IMMERSE
YOURSELF
Immersion refers to any number of ways you may spend time with the community. For example, designers can immerse themselves by taking tours through a neighborhood, regularly visiting community leaders, conducting focus groups, and canvassing the community. Sometimes you may need to fade into the background and observe, while at other times you might need to work side-by-side with members of the community.
Clear communication by the project leader is a key part of the immersive process and the project as a whole. The leader plays different roles, such as motivator, champion of the cause, planner, relationship builder, facilitator, and conflict handler.6 He or she defines and tracks responsibilities of team members to prevent duplication and to ensure that the results are efficiently delivered.7 The leader will also help the group understand and define the design challenges of the project, while identifying what questions need to be asked along the way—something that cannot be achieved without an intimate vantage point.
While nearly every case study in this book involved a process that started with immersion, the following two projects by the Canary Project and MICA’s Center for Design Practice show how different levels of getting to know a community can lead to different results.
HEALTH
The CARES Mobile Safety Center
Redesigning a mobile health bus to reach a bilingual audience
PROJECT DETAILS
DESIGNS Poster, brochure, exhibition; typeface: Museo Sans
DATE September to December 2009
LOCATION Baltimore, Maryland
LEADERS Mike Weikert and Ryan Clifford (Center for Design Practice, MICA)
DESIGNERS Five graphic design students (Center for Design Practice, MICA)
PARTNERS Stephanie Parsons, Eileen McDonald, Andrea Gielen, and Kira McGroarty
(Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research & Policy)
WEBSITE www.micasocialdesign.com/cares-mobile-safety-center
The CARES Mobile Safety Center parks outside schools, medical clinics, health fairs, and other venues in Baltimore. The colorfully painted, forty-foot vehicle has a retrofitted interior that looks like a normal home but educates visitors about safety hazards. Teaching parents how to prevent burns, poisoning, falls, strangulation, and other injuries in the home, it meets an important need in Baltimore City, where childhood death due to fire reached four times the national average between 2002 and 2004.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research & Policy created this interactive house on wheels in 2004. Since then it attracted over eighteen thousand visitors through 2009,2 96 percent of whom reported learning something new during their tour.3 Yet its organizers found that the vehicle needed to communicate more effectively to Baltimore’s growing Hispanic communities, so they approached MICA’s Center for Design Practice (CDP) to modify the existing design of the van in a way that would reach both English-and Spanish-speaking audiences.
The CDP occupies the top floor of a row house on the MICA campus. Here Mike Weikert, founder and director of this multidisciplinary design studio, prepares students for design
Environment
Green Patriot Posters
Designing an ad campaign against global warming.
The CARES Mobile Safety Center parks outside schools, medical clinics, health fairs, and other venues in Baltimore. The colorfully painted, forty-foot vehicle has a retrofitted interior that looks like a normal home but educates visitors about safety hazards. Teaching parents how to prevent burns, poisoning, falls, strangulation, and other injuries in the home, it meets an important need in Baltimore City, where childhood death due to fire reached four times the national average between 2002 and 2004.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research & Policy created this interactive house on wheels in 2004. Since then it attracted over eighteen thousand visitors through 2009,2 96 percent of whom reported learning something new during their tour.3 Yet its organizers found that the vehicle needed to communicate more effectively to Baltimore’s growing Hispanic communities, so they approached MICA’s Center for Design Practice (CDP) to modify the existing design of the van in a way that would reach both English-and Spanish-speaking audiences.
The CDP occupies the top floor of a row house on the MICA campus. Here Mike Weikert, founder and director of this multidisciplinary design studio, prepares students for design