BUT WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH DESIGN?

VINCENT TRUTER explains the process and discoveries made through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural public space intervention spearheaded by Dutch Artist Fiona DeBell in a recent collaboration with the Vega Brand Communication School.

“The focus is not the world of design, but rather the design of the world,” said Bruce Mau in Massive Change.

So where to start, well, Cascoland is by definition about engaging spaces and, more importantly, engaging the public in shaping their public space. A “casco” is a Dutch term used to describe an open, modular structure or an open space in to, on to and through which basic shelter can be realised. And it is within a Dutch context that the project was conceptualised by Roel Schoenmakers and Fiona de Bell. Durban is the last in a series of three Cascoland projects here on the southern tip of Africa. The first took place in the New Crossroads township in Cape Town in 2006 and the second in inner-city Johannesburg in 2007 – both stimulating projects that bridged many different worlds.

The Cascoland mission statement sees “public art” as an important tool in activating and developing public space. Through public art, Cascoland promotes that interdisciplinary creatives engage in communities to collaborate with audiences and community members to shape their public space through dialogue and participation. This inter-disciplinary approach where artist, architects, designers, animators, performers, city councils and communities work in dialogue with one another makes for a truly dynamic approach to activating public space and the challenges it holds, specifically in an extreme country such as South Africa.

Oh, and did I mention international? This Cascoland had participants from Lithuania to Holland to Sweden to Durban and many cross-pollinations. Check it out at www.Cascoland.com.

Cascoland in Jozi inner city
South Africa’s urban spaces have undergone radical changes over the past decade. While it may be that new forms of social and economic interaction have transformed cities, they still bear the mark of racial and structural segregation. We can see these boundaries all around us. From the highways that intersect, to the fences and security cameras that mediate, and the derelict in-between spaces that separate. There exist both visible and invisible boundaries within our urban communities. Now I am a total ‘Casco’ evangelist so, I am gonna skip laying my egg on ze inns and outs of the projects and get to the point relevant for this issue- le education. Ok one final in- Cascoland is fab, one final out- it changed my life. In 2008 Cascoland hit the inner city of Johannesburg in an attempt to engage the Inner city community at the Drill Hall heritage site in downtown Johannesburg.

Cascoland and Vega play
Cascoland had the foresight to hook into the Vega brand communication school curriculum and give 3rd year design students the opportunity to actively engage with their urban environment, and challenge the structural and physical reality of these separations through creating various communication design solutions in public space. The education component proved crucial to Cascoland’s objectives of creating awareness of urban issues and of the possibilities of activating public space through artistic/creative interventions across many disciplines and mediums.

Four projects were created by the students with the Downtown Jozi community, each with a specific thematic focus. The first project was called ‘design reflection’ and in this project each individual group member had the opportunity to identify and reflect on any aspect of the inner-city environment and his personal response to it. The result was a fascinating selection of reflections that took the form of short 1-minute multimedia documentaries.

In the second project called ‘design pride’, students proposed to develop a conscientisation campaign that instills a sense of ownership and pride in the community surrounding the Drill Hall. The Design solution was to visually map a route on the sidewalks linking the Drill Hall with other public spaces such as Joubert park. The creation of the route takes the form of an interactive event in which the communities leave their handprint on the sidewalk and also echo this print on a shirt. It is a playful event, which engages the general public on the street in claiming their territory. This collective marking of the space also serves to guide newcomers in the city to the different public spaces at their disposal.

The third project attempted to develop a communication solution linking the environmental organisation, The Greenhouse Project, and the Nord Taxi rank in the hopes to address some of the pertinent environmental issues in the inner city. Unlikely partners as these two community stakeholders may be, the end result was a campaign that created awareness of the primary issues addressed by the green living environmental NGO Greenhouse Project by using the taxi as a conscientisation and communication medium. The students did this by creating a playful messaging system with magnetic “tangram” triangles that can be arranged on the surface of taxis to create different messages. This interactive conscientisation campaign holds an anti-littering message through contrasting imagery of everyday trash on the one side of the magnet device with verdant green grass on the other side.

The fourth and last project focused on developing a communication solution addressing the needs of the ‘Time For Change’ charity organization, ideally linking the charity with a community outside of the inner-city context to the benefit of both. The students developed an identity for the charity’s craft workshop through the concept of ‘mending hearts’. The charity works, amongst others, with the HIV affected and infected youth of the inner city. They developed this ‘mending hearts’ concept into a merchandising and packaging identity used to brand the crafts developed by the organization to the corporate gifting market. Barbara Hill and her team also translated this identity into a spatial design for the counseling facilities used.

Myself and Dutch graphic designer Ruben Abels from Design Arbeid [www.designarbeid.nl], coordinated the student participation with the Vega third year design students. The various projects resulting from the student participation was developed in a collaborative process drawing together third year graphic design students and the respective communities within the Johannesburg inner city context. The education component proved crucial to Cascoland’s objectives of creating awareness of urban issues and of the possibilities of activating public space through artistic/creative interventions, more than this it gave Vega the opportunity to redefine it’s approach to design education.

Up to now
Design education at Vega has traditionally been approached as a process of deconstruction through isolation. By isolating elements of such objects and indicating their interrelations through our design discourse we establish and affirm a rather static design knowledge basis. The educational value of such a process of object deconstruction and theoretical discourse lies in aiding the learner in exploring the object, but seldom immerses the learner within the communities and disciplines that shape the very reason for the design nor the culture in which the design is created. Alternatives to such ‘static’ approaches are certainly possible, where meaningful social engagement drives design.

Vega the Brand Communication School in collaboration with the public art initiative Cascoland offered a dynamic opportunity and testing ground through which to challenge our traditional approaches to both the definitions of design and design education. Students spent 6 weeks in direct contact with the inner city community exploring, developing and executing communication solutions with their respective community stakeholders. While guided by certain themes, the student project brief made no defined parameters in terms of mediums to be used or processes preferred. The focus was not on developing certain design forms, but rather on developing conceptual ingenuity within students that would explore design as an expansive and cross-disciplinary modality that can be applied to a variety of challenges.

Lets have a looksie at some pearls of wisdom gathered over the course of ze project:

1] Throw wait or give it a skip.
The project certainly was not an extra curricular activity, but a key component of the compulsory course for 3rd year students and aligned with Vega outcomes in terms of our visual communications curriculum. The fact is, you need time, dedicated curricilum time. So when considering shifting the students’s perceptions beyond current practice. Myself and Ruben Abels coordinated the student participation with the Vega third year design students. The resulting projects were developed in a collaborative process drawing together third year graphic design students and the respective communities within the Johannesburg inner city context. This immersion happens gradually and needs to be facilitated, it took us about 6 weeks. Process first.

2] Cross Borders, visible and invisible ones
To most of us living, working and studying in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg the inner city is a remote island, a far off fictional reality shaped by the media and our own stigmas. It certainly is not the kind of island you pack your sunscreen and Bermuda shorts to, but rather an isolated space, an unknown variable that is constructed mostly in opposition to all that the safe and engineered enclave of Vega’s home base Sandton represents. To our students the journey to the inner city falls under the category of adventure travel, of stepping outside of your familiar environment and braving certain danger. It is a journey that requires a shifting of gears and availability to having your pre-conceived notions challenged, to the full. To us here at Vega the opportunity to collaborate with the talented and dynamic Cascoland team offered our Visual communications students, most of whom had never so much as driven through the city, to explore and engage in the reality of a pulsing, living and vibrant downtown Johannesburg. Many a visible and invisible border needed to be crossed in order to make this journey into the heart of the city a participatory and mutually beneficial exchange. But as we have learnt from this experience, there is nothing like crossing a border to allow one to explore new possibilities and even re-imagine your own world, it’s nature, conventions and even re-defining it’s borders. Cascoland Joburg 2007 offered the Vega visual communications department an opportunity to expand our approach to design education and evolve our fledgling visual communicators and their ever expanding frames of reference drawing on really exciting stimulus from both a local and international perspective. Shift context.

3] Problem solving- not brief solving
“But what does this have to do with design?” [Anonymous mother of student during Cascoland 2007]
If teaching ‘form-making’ is not our main concern within design education at Vega, then what is? Well the simple answer is that we are in the process of redirecting our focus towards the physical and practical exploration- not of media based design problems but of our community. The central challenge within this exploration lies in shifting the learning away from conveying undoubtedly credible, yet static sets of information. Our focus is on conceptual design solutions born from community engagement which is a conscious move away from creating abstract conceptions of design and thought processes and "teaching" them as a skill to be acquired.
This shift has resulted in the development of Vegas approach to design education, through Cascoland, as necessarily focusing on practical engagement with community. This is the first port of call before briefing our students to develop certain forms within certain media.

The cross- disciplinary nature of the Cascoland experience in itself affirmed our view that design and design knowledge can be harnessed as an expansive activity that could transcend specific disciplines and medium. At Vega design is not only a participant in the creation of our visual culture but also an activity connecting and engaging a breadth of disciplines, so we avoid deterministic definitions of design and design education by choosing to flip the coin and let it stand promptly on its side. Doing this raises important questions. What if we approach design as both a discipline and a vital cultural participant that transcends disciplines? Within this approach design becomes the manifestation of intent, a problem solving discipline that may or may not manifest itself as an object, a communication solution, or even organisational strategy. For us the “Focus is not the world of design, but rather the design of the world” [[Mau, Bruce. Massive Change. 2004.Phaidon Press.]

4] Collapse hierarchies
The project relied strongly on our Inner city facilitators and their extended networks within the community to offer students safe passage and valuable insights into inner city life. These facilitators themselves live and work in downtown Johannesburg and were predominantly from a creative background actively involved in a variety of projects throughout the city. Through their delicate negotiation and respect for the city’s ecosystem the facilitators instilled a very important ethic within the student projects: This was not just an exotic walk on the wild side, but a considerate and conscious approach to the inner city and all it’s rich dimensions.

The project as a whole created a dynamic atmosphere of exchange between all that participated. One of the key aspects in the student project was the Casco-exchange lecture series through which the International team of Cascoland creatives gave weekly seminars on their individual creative talents and Interests to the Vega Students. The topics ranged from Lithuanian designer Indre Klimates succinct account of her evolution as a creative entity, to Jan Korbes’s emphatic belief in transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary through his garbage architecture. The seminar series also offered Cascoland creatives the opportunity to reflect on their current experiences in the Inner city with the students and so create a dynamic dialogue from a multiplicity of perspectives, both local and international on the activities of Cascoland. No single participant had authority over a specific terrain. Give everything, own nothing.

5] Participation is Research
This active participation in the community life is a form of Design education. This immersion also represents a form of research, a generative process that activates the visual and spatial faculties of our students in dynamic dialogue with both knowledge base and experience. The ideal of this research is the expansion and amplification of ideas and responses that make for dialogue and varying discourses- reflective practitioners. As Maziar Rain puts it: ”Instead of asking our students to strike the pose of a detached, divorced and abstracted examiner, we design curriculum that impel students to maneuver and project themselves from the specific to the general” [Maziar, 2004].
This facilitated social engagement, orchestrated through the Cascoland project, has introduced Vega students to a larger set of challenges that we see the possibility for design to address within our contemporary South African society. This is undoubtedly an exciting position to be in, a position that is first and foremost informed by a community and not necessarily by motives of “social awareness” or “commercial conscious” designs. Know through doing.

Okidoki: Reflections on Design education
Through Cascoland, we attempted to shape and facilitate an experience, in dynamic dialogue with a fairly “traditional” design curriculum that would aid the evolution of our students through active participation in a community. This socially engaged approach developed into an investigation carried out by our students into the designed infrastructures that support our daily doings both within our own communities and also those of the inner city of Johannesburg. The central challenge within this exploration lies in shifting the learning away from conveying undoubtedly credible, yet static sets of information. Our focus is on conceptual design solutions born from community engagement, to us this was a conscious move away from creating abstract conceptions of design and thought processes and "teaching" them as a skill to be acquired. While guided by certain themes, the student project brief made no defined parameters in terms of mediums to be used or processes preferred. The focus was not on developing certain design forms, but rather on developing conceptual ingenuity within students that would explore design as an expansive and cross-disciplinary modality that can be applied to a variety of challenges.

The cross- disciplinary nature of the Cascoland experience in itself affirmed our view that design and design knowledge can be harnessed as an expansive activity that could transcend specific disciplines and medium. At Vega design is not only a participant in the creation of our visual culture but also an activity connecting and engaging a breadth of disciplines, so we avoid deterministic definitions of design and design education by choosing to flip the coin and let it stand promptly on its side. Doing this raises important questions. What if we approach design as both a discipline and a vital cultural participant that transcends disciplines? Within this approach design becomes the manifestation of intent, a problem solving discipline that may or may not manifest itself as an object, a communication solution, or even organisational strategy. For us the “Focus is not the world of design, but rather the design of the world” [[Mau, Bruce. Massive Change. 2004.Phaidon Press.]

Ultimately the most evocative benefits of a project such as Cascoland within the context of Design education lies in the immeasurable yet undeniable internal evolution of our students during Cascoland. The experience may have left us all with more questions than verifiable educational outcomes or answers, but it is a position we welcome with open arms. This facilitated social engagement, orchestrated through the Cascoland project, has introduced Vega students to a larger set of challenges that we see the possibility for design to address within our contemporary South African society. This is where the magic of the learning process meets the wisdom of an expansive and experiential engagement within our communities. Design at Vega is fast evolving into a collaborative problem solving and team based- multi-disciplinary practice.

There is a very important shift within this process-driven and community-engaged approach that has given our students a renewed and expanded understanding of the world we inhabit: It is more than the sum of its parts, it’s hard work and its not about the individual.

* Vincent Truter develops a variety of special projects and international collaborations for Vega the brand communication school. For more, visit his website www.orlando.co.za.