Trans-activisim in Design: A Case Study

The call to activism in design has developed in myriad interesting wayssince it was first articulated in the 1960s as a resistance to the juggernautof top-down planning. (Hatch, 1984, Jones, et al. 2005) New designactivisms are expanding the agency of the professions and engaging andempowering underserved communities in the process. Recasting the rolesof client and professional, redefining the scope and subjects of design, anda broadening the sites and time-frames of discourse, design activisms haveemerged around reactive, proactive and transactive models of practice.Reactive practices are efficient and respond to need defined a priori: theseinclude the modest pro bono professional services to community-based nonprofitsthat form the core of the work of design centers, but also high profiledisaster relief and other design efforts reacting to a humanitarian emergency.(Bell and Wakeford, 2008) In the proactive model of practice thedesigner takes the lead, framing critical social environmental issues throughdesign research and speculation, temporary art-based spatial practices, orhighly mediated events like charrettes and exhibitions. The third and mostcomplex is the transactive practice: inefficient by intent, design evolvesthrough a long-term commitment to a specific locale, building relationshipsof people to place to effect sustainable physical change. (Hamdi, 2004,Cruz, 2010) Often adopting elements of reactive and proactive practice,transactive process is always discursive and necessarily time based. Seekingemergent potential in creative use of space, connections are made betweenwhat is tangible and local and what is abstract and systemic.The presentation reviews the three modes of design activism, focusing on acase study of a transactive practice undertaken over twenty five years in animpoverished urban neighborhood. A three block area is home to a uniquearts organization led by artists and designers working with local youth tobring creative expression into a place seemingly without hope. Grown incrementally,it first appropriated a 19th century storefront as dance studio,then expanded its reach, rehabilitating abandoned row houses for classroomsand transforming the increasing number of vacant residential lotsas public spaces with brilliant mosaic murals and sculpture. But the postindustrialeconomy has taken such a heavy toll on the fabric of the neighborhoodthat the organization is exploring ways to stimulate further growth.The emergence of interest in new modes of arts education, performanceand urban gardening suggests other ways to occupy, intensify, heal and restructurethe space where the organization is situated. A nearby university’sdesign faculty and students, local teens and their families, staff and artistshave been engaged in imagining the future of the place. Seeking to framea continuous dialogue between a compelling future and a lived present, thedesigners developed a transactive process where long term vision is balancedwith strategic catalytic interventions that activate and map out thesites of potential growth. A plan is being presented to its funders and toother public stakeholders and first of these interventions is being developed.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1