Introducing Design Caucus
A 48-hour transdisciplinary design sprint focused on design activism
I’ve written an introduction to the introduction as a retrospective open letter. This is how myself and members of the Design Caucus committee were feeling prior to the inception of DC. It will give some helpful context before learning more about what we launched.
Strategic Designers,
What are we doing? I ask again, what are we doing? Are we not systems thinking, strategic, innovative thinkers and doers? Are we not this badass new breed of designers equipped to take on the most wicked problems the world can throw at us?
The world is falling down around us. Covid has demonstrated many of our systems were sick well before the virus took hold, and social isolation may just bring about their death. Unemployment is at all time highs. Entire countries are shutting down. A shortage of PPE and ventilators could cripple our ability to care for the sick. People are arguing what is necessary and what is the embodiment of fear over fact.
Businesses have reacted pretty quickly. They found ways to cope with working remotely, and continue to produce. Is it a mere coincidence that our solutions are always directed at continuing the flow of money. “Stimulus checks and unemployment boosts”. An album title for 2020. Where are the trillion dollar solutions for education? Where was the stimulus for America’s working class before the pandemic? Where are the design solutions for the working mother needing to fulfill this strange new role of mother, teacher, cook, employee, wife, fitness instructor, maid, and amateur virologist?
Maybe we need a way to engage. Maybe we need a spark to which our fuel can be ignited. Maybe we need a boot in the ass to remind us that we are not machine people with machine hearts. This moment is where we define our profession. This “nascent” field we keep complaining is ill defined is begging to make a name for itself, and we are failing. It’s our duty to do something in this moment, and I invite you all to join me in figuring out what that might be.
Design Caucus is not a hackathon
But it almost was.
When I first connected with Camila, now my partner in founding Design Caucus, we were mostly focused on doing something. However, we were failing to ask ourselves what was missing. Startup weekends are great for launching companies around specific areas. Hackathons are great because they get a lot of super smart people together to usually create some kind of technical solution. What was lacking was a focus on solving problems without regard to the kind of outcome. We want solutions of any kind at Design Caucus. Just don’t be inconsequential.
If you want to design a system? Great. You want to launch a company or product? Awesome. You want to reinvent sit-ins for a digital era? Stellar. You want to generate an open source bot to shout down trolls using dispersed server hosting? Get it done. In any case, we are here to help.
It seems too often that we in the design world are bogged down by funding, business opportunities, or feasibility. I get it. Rent is due every month, and generally the world keeps spinning. We aren’t asking you to quit your job. We’re asking you to grapple with a problem in a way that might be freeing for 48 hours, and will hopefully generate a more just world for everyone in it.
Design is not enough
If it was then we wouldn’t need Design Caucus.
Buckminster Fuller claims the world needs more comprehensivists. If you aren’t familiar with that term it is essentially a generalist with super powers. A poet, philosopher, scientist, artist, etc. but also incredibly good at all of those things. This would be terrific, and if the uber driver/dog walker/artist culture continues then perhaps we will arrive there sooner.
But for those of us in the current world where specialists run the table, collaboration is critical. We do not see Strategic Design as the pinnacle of design nor can we accomplish much in a vacuum. The reality is designers, as a general rule, are far too focused on perpetuating the world we already inhabit. By contrast those in the liberal arts, social sciences, and humanities are constantly grappling foundational concepts powerful enough to disrupt the status quo.
What would happen if we bring the two together? What if we bridge the gap between the revolutionary poet, and the product designer? What kind of magic could we generate when the vitality of deep thinking meets the calculated methods of creation?
Design Caucus is an experiment to find out.
Launching version one
Designing a Petri Dish
We decided to focus on The New School community early on. This was to best leverage our network of fellow students, instructors, and administrators. We also knew having both the New School of Social Research and the Parsons School of Design gave us the ideal partition and bridge for our experiment.
We enlisted the help of two dozen highly experienced professionals to offer support to teams over the weekend. Some were there to support design, and others were there to offer subject matter expertise. All of them were volunteers and tremendous assets in the approach.
We raised just over $1500 from The New School, FM-31, and Design for Tomorrow. This money was put towards grants for the teams at the end of the weekend. We expected some teams to need money to continue working or realizing their idea beyond the 48 hours.
We created an open source toolkit with methods pulled from strategic design, foresight, strategy, innovation practices, and other hubs. This will continue to be refined and live on hour home site. It acts as a reference guide for teams throughout the process, and as an open source tool for anyone pursuing creative endeavors.
We focused on the question of “How Might We account for socioeconomic differences in distance learning?” This was decided in conjunction with a preference in the registration form, and the timing of the Caucus.
Conclusion
This experiment was exactly what we had in mind in response to that letter we could have easily written 4 months ago. We could not have pulled off the event without the help of our partners, mentors, and sponsors. Thank you to all of you! If you’d like to hear how the experiment went I will be publishing a second part to this article in which I discuss the results.
