What if everyone is a designer?
ISA was invited to curate the Process Lab at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City as an extension of the interactive exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America. The installation, Citizen Design, transformed the lab into a workshop environment, inviting visitors to participate in the process of design and encouraging them to explore how design can activate change in their home communities.
PROCESS LAB: CITIZEN DESIGN
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum / ISA + Cooper Hewitt / New York NY / 2016
Similar to the process designers use when they collaborate with others to address complex issues – from designing a simple product to working with communities to create more inclusive neighborhoods – the Process Lab: Citizen Design installation prompted museum visitors to consider how design decisions get made and the power that they, as citizen designers themselves, could have when working collaboratively with community stakeholders.
Through a series of interactive activities, visitors were asked to go on record about values they care about, define a particular issue that matters to them, and propose design moves that could have positive impacts.
The card decks for Values, Questions, and Design Tactics in Process Lab: Citizen Design became a part of the Cooper Hewitt’s collection, and are available for download.
In January, 2017, ISA wrote about the exhibition in a blog post on the museum’s website titled Empowering Citizen.
In 2018, the exhibition traveled to the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College. The participatory lab environment was adapted to the South Florida context and served as the backdrop to several workshops and lectures that addressed pressing urban and local community issues.
