What time is it? ZINE TIME!

Our first deliverable after 2 weeks of participating in our Q1 Public Sector, Innovation, and Impact course with instructor Christina Tran was to make our own zine – HOW. FUN.

The prompt was: What is design (thinking), and why should (or shouldn’t) we use it to tackle wicked problems?

Do I prefer this to writing a paper? Heck yes.

I like going analog, because my hands are doing more than just typing. It stimulates my brain in a different way, engaging in something more tactile as I’m processing and organizing information. By putting pen to paper, things feel exploratory, playful, and messy.

This is only the third zine I’ve ever made (second one being the zine we made to help introduce ourselves in the first session of this course, barely 2 weeks ago), but I can easily see this becoming a thing.

Need to get my creative juices flowing? Zine.

Mildly grieving the end of a great book, film, or TV show? Zine!

A friend’s birthday coming up, and we’re still stuck in this pandemic? ZINE.

Did I answer the prompt entirely? Maybe, maybe not. When I thought about what design was, I thought about what it meant to me, and how that interpretation had evolved.

I thought about past readings that have inspired and informed my ideas about design and its place in the world (as well as my relationship to it), such as adrienne maree brown’s “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds”, in which she highlights the importance of connection, the 1:1 relationship, interdependence, adaptation, and challenging ourselves to reimagine what’s possible when we tune into the wisdom that nature affords us, inviting lessons from the principles and behaviors that exist in natural ecosystems. I integrated those learnings with work that we’ve recently been exploring and discussing in class, such as Anoushka Khandwala’s thoughts on what it means to decolonize design and Richard Buchanan’s “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” (from 1992), in which he calls design thinking the “new liberal art of technological culture”.

Some common threads that surfaced for me were the importance of systems thinking (because we all exist and operate within different systems), learning to adapt alongside change (which is constant and inevitable) while maintaining compassion for ourselves and others, and challenging ourselves to envision new ways of being and creating – and then making that tangible somehow, by first putting new ways of being and creating into practice, one small (sometimes uncomfortable) step at a time.

So when it came to the zine, I wanted to express some of the words that were floating around in my mind; words I associated with how I’ve come to think about design, the principles that have influenced my approach (thus far) to designing, and the responsibility I feel that comes with designing products, systems, and services.

Of course, there’s only so much content a 3”x 5” zine can hold (part of the beauty of it!). There’s more to be said, and design is an ongoing conversation, so I welcome your reactions, questions, ideas, and provocations.

It was thrilling, it was fun, it was challenging… it was a tad bit rushed! It was inspired by others who have written things about design that resonated with me, and I hope this little zine, in some way, shape, or form, resonates or stirs something up in you.

…And here it is, my zine (hope you get a think/kick out of it!):