DESIGN 21: Social Design Network’s mission in partnership with UNESCO is to inspire social activism through design. They connect people who want to explore ways design can positively impact our many worlds, and who want to create change here, now.
Answers abound…in terms of looking for ideas about how to overcome some of the difficulties associated with developing relationships between systems, design, and public health.
Take a look at DORI’s Moblog where she provides Two Reasons for the Failure of Design Policy . She is a design anthropologist, meaning that she is “tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it mean to be human.”
Does that mean that a design biologist tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it mean to be human and non-human.
I like that.
I found her research based on a tip from someone I met at the public health and complex systems conference last week. Speaking of social networks, weak connections are valuable.
On May 30th – June 1st I had the opportunity to attend a symposium that linked together the concerns of public health professionals and those who study and model complex systems. The symposium was hosted by the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems here at the University of Michigan. The meeting brought together a very diverse groups of individuals. This provided me the opportunity to have substantive discussions with a range of individuals working in public health policy and implementation. 
These interactions helped me gain a recognition for the scale (and complexity) that individuals and organizations face when attempting to solve problems on local and global scales. Among my many encounters, I was able to converse and share ideas with a Professor from Brown University that studies nursing home policy, a graduate student from John Hopkins that has spent the last eight years developing and directing humanitarian relief missions in places ranging from Bolivia to Tajikistan, and a public health practitioner responsible for implementing relief programs for children in Ethiopia. I was genuinely surprised at the potential that exists to merge the interests of those working in these areas with those of art and design. I’ll try to articulate a few.
If you are not familiar with complex systems, it broadly refers to any system (biological, social, visual, emotional, technological, etc) composed of diverse components interacting in interesting ways. Carl Simon provided an overview early in the meetings that described those traits that distinguish complex systems from something that might just be complicated.
Complex systems have properties of:
Some patterns stood out. Public health tends to focus most of its attention on individuals. Similarly, I think is it arguable that art and sometimes design share “the individual” as an organizing feature of the discipline. Systems approaches tend to take multiple levels into account and consequently set up a certain tension between individual and group level concerns. I think this is a healthy and very rich area for investigation. For example, how can you model empathy?
It’s not surprising then, that complex systems models sometime lack subjective interpretations. This point was raised during a talk that Dr. Simon presented last semester. He was asked about how the humanities and the arts could be incorporated into the methods of complex systems. The problem remains a difficult one that was reiterated by those in the public health profession. I think we often get caught up in the point in the process that involves adding quantitative values to some aspects of models that we create. This doesn’t have to be the case of course, and many complex systems models are solely verbal. Even more frequently they are multi-modal, incorporating visual, aural, and tactile senses.
I was struck by the diversity of goals embodied in the kind of modeling that take place when systems are “unpacked.” These goals include such things as prediction, explanation, action in real time, and many more. I wonder what kinds of goals individuals in art and design might share with these other modelers. That si the thing that got me most excited about this symposium. To be honest, I wasn’t initially all that excited about public health (though I am very excited now; see below). What intrigue me was the potential for this context to facilitate fertilization among art, design, the humanities, and the scientific and quantitative disciplines based on the assumption that there is some underlying shared similarity upon which we can all agree.
One issue that seemed to be implicit in many of the questions and comments was the role of perception and those cultural and visual aspects that influence public health. Many public health attendees reiterated the importance of cultural cues to the spread of disease. Smoking is a great example. The effort to ban depictions of smoking in movies seems to indicate the influence that artists and others have on public health. This role seems to be more widely recognized and may be a point of interest and future prospects.
A number of the quantitative modelers brought up the importance of underlaying antagonism in the systems they study. That is, in order for there to be any change (social or otherwise) some of the individuals had to be causing a ruckus (my word, not theirs). Consider this quantitative finding in light of many artists’ historical role in social change.
One thing that I wished had been dealt with more concretely was how, in practical terms, we can build relationships between those who are working on analytical complex systems models with those that bring other ways of seeing to the table. This peaks directly to the problem of integrating the concerns of other disciplines (e.g. art, history, biology, philosophy, etc) into models that propose solutions. What are the social strategies that students and others can use to begin to integrate and broker these diverse sets of methods?
Some possible solutions to this problem came from an enriching seres of conversations I had with a woman who has developed and supervised humanitarian assistance to refugees in Congo, infectious-disease control during natural disasters in Central Asia and the tsunami in Sri Lanka, and public health responses to drought and conflict in Somalia. We found a good deal of common ground in our professional interests–particularly is the area of design for the (so-called) other 90%. Some questions that we started to unpack related to the practical matters of involving artists and designers as members of aid missions. How can students and professionals apply their skills, interests, and methodologies to the diverse sets of problems facing sustainable development? How can design research be accomplished within the networks of international aid and local communities as a vector for problem-solving beyond the marketplace?
We’ve started a dialogue on this subject. If you have any ideas, comments, suggestions, or contacts on this area, we would really be interested in your thoughts via the comments below or to the electronic mail address in the right sidebar.
Finally, I did take part in a methods workshop in social network analysis. It was an amazing and very useful day that filled me in on its history and implementation. I went in interested in its possible applications for learning about how the social functions of artists are qualitatively different (or not) from other interdisciplinary practices. If you would like to hear more, just contact me.
