project 02 :: project statement

"Design for Good"

For this project, we will each be creating a campaign, service, product, or environment designed to promote inter-cultural understanding. With this design we have the opportunity to promote engagement with people of diverse backgrounds in ways that recognize differences, create connections, and cultivate respect. What a responsibility and an opportunity!

We will be focusing on campus, local, or regional opportunities in order to narrow our focus and not try to take all the world's problems on our own shoulders.

We recognize that we will not solve any of these issues. But, we can attempt to use design to promote inter-cultural understanding. As we are discussing in another design class, design has illustrative and formative power in culture – it can both reflect the culture by illustrating values already present or it can be the means for constructing ideas and values that will become part of the culture. This is an opportunity to explore how to use design in a formative way.

These helpful questions were included in our project brief:

–How can all these identities and differences interact in ways that make for good relationships, and for a society and a world where there is mutual understanding, respect and peace rather than misunderstanding, prejudice, suspicion, conflict and violence?

–How can we live together better – more peacefully and happily – than we do at present? How can we cultivate wiser and more effective ways of coping with our differences in many spheres of life?

–How can our world and each of its societies and localities be healthily diverse rather than dangerously divided? How can the dignity of each person be respected?

–How can there be connectivity that works for the common good?

–Can the resources of the world’s cultures, traditions, educational systems, technologies, media, philosophies, world views or religions be drawn upon to serve the common good? 

I am looking forward to navigating the challenges this project will present.