“How can you help us with your design?”

…a response to the lectures Teddy Cruz and Emily Pilloton (of Project H).

It has taken me a long time to write this post, and it’s not all because of procrastination. My reactions to these two lectures have been a little hard to sort through, and I want to lay it out right.

Teddy Cruz is a socially motivated artist, architect, and designer whose work ranges across a variety media and scales. A recurring aspect of his work regards the contrasting spatial and material needs of communities on either side of the California-Mexico border, in affluent San Diego and impoverished Tijuana.

As an “architect” Cruz is an interesting figure in that he does not care for how something looks, but how it happens; he is more interested in designing processes than making things. As an academic, an analyst, and a theorist, this makes his work very interesting. He focuses on “bottom-up” community-based design in communities that are often invisible to the standard developmental powers (developers, investors, governments, etc).

Emily Pilloton of Project H is a designer likewise interested in socially responsible, community-based design, whose inspiring work ranges from small schoolyard interventions to a high school design program in impoverished Bertie County, NC.

Like Cruz, Project H is committed to designing with people, not for people, and is more interested in “systems” than “stuff.” But unlike Cruz, Project H’s primary goal is not analytical or theoretical, but is instead focused on actually designing and building projects. Project H operates with a certain sense of urgency in addressing societal problems it sees, and creates its design projects as specific interventions that make some measurable change to a community.

Comparing the two presentations begins to ask questions about the best approach to large-scale social problems– be it poverty, marginalization of communities, youth disenfranchisement, etc. Should one keep looking at the whole picture, as any specific design/build project will ultimately be too narrow in focus to really change anything? Or should one jump in and start making small changes that will at least be meaningful to a handful of people?

While there are obvious merits and faults to each approach, as a designer, I have a hard time committing to the former. I find that if you refuse to step closer, for fear of losing sight of the whole problem, you miss opportunities to make real, positive change. The problem only seems to get bigger and bigger, and seemingly insolvable. While many of Cruz’s installation projects attempt to address border issues on a large scale, they fall short in their ability to actually change them. The argument could be made that art raises awareness of these issues, but I’m a bit skeptical of that explanation. In one of his multimedia projects in the favelas of Brazil, residents asked him directly: “How can you help us with your art?” It is a difficult question to answer.

But if you can step in and start to create real, meaningful change through design (or otherwise), you become a model for others to follow. This is the genius of Project H’s work: when people ask Pilloton how she plans to scale their work, she explains that their design is open-source– it is available for others to step up and start making change themselves. They become leaders, inspiration, precedents for change.

Surely, you cannot only design, and you cannot only analyze. They necessitate each other. But as a designer myself, I am more partial to Project H’s approach. I’d rather be the change I want to see in the world.