SiteWork: Building Citizen Designers

Cheryl Beckett, Associate Professor, University of Houston

How do we encourage our students to be socially responsible designers? To develop critical minds and social awareness requires students to conduct research, understand context, consider community, place value in their own culture and the culture of others, and ultimately gain awareness that design helps shape society. The model of site-based investigations, along with interdisciplinary collaboration, offers a particularly strong methodology for this type of learning. Interdisciplinary projects instill awareness that design is not an independent activity but an integral part of a larger system that is linked to a web of social production. Graphic design students engaged in site-specific work are faced with a unique set of challenges. A focus on public space is an experience in environmental context with a directly felt public presence in neighborhoods and the community. Students that work on site-specific projects to improve public space gain an awareness of their role as citizen/designers.

This talk will discuss ways to implement SiteWorks into a curriculum and to share the conclusions of several site based, interdisciplinary projects such as: “AgriProp: Ecological Propaganda,” a collaboration with the UH College of Architecture that deployed environmental messages in public urban sites to provoke positive action by its citizens; “Project Brays,” a collaboration to produce proposals for interpretive, ecological, historical, and educational environmental graphics along the bayou; and their current work on Project Stars: Historic Harrisburg; and Borderlands: Cultural Heritage and Ecotourism on the Texas Mexico Border.

Watch the video of the presentation here: http://www.socialstudiesconference.org/node/236