Here’s an interesting thing I came across, and got me thinking about certain things. Social issues and the designer’s role in all of it:

… because too often, we don’t even pick ourselves up to protest. We don’t believe that injustice will occur, and then before we know it, things happen, and we just adapt to the new rules. How many times have I signed a petition, and then did nothing more? I’ve been a California resident since 2000 (with a departure in 2002 for school in Milan), and to be honest, I have no idea what the hell happened that California’s budget is in the shambles that it is. And there is no clear resource for me to educate myself easily either. Isn’t there a web/graphic designer that could tell me what happened in a nice data visualization diagram? I would take a stab at such a thing if I knew what the heck happened!

• Ivy Chuang on “Design as Social Protest” from Creativity Online

I think this is a relevant topic, as educating oneself about any situation is not only preferred, but actually essential in today’s communities. Not to give too much credit to Design as a Practice (capital letters included), but we certainly do have an obligation to participate in social causes as designers. Even speaking as an international ex-pat of the Philippines, I find it hard to keep up with current events. I admit I’m part of the generation of MTV, so my attention span might not be as great as others, and with developments of new technologies and ways of communicating (Twitter, nice to see you back in the discussion again).

I need the flash and the pomp, the humour and the sparkles. A good example might be the Daily Show with John Stewart and the Colbert Report. I am part of the sad statistic! (Get over it.)

My instructor Deborah Shackelton once advised me of the dangers of being too self-referential, and this is good advice to heed—especially now, where we are shifting from individual entities and back into more collaborative settings to ride out the recession. It’s cool to do something and learn for yourself, but there has to also be a moment of sharing. Otherwise you’re just a 13-year-old boy locked in his bedroom discovering something for the very first time.

If design has the ability to communicate, then we should be looking to communicate ethically and responsibly as well. Although viewpoints and sides are always going to be different, I strongly believe in Designer as Author, and that we aren’t educated to just program and insert things into InDesign for a final output. There is something more human to how design is taught, at least I know for me, and pulling this humanity out of the equation is never an option. You can’t reach humans if the medium itself doesn’t contain anything remotely humane.

Talking about design touchpoints and emotional effect, are we able to design something that will resonate enough for an individual to do something more than sign a petition? Can design have the potential to get the armchair activists up and hugging trees and other objects again?

Sharks?

Optimistically (delusionally) speaking, and despite this lady in the video above, I think so.

But the question I’d like to bring up isn’t design reaching an audience, but the prospect of the design itself reaching the designer. Shifting the question a little bit from design-to-audience to design-to-designer, how do we as designers find the motivation or emotional investment to pull ourselves into taking on a design project for social change/protest in the first place? Do we need a super-human notion of empathy to begin with, in order to promote such change?

If it feels like there is nothing at stake for a designer, or the rewards aren’t as big or immediate, what will make us active enough to encourage more activism? Perhaps we can work on developing the aforementioned superhuman empathy, or as one of the very tired ideas I keep throwing around, maybe it is establishing personal connections with other people with different levels of empathy & experiences to bring to the table; being friends with people who have the things at stake, where our own emotional input is tied to the well-being of these friends, and the sincerity can naturally come through our work.

I remember the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean when I was in high school, and how foreign the disaster was to me as I saw it on the news. I felt terrible, but for the most part, these were images on a TV screen, people I didn’t know, numbers on the newspaper headlines.

However I also remember coming to school a few days after and realizing that I had dear friends who had families in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, that they were wrought with worry for the safety of people who were very much real to them. They had names to the faces for their concern, and actual memories connected to the destroyed landscapes. The effects of such a realization were remarkable to me. The whole school came together to raise money, and the donations were enormous—even our senior class representatives held a fund-raising event, where they all shaved their heads for the victims of the tsunami. All of this was rooted in the fact that we knew, at least by extension, who were suffering. They weren’t necessarily the ones taken by the waters, but even more painfully, the ones who had to live with the losses.

I guess this is even more encouragement to work outside of ourselves, and that design as/for social protest can only truly be worth exploring if it seeds from an equally social beginning. We can only get so close to hundreds of causes and topics and issues, but once in a while (hopefully more often than not), we just need to be close enough to the periphery, within flinging distance of the sweat and tears of others, to feel it against our own skin.