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Course Description

Summary

How do we come to understand what we are doing when attempting to change or interfere with a messy complex social problem? How can we know if the thing we want to do to improve a social problem will work or backfire? There are many lessons from psychiatrists like RD Laing to cultural heroes like Hermès on this topic. Ideas Arrangements Effects will overview several lessons from a variety of schools of practice of solving human centered social problems. The course will help socially engaged artists find where their own thought habits and beliefs can get in the way of their attempts to improve social problems. The class will also offer students a genealogy of the schools of thought that informed the Design Studio for Social Intervention’s take on addressing social problems. As part of the course, students will set a problem they are intending to address and use the class as a design intensive to devise their own social intervention. DS4SI’s book, Ideas Arrangements Effects would be the primary text, supplemented with readings that were critical in shaping our take on design and social change.