DESIGN
Design is the process of imagining an intervention that may be able to effect change in a larger system. In ecosocial design, the individual participants are taught to use design thinking and design process to understand their own personal environment and then synthesize this understanding into a plan of action that reaches beyond themselves and effects their shared environment.
In the Urban Rhythms Marcus Garvey Village design education studio, youth came to understand how to describe the issues that were most central to their everyday health - gang violence, safety, and personal freedom. This became core to their mapping process.
They then used this understanding and the maps created to locate and design a recreation center that would be a safe space for them to hang out.
The recreation center was built in 2016.
In the Sinking Gardens of Hangzhou, design became the medium to describe the issues facing this gentrifying Chinese garden city - the dislocation of residents and the aestheticization of traditional ways of life into a tourist destination.
The boats and their floating landscape gardens became a way to inscribe these cultural ideas into the existing XiXi National Park as a lasting memorial.
