DESIGN RE:PUBLIC

“I have been working on writing upside down. We sit across the table from one another. We both have pencils, and we are writing on this big piece of paper, and I write upside down.”—Lindsay Kinkade

Lindsay Kinkade: Founder, Design Re:Public / Phoenix AZ
 
designrepublic.us

 
“i have been working on writing upside down. we sit across the table from one another. we both have pencils, and we are writing on this big piece of paper, and i write upside down.”—lindsay kinkade
 

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What are the origins of Design RePublic?
I help people understand what design for social change is. My background and my first career was in journalism, working at the Boston Globe for seven years. I was a newspaper designer. I loved my job and the people that I worked with. I loved storytelling and I loved that there was some writing involved. I did not like sitting at a desk. I felt that every morning, the reporters and photographers got to go out into the world and capture what was going on and talk to real people on the street. But so much about newspapers was changing. My roots are in journalism, crossed with the new economy, crossed with a studio and a backpack, to equal a new, small but agile studio model.

Design Re:Public Studio Space

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What are you looking for in a collaborator?
As I finished my grad study and founded Design RePublic, I was invited to be a collaborator on many other people’s teams. I tried a whole bunch of different studio models. I worked in Collaborative Studios as part of a science model, I worked in a hospital setting, and I worked in a rare corporate setting. I liked all of them for different reasons, but at the end of the day, I figured out my own aesthetic. I decided to root my practice really firmly in the community. I can teach the design stuff, but I can’t teach somebody to care about their neighborhood. I look for people who already care and show up. If I was in London, it would be rad because I would have a bajillion collaborators. We could speak at a very high level right away. But in Phoenix, I’m still explaining really basic collaboration stuff, because the design economy model here is competitive.

Design Re:Public Will Travel

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How does the physical space facilitate people working across disciplines?
I first did an R&D experiment to figure out the studio space I would need in Phoenix because it is really contextual. You have to figure out overhead. I set up shop in a gallery space that is in the heart of downtown. People from different creative backgrounds have history there. It is a common ground space that we reinvented it as a pop-up design studio. We did a book project to try to figure out what kind of space that we needed. I built the studio furniture that I now have in a much bigger warehouse space as a colab effort. And I tried to figure out what we needed to change the room, in order to facilitate various activities: tools needed for small meetings versus bigger meetings, for work sessions, and for intense design-athons. We built our furniture out of plywood and sawhorses and stuff, but it all folds flat and fits in my car. It had to be lighter, faster, and cheaper, so any of us could take it to where we needed it to go. I found the space later. We have our core pieces: folding chairs, sawhorses, tabletops, pegboards for pinups, and it all fits in my tiny station wagon. The studio is now 1000 ft.² in a warehouse. It is in a neighborhood that some artists colonized 20 years ago in Phoenix. Food is kind of mixed with business and manufacturing. A lot of artists are doing their own version of manufacturing. There’s a lot of welding, furniture making, guitar making, and stuff like that. It is kind of an awesome setup—a space ready for us to make a big mess. The studio is like a big rectangle that has a divider down the middle—so half of it is a clean studio, which has books and papers and desks and computers and scanners and cameras and all of that stuff. The other side is for drills and hammers and nails and wood and paint and chalk and stencils and tape. It is easier to keep the dust on the one side instead of the other. I recently bought an Airstream, so we can take it mobile. I think that finding the right landlord is a big deal, and our landlord is an artist. She lets us do the kinds of things that maybe other landlords would not let us do.

Phoenix Design Week 2013

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How do you collaborate with clients?
It takes a long time to build trust do this kind of work in the community. I couldn’t have just landed here and started doing the work immediately. I had to go to meetings and work on small projects and propose things for at least a year and a half before I could actually do bigger pieces. I had to do a big social networking course to figure out who is here and what they were doing and how my skills could fill in some of the gaps without stepping on anybody’s toes. I wanted to come in and share what I do in a way that would help the system flourish as it is now. My collaborations are built on this period of deep immersion, of going to community meetings, festivals, other people’s events, gallery shows, and putting on my grubby shorts and pitching in. They are all my friends now, so that part is cool, and projects have emerged from that.

When I first got to Phoenix, people asked, “You do what? And you want to get paid for that?” I think in an economy without a lot of social practice, and that is so commercially driven, it takes a long time for me to explain what design for social change even means. So I stopped trying to describe it, and I just started doing it. I essentially did a lot of self-produced and pro bono projects that people could touch and feel. Once I had done a bunch of those little experiments, I could show documentation and point to results. Now it is easier for people to hire me. After we all believed that it can, and should, be done, and that it is fun and worthwhile, we had to figure out how to pay for this type of work. I am now starting to partner with collaborators on funding. We are inventing the project with the client before they even know it is possible, much less have line items to pay for it.

Can you describe the development process of a project?
I prefer to be physically present. I often work in residence in the client’s office or in the community space. When I am working on an identity project, I go and I sit with them in their space with their team, so that I can overhear contextual things that will apply to the work. They often don’t have designers on staff to implement the thing that I am doing, so I am slowly training people. I also invite people to come to the studio, and we have 18” x 24” newsprint pads to map out timelines. I have been working on writing upside down. We sit across the table from one another. We both have pencils to write on this big piece of paper, and I write upside down. My handwriting is readable, but all of the good handwriting on this final plan is in the hand of the person that I am working with. I propose some pie in the sky crazy stuff. Then I stamp it with the studio name, like an architecture drawing, put it in a tube, and they take it back to their office, so that they have some material that they can share with the higher-ups about what is possible and what can be done now. We have a collaborative Google Doc where we co-author the text: what are the various stages, what is the scope of work, where are we going to start, and how are we going to roll out?

Phoenix Design Week 2013

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Is designing for social change a particularly collaborative field?
There are a lot of people who were doing social change every day, long before designers ever showed up: social work, nonprofits, housing agencies. Some of them are good at delivering services. Some of them are legal experts. Some of them are great at administration or fundraising. There is already a whole collaborative group of people working on social change. Designers have finally mobilized and gotten involved to leverage what they can do and clearly communicate what they are doing. A lot of socially oriented work has become a design ghetto. It was a place where people only popped in for pro bono work now and then. I think we now have a couple of generations of designers that have been through programs, that have focused on this type of work, or have had mentors who do this kind of work, and they are not just doing traditional design stuff. They are deeply embedded in the bigger strategy processes of how we think about social change on a longer timeline. One thing designers are great at, is scale. For a nonprofit that views itself as having a small reach, the opportunity to work with a designer and think about the bigger picture is valuable. There was already a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration; it’s just that designers are now joining the party.

James Madison University XO Crosswalk

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How much of that is tied toward increased awareness of wicked problems?
In order for me to do my work well, I need to stay informed on wicked problems and how designers around the world are trying to wrangle them on collaborative teams. But it is not a conversation that makes sense at a really local, fine-grain level. Part of my role is stitching together things that we are seeing at the local level, back up to national and international wicked problems conversations. And I am also bringing the findings from those high-level conversations back to a local level. This is where my newspaper background comes in handy. Much of newspapers are about translating complexity down to a level that anybody can read. In the beginning, I just assumed that everybody was paying attention to all of the same national stuff that I was, but then I realized that a lot of people that I was working with, hadn’t had access to the same conversations that I did. I’ve been trying to find ways to talk about what I am learning at a national level, to my community, in a way that doesn’t belittle local work.

James Madison University XO Crosswalk

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Has the local conversation been expanding?
Absolutely. There was already a shift taking place. Our local AIGA chapter is receptive to that conversation. It is not realistic for all of those kinds of people to change their personal practice. They all can’t change their clients and get all of these nonprofits who have a lot of money to work together. But we have provided some public opportunities for people to get involved in this type of work and designers are really excited about it. We now have a Design for Good chair in our local chapter. He and I are working together to figure out real things that people can do, that will have an impact on our city, and provide positive feedback loops through the designer and the community.

Have you noticed a trend toward interdisciplinary or smaller scale practice?
I have. The entire economy contracted, and we are all trying to figure out how to do things lighter, faster, cheaper. I have also noticed that people who are really excited about designing for social change, also want to quit their job and go backpacking for six months. There is something about having a smaller nucleus that can expand on a project basis. That is helping me run a lean business. It is also helping the people that I am working with, live the life that they actually want to live. Most of the people that I’m working with are Millennials, and they don’t want a full-time job. They don’t only want to work for me—they just want to do their own thing. They work with me on a project and I help mentor them as a small business. Arizona actually needs more small businesses. I think smaller businesses make a stronger economy, while allowing us to be able to live the lives that we want, if we know how to work together.

James Madison University XO Crosswalk

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Why are Millennials interested in social change and not in full-time jobs?
We have the biggest school in the country here, Arizona State University, with over 80,000 students. We also have a visionary University president named Michael Crow, who worked with Bruce Mau, an amazing designer for social change. Crow’s vision of the New American University is open, accessible, and focused on making the world a better place. Paired with Bruce Mau’s design sensibility and storytelling, that is what brought me here in the first place. I have bought into the idea of this New American University, and I wanted to be near it and a part of it. We have thousands and thousands of people graduating every year from the school, and they believe that the world can be a better place. They already know that they can be a part of the change. But we still have a lot of work to do in building specific pathways to actually start doing that change. As a region, our economy is just not mature enough to keep all of them. I am trying to find a way to give some of these people an experience here in Phoenix, to do what they want to do with design, and change the world on the ground.

Transportation Collaboration

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Can you run through a particularly effective project?
I have been working with downtown Phoenix Inc., a new nonprofit that is helping to restructure some existing organizations downtown. They help businesses and citizens work together to make a really vibrant downtown. They already work with all of these stakeholders in town, but their offices are on the 14th floor of a major downtown building, which is inaccessible to anybody who doesn’t know that they are there. I have been working with them to open a storefront space, so that anybody can walk in and get involved in the work. Yesterday, we hosted 50 bioscience high school students in the space, who were riled up about what they think downtown should be. I built this kit of parts to set that up as a working, open, community studio space. We finally have a neutral ground. It’s actually more like a community treehouse. It is a fun space to be in. It has made it easier for all of us to collaborate and find common ground because there are no cubicles and there are no barriers. There are no appointments. Anybody can walk in from off of the street and share their ideas for Phoenix, which we can then connect them with specific organizations.