Our newest project has now been briefed to us. 'Unheard Voices' is a project aiming to elevate fascinating individuals working in the creative industries who don't fit the norm of people the mainstream media routinely cover. Once we have identified an inspiring and lesser-known creative, we are to create a response to their practice in whichever medium we feel appropriate. Our society is becoming more diverse but also increasingly divided. Mainstream media outlets often only perpetuate stereotypes of race, gender and sexuality which leads to a lack of empathy towards people who are different from ourselves. Elevating unheard voices and offering platforms to people whose stories aren’t normally profiled allows a better chance of challenging these dangerous divisions. The arts are not immune to this inequality - the majority of art, design, literature and film celebrated in mainstream museums, galleries and publications comes from a narrow canon of work. In an effort to discover and share references with each other, this project is challenging what we can do as designers to change the narrative.
Of course, the initially challenging part about this brief is that we have to find an unheard voice who, by their nature, is not easily found! My first week was spent simply combing through old issues of design publications, using the internet and obscure books and interviews in the hopes of finding a gem. To begin with, I was considering basing my project around a designer named Shanaz Ahmed, who is currently working in London. Her practice involves a lot of design for charitable organisations and she even has a side project called 'Knit Aid', where she has managed to help hundreds of displaced refugees through her love of knitting. What I found interesting about Shanaz was that even though she has worked for many major clients, her work seems to all be about doing good in society. The design world is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The designer as celebrity is a very familiar sight, with fame and money motivating many young designers today. Shanaz takes a different approach. She has no website, no publicly available portfolio and her social media consists mainly of her work for 'Knit Aid'. I booked to see her talk at an event held by 'The Other Box', which was an evening of inspiring talks, delivered by people from minority backgrounds. Each speaker was somebody who once felt invisible, even actively silenced by the mainstream, but who have used their experience and creativity to change the narrative. They’ve written themselves into the story so that all of us can feel inspired and empowered to tell our own stories. Although I found Shanaz's story and background inspiring, especially given her success as a minority woman in the design industry, the event left me wondering whether it was right for me to cover her for this project. The event was all about minorities championing themesleves, writing themselves into a new, more diverse narrative and encouraging those of a similar background to aim higher. As a white woman, it would feel somewhat uncomfortable and even condescending to say that I would like to make her voice heard. She is doing such incredible work that I would feel unqualified to suggest I could do better at letting her voice be heard. I am very glad to have found her work but I think for this project, it was better to continue my research.
I have no settled on a new creative to base my projct on. Barbara Beskind is 93 year old product designer - who only started her position working in Silicon Valley at the age of 89! In January 2013, she saw IDEO founder David Kelley speak in a television interview about the importance of cultivating a diversity of experience among team members developing new products and services. Barbara wrote to the company, offering to help IDEO design for an ageing population. She soon began working in IDEO’s offices. She has been directly involved with client projects related to contact lenses, health care delivery, and retirement home services. Having being told at a young age that places at engineering school were reserved for boys, Barbra joined the army as an occupational therapist. She retired as a major in in 1966 and went into private practice (the first occupational therapist in the US to do so). She worked with children with learning disorders and develop equipment that helped to improve their balance. She patented a 3ft inflated square pillow with rolls around the outside that protected children when they fell. Calling it a “space ship”, it was fun for the children but it also improved their sense of balance.
Now legally blind, she has personalised two ski poles bought at Costco for $30 — wrapping the handles with flannel and duct tape to prevent blisters. To differentiate between right and left poles, she also put markers on the top that she can feel. Beskind puts small bumps on her products, on lipstick tubes and pillboxes — nearly everything — to orient the object. She makes sure to vary things by size, texture and colour, telling the story of a time she put a white light on a white table, which took her weeks to find. Clearly, Beskind is a natural inventor and she talks of how the great depression necessitated that she make as much as she could. I admire her hands on, human-centred design approach to problems faced by the elderly. Often inventing products for her friends in her retirement community, Beskind makes sure to truly understand the problem before coming up with sometimes startlingly simple solutions. My ambition for this project is that the 'unheard voice' element will be twofold. Barbra herself, as a woman working in an environment of designers sometimes 7 decades her junior, does not fit the usual norm of what the media constructs a designer should be and look like. Further to this, Barbra's work allows the unheard voice of the elderly to be lifted as she creates solutions for genuine problems. She often talks about how young designers may think the elderly want jewelled pillboxes when actually they need products to increase their sense of independence. As an unheard voice, Barbra uses her talents to help the often overlooked people in our society.
So now my challenge is thinking about how I might represent Barbara's ethos in my response to her work. For me, I'd like to go about making my own piece of human-centred design. Barbara's practice is all about helping people and solving problems so it only feels right to spend my time for this project doing that. Other approaches I have considered and have been discussed in tutorial time involve representing Barbra herself and her design practice. For me, if I am going to celebrate Beskind's work appropriately, I need to help solve people's problems with design.