whatever definition I came up with. It had to play a central role. The question of what it is to be a good designer has lingered beyond my studies and into my professional career. Personal projects undertaken during my university studies allowed me to explore this question on a personal level. I continued these explorations throughout my professional career and  have been scouring books and various articles ever since to try to find the ’5 easy steps’ to being a good designer.

Depending on where you look, a different answer surfaces. Is it about what you say or what you think? Is it your client list? The number of Non Government Organisations you work for? Or is it more generally about who you choose to work with – the ethics of your printer and the type of ink they use? Or maybe it’s the quality of your design work after all. Maybe it’s about how long lasting your design response is to a problem. And is it ok to earn good money as a good designer? Or are you expected to do a lot of pro-bono work?

Twelve years on from starting the degree, I haven’t come up with the answer. I have however realised that coming up with 5 easy steps isn’t going to happen either. I have now come to understand that trying to respond to this question with a set number of check box categories that can be ticked is flawed. Knowing what I don’t know has landed me here – at the start of a PhD. Through my studies I will have the opportunity to explore this topic further and hopefully end up with practical strategies that can support becoming a good designer.

I will use the next few entries to reflect upon past professional experiences and my perceptions of what it is to be a ‘good designer’. By doing this I hope to better understand how these experiences have shaped my thinking.

What does good design mean to you?