Magazine Design Thinking for
Rocket Scientists Removing Barriers for Innovation at NASA Page 38
Summer 2020 Issue 015 US $20
jeffstaple: A Streetwear Legend's Creative Career Page 22
Four Climate Futures for 2050 Page 48
Design Lessons from Quarantine Plus, tips for your best home office! Page 62
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Design Activity. With our Design Field Dice activity, we want to create space to learn about the design field. This activity will allow learners to see examples of design in their own daily lives and to create several concept ideas using the randomly selected categories. There are up to 216 combinations!
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Visit our website (designmuseumfoundation.org/designfielddice) to print out and build the dice.
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Have your learner roll each die and keep track of their results.
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Now it’s problem-solving time! Give your learner 5 minutes to think of as many problems as possible for their audience given the locations they rolled on the dice. Example: Infants on a Subway Platform: It’s loud (hurts their ears!), nothing cool to look at, scary things moving quickly!
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Challenge your learners to create solutions to the problems they came up with. Have them come up with 3-5 solutions for as many of the problems as they can, including a sketch/prototype of the design. Give them at least 30 minutes for this task. Instruct them to choose their top two ideas to present to you or a partner. Tell them to prepare a short presentation about their designs, including a section that addresses why their designs would benefit their audience in each location. Between each presentation, give your learner feedback on their design. Example: This is great! Looking at it now, what would you change? Can this be used by several people at once? How do you think we could build this? Who should we ask for more information?
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Debrief with them. Ask them about their experience and which field most closely aligns with their interest.
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Repeat this cycle as many times as you’d like!
Share your favorite measurement findings with us using #designtogether and tag us! @designmuseumeverywhere
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PROFILE
Legendary Streetwear. A Profile of jeffstaple By Sabaat Kareem & Thais Jacomassi In February of 2005, the shoe that catapulted sneaker culture to the masses was finally released. While not designed to be a hyped icon, this new shoe, named the Pigeon Dunk, was one of the most sought after silhouettes, and the limited number of pairs available caused chaotic scenes to develop in New York’s Lower East Side. Outside Reed Space, a now-closed landmark streetwear boutique, people began to pitch tents along the sidewalks days before the release. Through a blizzard, more and more came to await the coveted shoes. When the line got to be over 100 people, the police arrived. Arrest threats were made to those who refused to leave after so many hours of waiting, yet the crowd fought back. While sneaker culture had been largely underground, this riot catapulted it to the limelight. On that February day, jeffstaple became a household name. Staple Design is a creative firm founded by jeffstaple. Originating in 1997, the New Yorkbased firm works with some of the world’s most prestigious brands on design, identity, and marketing. jeffstaple is deemed one of the most influential designers in the streetwear world, and his firm’s expertise is highly coveted by brands like Nike, Adidas, and Puma. In addition to his brand, jeffstaple founded Reed Space, produced a creative magazine called Reed Pages magazine, became the creative director of TGS Hold-
ings, Inc. retail outlets, and created his own podcast called Business of HYPE. The man behind the design giant, Jeff Ng, was born to Chinese immigrant parents who moved to the United States to start a family. He grew up in a middle class, suburban city in central New Jersey as a minority in a predominantly Jewish-Caucasian community. Growing up, Jeff’s world was all about comic books, sports, music, streetwear, and sneakers. He followed athletes’ careers, the shoes they wore, and their collaborations with athletic and fashion brands. He was fascinated by the small differences in products like sneakers and jerseys and became an avid collector. Jeff explained that, more than the actual sport games, he was always interested in the players' costumes and how they would be marketed. Knowing that his parents wouldn’t finance his shoe obsession, at 13 he took various odd jobs and bought all the newest sneakers from the local mall. Those sneakers were his prized possessions, and he kept them lined along the walls of their dining room on display. Jeff called himself an “extremely average” high school student—“I wasn’t a phenom growing up in the slightest.” At his suburban public school the curriculum revolved around rote memorization, which Jeff was not interested in and did not excel at. While his parents dreamt of him being a doctor or a lawyer, it became evident that those were not viable paths for Jeff by high school. Back then, Jeff learned the most from his art teacher, Michael Reed, who taught PHOTO BY BRIAN ALCAZAR
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Over the decades, NASA has grown and launched dozens of other missions beyond the Apollo Moon program, from Voyager to the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station to landing robots on Mars. At over 60 years old, NASA is still known as the pioneer and leader in space exploration, but multiple nimble competitors from the private sector now play a growing role in the field. Douglas Terrier, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer, stated “We’re at a fork in the road, not because NASA has suddenly started to do something different, but because the world is doing something very different in technology and culture. And we’re really at a decision point about how we’re going to adapt to that.”
The idea was to find these particular people—we called them Persistent Innovators. They’re persistently moving the needle and naturally becoming leaders within the organization. They’re at NASA because they have a vision and they want to make an impact. Leaders of NASA arranged for an external advisory committee in 2018, composed of innovation leaders in academia and business, who were tasked to organize a workshop, “focused on understanding barriers to innovation at NASA and providing feedback on NASA’s framework for creating an innovative ecosystem.”
Convening Around Innovation The advisory committee selected the approach of convening a two-day exploratory workshop that brought NASA leaders face-to-face with diverse experts and innovators. I had the good fortune of being invited to run a workshop initiated by Mona Vernon around innovation and 42
PHOTO BY NASA/BILL INGALLS
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FOUR POSSIBLE FUTURES
Post-Anthropocene A path to a regenerative world where society consumes resources at a rate in which they can be replenished. Humanity recognizes and values ecosystem services, in turn helping to improve the quality of life for both the planet and society.
Extinction Express Natural resources that had been previously taken for granted and consumed led to the destabilization of natural systems. Resource and energy shortages are pervasive around the world. Society is driven by fear of the ‘foreign’ and ‘different’ as isolationism has been on the rise for years.
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ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF ARUP
Greentocracy The Earth and its health has the highest priority on every national and transnational agenda. Global efforts for climate action have been made at a significant cost as humanity lives in self-imposed servitude to the environment.
Humans Inc. This period reflects a business-as-usual trajectory from 2020. The condition of humanity has continued to improve, but it comes at the expense of the environment. Climate considerations have become subordinate to economic development and societal well-being.
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A graph of the four plausible futures and what implications each represents. 56
DIAGRAM COURTESY OF ARUP
must hold is increasingly prevalent. Will it look like X, or Y, or Z, or Q? There is no way to really know, but we can get a bit closer by looking at trends, data, and by delivering scenarios to help us start to approach this question. In my role as a foresight practitioner, I help people think about the world we want to live in, and the ones we don’t. Scenarios are one way to help us. By juxtaposing positive with negative, or the desirable with the undesirable, we can start to paint the future we want, the future we don’t want, and the future we think is most likely. Following scenario development, we can then start to think more practically about how we want to construct that vision. Arup’s recent publication looks at the world in 2050 and considers all these things. In this document we designed four different plausible futures based on planetary health and societal well-being improving or declining as drivers for our communal future. What would the world look like if planetary and societal conditions both improve? Could people and the planet live in harmony? The Post-Anthropocene depicts such a future where people only use the resources they need and consider their everyday impacts on each other, as well as on the environment. What would happen if both planetary and societal conditions degrade? Extinction Express outlines the grim conditions for the majority, where decades of desires have stripped the planet of resources, where chaos rules, and every-person-for-themselves is the modern mantra. What if we put our planet before the needs of the people? Restricting resource use, restricting access to nature, restricting people’s lifestyles in an effort to get to one-planet-living. Greentocracy illustrates what the future might look like if humanity is able to transition from using 1.7 planets per year to using less than one. What if we carry on as we are? Using up resources as we see fit, building cities as we see fit, but all in honor of improving the lives of humanity globally? Humans Inc. describes a world where resources are used frivolously
in honor and effort to better the quality of the human condition; but at the expense of our oneand-only habitat. None of us know what the future really holds. But we can imagine. We can begin to design, plan, and build toward it. We can put the planet or people at higher priority, but with either option we will have unique consequences and benefits. Or shall we consider the reality of what a planet in harmony might look like? I hope my questions have left you curious, puzzled, inspired, and determined to think about how you might design better for both the planet and people. •
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