Embracing the Shift: Nonprofits and Designers Chart a New Direction
Posted on October 29, 2013 | posted by:Last week I found myself at the New York Design Center for desigNYC’s Healthy Communities exhibit. I thought I knew what to expect; and a month into the Trans D program, I had gone in with my critique of the whole program at the ready. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
A little background: founded in 2009, desigNYC works with nonprofits serving New Yorkers by matching their needs with design-industry professionals looking to do pro bono work. Every year desigNYC puts out a call for applications. The call seeks both nonprofits and designers. Once selected, the design teams and organizations work together over the next year.
I first became aware of desigNYC during my first year as the communications manager for a New York-based immigration rights nonprofit. As a large part of my responsibilities included design and branding, I was curious about the ways that partnering with a larger team of designers might benefit us. The first 2010 call for entries went out and I realized that our needs were both beyond the narrow focus of New York City and would require a number of internal discussions before we could even apply.
I hadn’t paid much attention since. But my thought at the time was the program was relatively traditional. Need a brand for nonprofit? A new lobby design? New program brochure? They’ll match you up.
So I went to the Healthy Communities exhibit expecting very nicely designed projects that reflected a certain kind of gloss that many people associate with the design community. I didn’t expect to see a range of nonprofits tackling issues in holistic ways. And, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see project teams that crossed disciplinary boundaries.
As I said, I was wrong and pleasantly surprised. What I found were projects like Food Fight and the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, both of which used food and nutrition to address larger issues around wellness and neighborhoods. Projects for the Fourth Arts Block and CLIMB’s Giraffe Trail in Northern Manhattan involved co-creation, resilience, and emergent communities. Two other organizations featured, the Arthur Ashe Initiative and El Puente, are taking on distribution of health information in unique, community-focused ways.
So is this just a fluke? Has there really been a change at desigNYC? Or has my brain become so focused on transdisciplinary thinking and toolsets that I had fallen into an illusion created by frequency? To see if I could find evidence of a change in approach, I went through previous reporting on desigNYC and their calls for projects and designers.
In a short 2009 Print magazine piece on the emerging org, Steven Heller, who has been involved from the beginning, wrote:
“DesigNYC will connect the organizations with design professionals that seem like a good fit The design firm and the organization will work together to define the scope, deliverables, and schedule to get the job done (most projects are in the 2-to-4 month range). DesigNYC will provide guidance and promotion/advocacy, as well as a networking community for all involved. The design firm will have done a public service and will be recognized for its contribution, and the organization will be more able to succeed because of it!”
Heller’s focus in this conceptual outline is on defining the client-firm relationship, including scope and deliverables — not atypical of the way design and branding firms have traditionally understood their work. The mission of the organizations, or a vision for designers as collaborators on service delivery, doesn’t come into play at all. And it didn’t: the first twelve programs covered traditional design disciplines like master planning and a interiors for a children’s room, according to Brand New.
That appears to change going forward, however. By 2012 when announcing the 2013 call, there’s an obvious shift in tone. As New York magazine explained:
“Past years have paired affordable housing projects with architects, urban farms with graphic designers, and community web resources with branding agencies. This year’s theme, ‘Recharging Communities,’ will support projects that, in the program’s words, ‘connect communities, strengthen their social fabric, and improve neighborhoods.'”
Since starting in Transdisciplinary Design, my view of desigNYC had only narrowed. I believed their approach didn’t take an expansive view of design. Based on the descriptions of their work and what I saw at the Healthy Communities exhibit, things seem to have changed. The reasons for the evolution represent internal and external changes in the professional field for nonprofits and designers.
For nonprofits, my inside view suggests there has been a shift in the way nonprofits see their mission. This might be part of a cultural shift to understanding problems in systemic ways. Working on jobs or food or housing aren’t isolated problems. Organizations like Housing Works here in NYC have understood that for awhile but I think that understanding is growing.
Funders — both private and foundation — are changing too. With the rise in the technology-entrepreneur classes has come an approach to funding that is more hands-on in its approach to management and more systemic in its understanding of program missions.
The Robin Hood Foundation or the Gates Foundation want to take a participatory role in management. People like Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen at the Stanford business school have also advocated for a new kind of philanthropy. This philanthropy has developed in opposition to the old East Coast ways of doing things in the same way Californization of business has. Her own bio — and money — reflects this dynamic, including the early transformation of the Santa Clara Valley from truck farming to technology as well as the evolution to the Internet economy.
These changes have happened in parallel to growth in the information network. With the growth of analytic research methods and tools, coupled with a rise in data collection and sharing, there has been a greater awareness of the interrelationships of players within systems. Systems thinking has spread into nonprofit management.
But what about designers? What has inspired the search for an expanded definition of design? Perhaps its frustration with the limits of disciplines. Even Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright understood this. Architecture didn’t and doesn’t live in a vacuum. It lives in a city, habited by people. No matter what you think of their solutions, both architects saw a bigger role for their profession.
Maybe too as the business sector has discovered the tools of design and (maybe) bastardized them for their own bottom-line driven purposes designers are taking back their toolsets? Designers, who have watched their own discipline be hijacked, repeatedly, by the machine, are finally ready to lead.
DesigNYC seems to have embraced that proposition: “Our focus is local. Our approach is multidisciplinary. Our process is participatory, and community-centric.”