We pulled into D-Town today (gorgeous weather!), and Matt, my partner and former Detroit resident, was excited to be back in the city we’ve all come to know as the urban representation of collapse. Amidst the city’s tragedy, there’s tons of hope, much of it coming from a recent influx of artists and designers intent on bringing empowering solutions to the city’s residents. While we have to be careful about just making “design for design’s sake” and actually provide real sustainable solutions, we were thrilled to get to talk to students at CCS today about what they were doing in their own back yards.
After our lecture (which included forty high school students who have collaborated with CCS professor Stephen Schock’s industrial design studio), we opened our doors to a huge crowd of post-lecture visitors. We were also joined by my old friend Jason Chernak, who went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with me, and Project H’s “roving critic” Justin Mast – the two of them (below with professor Stephen Schock) drove in from Ann Arbor.
The highlight of the day, however, came when we visited Stephen’s industrial design studio in the new Argonaut building (700,000 square feet!). I had spoken to the class at the beginning of the term via Skype and gave them some advice on how to engage within a community, take the product out of product design, and really focus on working solutions. We heard presentations from each student about their projects, which ranged from aquaponic urban farming systems to homeless craft enterprises, ideas for new and improved outdoor community spaces, and more.
A few themes we saw that impressed us were a focus on enterprise- infusing products with the holistic system that might make them more easily accepted and owned by a community. Many students looked at homelessness in Detroit, a rampant issue, and one students’ amazing “coat-turned-sleeping-bag” design did a great job of bringing homeless individuals into the creation process to integrate job skills and ownership (photo above). She has spent 3 nights a week the entire term in one of the most intense homeless shelters in the city, working with the homeless and the folks running the shelter (kudos for taking to the streets and not producing work in a vacuum!)
One promising projects was almost undesigned: it was simply an idea to grow grapes on chain-link fences (though there was a fixture design component that facilitated the vine growth through the chain-link). We spoke about incentives, which were missing from some projects. When designing for hesitant or even truculent users, the design must provide an incentive to use the new and improved solution. The grapevine idea required little work on the part of the end user but did provide a significant benefit: easy and free access to healthy food that didn’t need much maintenance.
One other great project was a simple design for a bag that could be transformed into a shoe (or shoe cover) for homeless individuals. A huge problem for individuals living on the street is keeping feet dry and warm in winter months. The bag was well-designed to morph into a rubber shoe sole, and could also be sold as a cool object to a retail market (video above).
Another project took an inexpensive water bottle (also a solar pasteurization device) and applied graphic maps to outline resources for the homeless: local shelters, etc. We left the students with two pieces of advice (as they have 4 more weeks to refine their projects): Grow/build stuff, and team up – so many of the projects had great synergy! We can’t wait to hear how some of the projects turn out.