Designing for Social Needs
Interpreting Social Distancing Through Design
The following are examples to stimulate thinking around opportunities to interpret or reinterpret social distancing through product design and a speculative approach. As discussed, there doesn’t have to be a heavy or dark stance to the subject. It can be present or future positioned, i.e. post COVID-19. If your position is to focus on the present, then you are to be guided by health and government experts’ mandate of social distancing. If your position is post COVID-19, your scenario assumes that there are lasting effects on physical and emotional behaviors where social distancing is still practiced in some form, especially where there are signs of illness.
Your response to this project can align with a more practical approach or one that pushes the boundaries. In either case, speculating how your design proposition can motivate people to modify their behavior regarding social distancing is the key challenge.
What if the current state of national concern continued for some time and resulted in a some change in social interactions? In what ways could speculative design contribute?
Literal Responses?
- Community Social Gathering: Could a speculative product design response be as simple as a networked chair? One that perhaps has features that support the physical and mental needs and desires of social gathering while teach and maintain proper distancing? What would be necessary for such a product? What are system considerations?
2. Personal Gatherings in confident spaces: This likely relates to the places like the home and is particularly challenging if multiple people occupy spaces and someone becomes infected? How can a speculative design approach envision sharing spaces and activities while social distancing? If the framing of this project is positioned post COVID-19, yet the concerns about social distancing remain part of cultural behaviors, particularly if someone in the household becomes sick, what type of product proposition might be conceptualized that could accommodate both close and distancing sharing?
3. Line Queueing: How might airport line queueing, as an example, be designed to address social distancing practices? What are physical and system thinking needs that account for “proper distancing” and emotional security?
Pushing boundaries: Technological Considerations?
- Interactive Navigation? How might behaviors be modified via environmental technology prompts?
2. Fashion and Wearable Technologies? What can a product be that is designed to communicate personal space boundaries through indicators to the surrounding environment?
Reference quotes from interviews of speculative designers — SpeculativeEDU project
https://speculativeedu.eu/approaches-methods-and-tools-for-speculative-design/ (provided to support your thinking as you frame your project focus and goals)
“craft the speculation from the bottom up with localized interventions from which can emerge a bigger picture”, from Andrew Friend and Sitraka Rakotoniaina;
“get the attention of the audience or passerby”, from Andrew Friend and Sitraka Rakotoniaina;
“tell stories that lie somewhere between utopia and dystopia”, from Nonhuman Nonsense;
“Instill a sense of opening and curiosity that allows people to explore and consider their position from different perspectives without having to identify strongly or attach themselves to views and opinions”, from Nonhuman Nonsense;
“combine the elements of provocation and practicality; criticality and participation; aesthetic spectacularity and social involvement”, from Markéta Dolejšová;
“overlap scientific, political and research-through practical agendas”, from Martin Ávila;
“mix various aspects of probable changes (showing both the balance between benefits and limits, opportunities and frictions, the interplay between new things and old ones, etc.)”, from Nicolas Nova;
“interested in very mundane situations and banal artifacts to express future scenarios”, from Nicolas Nova;
“establish empathy towards a certain subject”, from Susan Soares;
Develop a Design Opportunity statement — a statement that succinctly and clearly communicates a need and or desire to be fulfilled by design activity. This statement should include the basic, but key question of:
Who is this opportunity for?
What issue(s) can/should be address?
Why is this a need?
Where does the need take place?
When is the action or activities needed/performed?
