Social Design and Collaboration

This year the Level 5 Graphic Design students have worked collaboratively with the Fashion Design students as a means to research and respond to questions of sustainability. The research and projects have looked at themes concerning materials in design, design and production, community and social justice and environmental impact. 

The United Repair Centre addresses a material concern as well as one of equal opportunities and the conditions of labour. Kingston 2025 in part looks to explore the past, present and future of its communities. 

Graphic design practice is often understood as a highly collaborative practice. In her opening address at the Design for Planet confrerence 2023, design council director Minnie Moll suggested: 

‘The challenge of climate change is so huge we are only going to make the impact we need to if we collaborate, not just with other designers but collaborating with different disciplines, science, technology, business, artists and storytellers. When facing a challenge like this collaborating across all disciplines putting competition aside we do better together, we go faster together, we shout louder together and we can be more inclusive and equitable when we work together.’

Within the Social Strand the students developed research-led projects that enquired into questions of design and sustainability, looking at both the effects of different graphic languages and also how we can use graphic design as a means to communicate messages and narratives. 

At the end of the Social Strand Aaron Deacon Sanchez, Abi Wright, Louis Ashworth, Martha Rutherfoord-Jones, and Tom Mower had a discussion to explore our thoughts and reflections on the value of collaborative or interdisciplinary practice as a model for addressing questions of sustainability. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.

Tom: As an extension of your research this year – if you could go on to work with any other discipline, specialist, maker, community who would it be and why? 

Aaron: I would be interested to work with a filmmaker or philosopher, to further develop my approach to film making and the content within my work.

Martha: This year in one of my collaborative projects with Fashion, we wanted to create an eduction project on water quality and the rich cultural and historical significance of rivers. We wanted this to be for a younger audience – but would have really wanted to work with young people within schools and youth groups to develop our research and approach. We did get to work with a local historian whose knowledge and insights on rivers really helped to inform the project. 

Abi: I’d like to take my project on natures patterns to a park – having developed it in book form, I’d like to see how it would translate into a workshop for a park community. I’ve started to work with Knowle Park in Cranleigh with this in mind.

Tom: Collaboration provides a platform for knowledge exchange, what did you learn from each other (graphics/fashion/community/audience)? 

Louis: In different design disciplines the design process is quite different, and through working with other disciplines this year we have gained this perspective. It makes you reflect on your own design process. Collaboration also let to ways of working I hadn’t considered, fashion designs tend to make use of drawing and sketching – this became material for me as a graphic design to start to interpret as a poster design. 

Martha: It reminded my of how digital graphic practice has become, as when working with fashion there was a lot more analogue material exploration involved in the design process.

Tom: Are there particular studios, projects or designers that you found valuable as examples of collaborative design practice/working with communities, uses, audiences?

Martha: A project called ‘Questions?’ by the students of HfG Karlsruhe invited students to interview and respond to the work of guest lecturers as a way of further understanding their practice. These interviews were then designed and collated into a single volume. For me this was a key reference for my work when working with interviews within my own project. I particularly appreciated the use of only two colours, yellow and pink to divide the book into 2 parts. It was also a super collaborative project. 

Abi: When researching circularity in design I came across Stella McCartney’s approach of working closely with scientists to reduce the use of harmful plastics within her collections. Whilst this is progressive in terms of material innovation and sustainability I still think cost is an issue as her designs are still relatively expense and not accessible to the general consumer.

Tom: FoilCo gave a presentation this year on their products. They spoke about developing recyclable Foils that break down during the recycling process in the same way that papers do. When we visited Impress they spoke about the developments they have made recently within sustainable print. I was struck by the developments in digital print and waste reduction and also the advancement in print material for outdoor graphics becoming more recyclable and biodegradable. Also, whilst not an area we tend to focus on but is a significant contributor to the carbon footprint of print – behind the scenes they had also quietly moved to a fleet of electric vehicles and utilised their roof space for solar panels. 

Martha: Nopla created a packaging material made out of seaweed. I discovered this during my research into materials and my proposal for a materials library. A proposal I want to revisit at some stage in the future. 

Tom: During the year you have explored and developed visual languages in response to different conditions of accessibility, sustainability be it environment, material, or semiotic. How would you describe your decision making process and the graphic languages you have developed? 

Louis: I found personally a lot of my research was trying to explore alternative graphic and typographic forms for those that we classically associate with mental health and wellbeing. I didn’t want audiences to be put off or feel that it wasn’t for them by the presentation of the subject/service. 

Martha: For me it wasn’t so much a question of visual but written language. I was interviewing women about quite personal topics, to create an openness within the dialogue I decided to only use people’s first names in the resulting publication that recorded these conversations. I felt this was a small but significant action within the project. It’s an important topic to talk about but I didn’t want to expose people in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. As an editor I also gave people the opportunity to see and edit the transcript before publishing. 

Tom: This is a great point, thank you for sharing that. I guess you have now prompted me to build those approaches into the transcription of this conversation. 

The Social Design strand, is conceived as a space to support design enquiry located around a shared and common interest in design, society and sustainability. We come together to consider how people and planet can both flourish in times that present a threat to both. Information, storytelling, identity and exhibition design all form part of both our means of communication as well as practices for critical thinking. When we design, perhaps we should all follow the principle of wanting to ‘leave the planet a little better than how we found it’.

References

Common-knowledge commonknowledge.coop
Centre for Urban Pedagogy welcometocup.org
FoilCo www.foilco.com
Impress www.impressprint.co.uk
Kellenberger-White, Exhibition design for ‘Hand and Machine’, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo  
kellenberger-white.com/project/hand-and-machine-architecture-drawings-2/
Nopla, Shop for nopla(stics) https://nopla.store
Questions? www.itsnicethat.com/articles/sereina-rothenberger-david-bennewith-hfg-karlsruhe-questions-looking-for-answers-in-the-middle-of-somewhere-publication-graphic-design-160519