I know I am quite late to be starting with my blogposts for this semester, but I’m trying. I’m currently in one of the hardest periods of my life so far, so please, bear with me.
I decided to do an interview for my topic of Design Activism, but since I’m still missing my research question, finding interview questions turned out a little harder than I thought. For this exact reason, I currently only interviewed one person, because I wanted to find out if the questions would work and what results I could get. For my master’s thesis I will probably be reworking the interview, in order to make it more specific and accurate for my future research question. I decided to focus on how Design Activism is viewed by people within the Design industry. For this I decided to interview Lena, who turned out to be a really good interviewee and confirmed many of the thoughts that I had about designers dealing with Design Activism, so thank you for that.
In the beginning I instantly wanted to start with some hard questions, because it gives me a better idea what designers might know about Design Activism without having spent time researching it in-depth. So my first two questions were: What is Design Activism for you and how would you describe Socially Responsible Design? Lena told me that Design Activism is when someone actively talks about things through design, while Socially Responsible Design is design that takes things into consideration (for instance, environment, inclusion, accessibility, etc.) it is Design that is for everyone.
In the next step I asked her which types of design projects she would describe to be design activist and she said that she mainly thinks posters and social media are platforms people use to show design activist work. This showed me that, as I thought, the main idea of activist work nowadays (excluding demonstrations, of course) is being presented and spread throughout social media or posters. Lena mentioned that although many things happen on social media nowadays, posters still have a lot of power and are sometimes even more accessible to people than social media. This is also why she thinks that both the digital and the analogue space are important for Design Activism, since they are accessible for different people and the message can be spread in numerous ways depending on the area, where it is shared.
Last but not least, I wanted to know if designers should show activist work or not and Lena answered that to a certain degree designers should add activist works, because they are responsible for focusing on and showing certain topics in a visual and easily understandable manner, so people might be able to understand some causalities better.
Thank you Lena for the interview and for the experience of professionally creating and conducting an interview! And thank you Selina for the observations concerning my interview. Below this blogpost you can see my interview notes, a short summary and reflection on the interview, the observation sheet from Selina, a Feedback from Lena and the transcript of the interview. Keep in mind that it was conducted in German so all the mentioned documents are in German too, sorry.
