Global Perspectives
Bricolage Community Design Studio: Bringing Design Solutions to an Underserved Neighborhood View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dana Moody
This paper discusses the creation of an interdisciplinary community design studio focused on providing energy efficient and accessibility home solutions to low-income residents in an underserved community. Bricolage Studio, made possible by a grant, brought together residents, stakeholders, social service providers, and students from diverse disciplines to collaborate on home improvement solutions needed to empower residents towards self-sufficiency and sustainability. An empty church in a low-income neighborhood in Chattanooga, TN housed the studio. Engineering and Interior Architecture students worked on the space to make it habitable for use by an interdisciplinary class. Students worked in committees including Public Relations/Branding, Community Involvement, Design, and Construction/Estimation while establishing a vision, mission and goals for Bricolage Studio. The mission was to be a service-based initiative, creating solutions that optimize living conditions while protecting the unique character and identity of the community. The studio worked with local non-profits to determine clients. An energy efficiency / accessibility inventory checklist was used on each home to determine priorities. In the end, the students completed twelve community design projects that included designing and building wheel chair ramps, installing Universal design features (walk-in showers, toilets, grab bars, levered hardware, stair railings), and installing energy efficient features (GFCI receptacles, light fixtures/LED light bulbs, weather stripping). Through the Bricolage Community Design Studio, students successfully worked in interdisciplinary design teams while making an impact in a community often overlooked.
Challenging Western Dominance in Technology for Increased Inclusivity and Access: Investigating Cultural Imperialism through an Examination of Keyboard Designs from Various Languages and Cultures
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Omari Souza, Alice Lee
During the nineteenth century, industrialized nations pushed economic integration upon developing countries. To be fluent in Western ways meant colonized civilizations needed to adopt the technology, and forms of communication ushered in by the industrialized powers. For example, the roots of computational communications can be traced to the QWERTY type system created by Christopher Lathan Sholes. The layout of this system was designed for Latin-script alphabets and originate in the nineteenth century. The layout has become ubiquitous with keyboards and smart devices globally. As an artifact originally crafted by an American inventor for an English speaking audience, the functionality of the QWERTY keyboard falls short when translated for cultures with different writing systems and reading orientations. This artifact functions as an example of technology that, in order to access, requires cultural conformity. Utilizing one culture over another as a template for prototypes could lead to service gaps when internationally distributed. The future of design must take into account not only the production of artifacts but also its ability to evolve with the lived cultures and social relationships of its global consumers. This paper provides a brief history of the development of the QWERTY keyboard and its expansion to non-Western cultures as a means to investigate the impact of Western Imperialism from a more global, inclusive perspective. Using the case studies of the Korean and Persian alphabets, we will present an overview of QWERTY’s past and current technological applications and the challenges its structure causes for other languages and cultures.
Design in the Shadows?: Advocacy and Creativity for the Nocturnal Commons
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nick Dunn
Urbanisation continues to provide habitat for more and more of the planet’s human population. Accompanying this process are the energy, transport, and service infrastructures that support urban life. Enmeshed in these networks is artificial illumination and its unintended consequences. Light pollution, for instance, accounts for a growing global carbon footprint, yet more efficient artificial lighting methods using LEDs have resulted in increasingly higher levels of brightness at night (Pawson & Bader, 2014). This is altering natural cycles of light and dark, directly impacting on the circadian rhythms of our bodies and having disastrous effects upon other species and their ecosystems. Where is design in addressing such poor performance? This issue of critical importance has been referred to by some scientists as the ‘hidden global challenge’ (Davies & Smyth, 2018) but the public awareness and understanding of it is negligible. The growing problem of how we perceive darkness and the attempts to manage it, typically through artificial illumination, requires new design strategies to create viable alternatives to current pathways (Dunn, 2019). How can we advocate for the ‘nocturnal commons’ (Gandy, 2017) when the majority of society does not even know what is disappearing or understand the implications? This paper, therefore, presents a new framing for design as advocacy through creativity to raise awareness of these complex issues and address them. In doing so, it calls for the important and urgent need for design to commit, act, and engage others in the future of our planet, its people, and non-human species.
