Designing in and for Communities: Breaking Institutional Bariers and Engaging Design Students in Meaningful and Relevant Projects

Traditional art and design curriculum revolves around instructing students and evaluating their individual projects without considering hat a student’s future professional life and success will require that he or she function in a complex design environment with multi-faceted levels of relationships. Educators nurture, and the institution rewards the ‘me’ designer while the professional world requires that a designer operates as ‘we’ and ‘us’.For the past nine years, I have developed classes that operate on a different paradigm—where students are forced out of their academic comfort zone to come to grips with complex, “real world” community issues, ultimately resulting in a greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of art and design. These classes rely on partnerships forged with researchers from The Johns Hopkins University School for Public Health, educational institutions in the Middle East, local communities, and community organizations. The multi-fold objectives of these classes have been to understand and translate research into creative solutions for disenfranchised and neglected communities, for students to function in multi-disciplinary teams, and to increase students’ awareness of how the designer functions within these different groups. These creative solutions have translated research projects about inner city gun violence, hypertension, religious and cultural understanding into multiple delivery vehicles, benefiting all constituents. The paper will address specific case studies as well as highlight the strengths and weakness of working with groups that have different needs and objectives. The paper will showcase two recent projects involving: (1) encouraging inner city women to breast feed their children, and (2) three interconnected projects that engage with a local Somali Muslim community. Each case study will have examples of the final products as well as an overview of the pedagogical structure of the class.