Agile Factory
Introducing Agile Factory
Innovating for Emergency
by Renata Lemos Morais, Carlos Montana, Sayjel Vijay Patel
Design as Response-ability
Effective responses to the pressing needs of moments of crisis and emergency require many of the attributes that are a part of design practice and research. Every crisis brings with it a sudden reconfiguration and upheaval of its systemic structures and dynamics, creating with this an open space that must be filled with new systems, new collective responses to a common challenge. Ideation, co-creation, making and experimenting are not optional during such times. Innovation becomes much more than an aspiration; it becomes instead a basic necessity of our times, the only possible way to ensure our survival. Creative problem solving, perhaps the most important ability developed by design education, is the ultimate skill required to overcome the challenges brought about by complex systemic emergencies such as the one we are now facing with Covid-19.
Against the background of an unprecedented global emergency, not only the responsibility but most importantly the response-ability (Haraway 2015, 2016) of designers becomes apparent. Design education must prepare students to face global challenges with courage and determination. Donna Haraway has defined response-ability as the “cultivation of the capacity to respond […] in the context of living and dying” (Haraway 2015, 2016). For Haraway (2016), response-ability means finding new ways to co-exist in sympoiesis: a shift from individualistic self-making into a collective making-with that is entangled both with what is human and what is non-human.
Innovative and timely responses to such challenges are required from all of us, designers and non-designers alike. Disciplinary boundaries suddenly stop making sense. During the current Covid-19 global emergency, doctors and nurses are becoming product designers as they must continuously use creativity to overcome obstacles and constraints in order to save lives. An inspiring example comes from Alain Gauthier, a Canadian doctor struggling with lack of ventilators, who has re-purposed a single user device into a nine user device, showcasing how design is a transdisciplinary mindset that can be applied by all knowledge fields and disciplines. Design can and should be used as a force for response-ability.
DIDI Agile Factory
Aligning with this vision, our students at DIDI have actively embodied response-ability in response to the current pandemic, immediately and spontaneously coming together to ideate possible ways we could help as a community. We have listened to their ideas and responded by creating an unified work-front initiative at DIDI, bringing together the entire Multimedia concentration and the Design Strategy and Entrepreneurship foundation course. We have named this initiative the DIDI Agile Factory, a joint effort to bring forth simultaneous trans-disciplinary projects by getting 1st and 2nd year students to collaborate to develop design solutions to Covid-19.
We have named this initiative the DIDI Agile Factory, a joint effort to bring forth simultaneous trans-disciplinary projects by getting 1st and 2nd year students to collaborate to develop design solutions to Covid-19.
Our response will be ‘glocal’ — both global and local — integrating a data-oriented approach that uses global data sets and information to articulate better and more comprehensive insights in relation to the pandemic to an innovation-oriented mindset that will apply these new insights to providing answers and solutions to the direct needs of local communities in Dubai.
The project groups students who have voluntarily opted for this option, while keeping them mostly within their previously allocated courses, in alignment with current government mandates and institutional responses. As such, as possible and within constraints of the current situation, the project will be supported and/or aligned with efforts from partner institutions such as MBRU.
Project Areas
The DIDI Agile Factory has opened up three topic areas for investigation:
1 Open Data Interfaces
This project uses interactive design, emerging technologies and data gathering, processing and visualization to articulate better sense-making tools and generate new insights about Covid-19 as a glocal challenge [global + local].
2 Design for Emergency
Covid-19 has made evident many of the constraints and bottlenecks of current social infrastructures in the areas of health, transportation, logistics, etc. This project uses an agile approach to the quick mapping of problem-spaces and the design of fast solutions that can unblock these bottlenecks.
3 Hacking Manufacturing
This project curates open source resources and hacks for agile manufacturing of urgent solutions to Covid-19 that take into account distributed manufacturing, deliveries, material inputs The topic connects the urgent needs of healthcare professionals with designers and makers around agile responses to their local needs.
Conclusion
Response-ability enables us to keep moving even when we are not so sure about our destination anymore. It enables us to find new meaning even when many things around us become meaningless, to make sense of the world even when we stop understanding it.
When our sense of external direction is not there, and uncertainty seems to be our only certainty, we must turn to each other and allow our common needs to drive us toward a new direction. We must be both responsible and response-able.
Within the spirit of response-ability we are applying agile methodologies to the design of integrated responses to the multifaceted challenges of Covid-19, in line with learning outcomes and pedagogical approaches of the courses involved. This is not a new course with a new syllabus. It is an adapted and contextualized final project brief for some courses, where students from different years can work together in response to the current situation. It is also part of the collective efforts to adapt DIDI pedagogy to e-learning modes necessary in times of pandemic and lock-down.
N O T E S
1 Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin with the Chthulucene London: Duke University Press. 2016.
2 “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in Conversation with Martha Kenney”, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp 229–244.
3 Sarah Franklin, “Staying with the Manifesto: An Interview with Donna Haraway”, Theory, Culture & Society, 28 Mar 2017, 15 pp.
