What does change look like?

There are many ways of understanding the complex concept of change. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means to alter, vary, convert, transform, modify, switch, adapt, adjust, and evolve (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d). That is, Design + Change means that we alter, vary, convert, transform, modify, switch, adapt, adjust, evolve with design to form a sustainable development. Change is going from something to become something else. We know how design was formulated and institutionalised during the 20^th century in practices, universities and museums found in metropolitan areas of the global North. It is here, in the metropolitan area, that “the modern” and “the innovative” have been found. Here, in the institutional version of design, we tend to find a design that is defined as problem-solving, a design that is intimately linked to an object, to a certain form of economy and, many times, a specific aesthetic. In forming a sustainable development we need to radically question the given, to reconsider existing paradigms and search for new paths. In this process, it becomes less distinct what design is and does. Adding to this is the wonderful reality of the diverse design department at Linnaeus University, with students and teachers from many different geographies, with various skills, worldviews, practices, definitions of design, and ways of practising change.

How can we understand this ongoing practice of change? What does it look like when we practice it in our department? Whose practice of change do we reference?

In an attempt to find a collective answer to these somewhat elusive questions the +Change Archive was initiated where all of us were invited to contribute with our change reference.

The archive has a very simple design, archive forms collected in a box made from birch bark with plastic handle, a conceptual container for an archive holding +change desing. Birch bark is a versatile material was used to make everything from shoes to insulate houses. It was a material that was marginalise in the process of modernity that made plastic essential. Today, we need to leave our dependence on fossil fuel behind and by this question our dependency on plastic. Perhaps will birch bark become a more frequent material in a sustainable future.

The archive cards were developed by Stephanie Carleklev. They are yellow and contains some questions that the archive contributor needs to fill in. Apart from title we ask them to fill in a description, year, place, and medium. Perhaps the most important one is the +change motivation – why should this reference be in the archive?

I have added several examples. My first example is a design that happened in an unexpected place, a change that would increase women’s right to their own body. It is Margaret M. Cranes invention of the home pregnancy test something that she did while working as a graphic designer with a new cosmetic line at Organon Pharmaceuticals in the US in the 1960s. The company also produced pregnancy tests. At that time, you needed to go to the expert, a doctor that at that time probably was in most cases male, to do the test and it would take two weeks to get the result. Margaret M. Crane came across the equipment for doing the pregnancy test at her work and saw the simplicity of the test. One could imagine that her background as a designer, designing with the in mind helped her to think beyond the given scientific view on the test. Crane developed the home pregnancy test in her own home. However, it would take a decade before the home pregnancy test was sold in the US and it would last even longer before Margaret M. Crane was acknowledged for her innovation. It would last until 1977 until it was sold in the US as the company was afraid to “antagonising doctors and aligning themselves with the “fast women” who desired a fast test” (Kennedy, 2016).

My second example is the US based graphic designer Emory Douglas. In 1967 he joined the Black Panther Party where he would become Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture and was part of creating the The Black Panther Newspaper an iconic newspaper that was read by the members and beyond. Emory Douglas work for the newspaper is for me a very good example of design and sustainable change. Designing a newspaper can seemingly be small and unassuming. Design has too many times thought of change in an abstract sense, something that is formed somewhere for somebody. It has worked with abstract “target groups” and “stakeholders” many times found in places and communities that are far away from the designer. What Emory Douglas did is designing with a community in a movement. The Black Panther newspaper would get a wider circle of readers in the US and beyond. Between the years 1968-1971 it sold around hundred thousand copies a week (Maxists.org, n.d.). The UK based Caribbean poet Linton Kwesi Johnson gave in talk at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in the Autumn of 2023, 50 years later, an account of what it meant for him as a young person to read and sell The Black Panther. A seemingly small change can go far.

Over the years the +Change Archive has through the contribution by students, teachers, and others developed to a diverse archive. It ranges from Extinction Rebellions, Palestine Poster Project and the rural design community Brave New Alps and much more. It is still growing with new examples that that materialising our change references, who they are, what practices and geographies are active in our change making. It displays and negotiates how + change design is understood among students and staff at the design department at Linnaeus University.

And we are, in our work at the department, continuously creating practices outside the +change archive that contributes to how we can understand change through design. We do this through our research and our students constantly make important contributions. I have had the great privilege of working with our thoughtful and engaged students throughout many courses and have experienced their careful and reflective design. This coursework is in of itself is a +change archive.

References:

• Cambridge Dictionary, “Change”, Accessed November 15^th 2023, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/change
• Kennedy, Pagan. 2016. ” Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?” The New York Times. July 29 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/could-women-be-trusted-with-their-own-pregnancy-tests.html
• Marxists.org, “The Black Panther Newspaper”, Accessed November 15^th 2023, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/