KYOTO Design Lab [D-lab] will hold public lectures by Lara Penin [Parsons School of Design] at Kyoto Institute of Technology Graduate Exhibition 2019.

Looking forward to seeing you.

The socio-cultural relevance of design in a world of systemic crisis: a case for transdisciplinary design

Time: 15:30-16:50 Saturday 15 February, 2020
Venue: 6F, The Museum of Kyoto
Lecturer: Lara Penin [Parsons School of Design]
Admission free

Summary
What does it mean to design to today? What is the relevance of design in a world of ecosystems collapse, persistent inequalities and the new political realities that are emerging in this century? How can we establish a new socio-cultural relevance of design to the present?
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Design can play a unique role providing visions to resolve critical social, economic, and environmental challenges from a truly humanistic place – where social theories and technologies can be embedded in proposals that transform systems, industries and policies, to improve and sustain life. But changing complex socio-technical systems and organizations through design is a radical ambition. While most designers are generally more comfortable designing discrete outputs, they lack the foundation to design the organizational structures that may serve as a platform for these outputs to exist. This is reflective of a broader epistemological issue in design education seeking to address complex social, political end environmental issues. We are still learning the requisite base of knowledge needed for designers to move towards more complex interventions rather than interventions based on design methods alone.
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In her talk, Dr Lara Penin will make a case for transdisciplinary design as an approach towards complex and systemic issues of the present. As designers today try to respond to the current and wide ranging systemic, social, economic, political and environmental challenges, design becomes a mode of thought that “crosses and connects different disciplines” and fields. In this context, designers must act as designers in the conventional sense, but also as integrators of different fields of knowledge reaching beyond the boundaries of design itself.
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Lara’s work has been at the intersection of design and social innovation, service design, civic design and design for sustainability. In her professional trajectory, she has been inquiring about the role of design in promoting and contributing to social and cultural change. This emerging idea of design crucially question design tradition centered in materiality, and expands it into a broader socio-material practice. As practices such as service design have been diffused across different areas of applications and sectors such as finance, government and healthcare among many others, its methods and approaches have been increasingly adopted by the management ranks within organizations, bringing designers’ capabilities closer to the realms of strategy and leadership. Promising as this trend has been, it has also meant a progressive loss of specificity, and craftsmanship, in terms of what design entails.
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We need therefore to define a larger intellectual framework for design by expanding its disciplinary base into other fields such as anthropology and sociology but also cultural studies, psychology and drama. It is crucial for design to connect with the social, cultural and political elements that have been always present in design development through history, but now require a more strategic and transdisciplinary approach, to advance the practice and discourse of design and foster more equitable and sustainable cities and regions.
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In her talk, Lara will use examples of projects of her students of the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons School of Design, as well as projects by her design research lab (Parsons DESIS Lab) to introduce the concept of transdisciplinary design.

Biography
Dr Lara Penin is an Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, where she has been director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program from 2015 to 2019. Lara is co-founder of the Parsons DESIS Lab, an action research laboratory that works at the intersection of strategic design, management, and social theory, applying interdisciplinary expertise in problem setting and problem solving to sustainable practices and social innovation. In her work she seeks to explore the agency of service design to effect positive social change while bridging the gap between the innovation of design pedagogy and practice to equip designers to play a more transformative role, involving both civil society and the public sector. She’s the author of “An Introduction to Service Design. Designing the Invisible” (Bloomsbury, 2018) an introductory textbook on service design. Lara has been the principal investigator of “Amplifying Creative Communities” and more recently, a project for the Brooklyn Public Library related to improving services for reentry from incarceration offered at the library branches. She received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the São Paulo Architecture Biennale. She was the chair of the Service Design Network Global Conference in 2015. Lara holds a PhD in Design from the Milan Polytechnic University in Italy and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Kyoto Institute of Technology Graduate Exhibition 2020
MA Design Public Lecture

14:10–15:10｜Yuma Harada [UMA / design farm]
15:30–16:50｜Dr Lara Penin [Parsons School of Design]