A Socially Engaged Design Practice
Since 2011, the Studio in Experimental Design at the HFBK Hamburg has been offering support to people in the neighborhood of St. Pauli and elsewhere in the city who, for economic or socio-cultural reasons, do not have access to or are prevented from wielding the agency of design. For the past ten years, we have hosted open Public Design Support sessions every Wednesday from 6–7pm in the storefront space of GWA St. Pauli, a social association that has been doing community work in the community for decades. In these weekly consultations, students pick up requests from local residents and work together with them to address the everyday problems they bring. All kinds of personal or collective issues, ideas, and desires are the starting point for design projects.
In recent years, St. Pauli has undergone unprecedented change, from which its local population has been largely excluded or negatively affected. At the beginning of the 2000s, St. Pauli was the poorest neighborhood in West Germany and characterized by a culture of solidarity between former harbor workers, immigrants, and diverse subcultures, including participants in the Hafenstrasse squatting struggles and the Reeperbahn red light district. Recently, however, St. Pauli has become the most expensive district in Hamburg for new rentals. Through the conversion of tenements into condominiums, new real estate developments, and municipal housing associations focused on maximizing profits, an unmistakable displacement has and continues to take place.
Public Design Support intends to intervene in these urban processes by testing and deploying an alternative design practice. Design can contribute to generating autonomous living conditions and counteracting the powerlessness and dependence people often experience within exclusionary urban development policies. Yet most residents of working-class neighborhoods and others affected by gentrification would typically be unable to afford design, not to mention even think about laying claim to its agency. As a clearly partisan practice, we work with those who are not only excluded from urban development but also from design itself. We advocate for the “Right to Design,” which regards design as a fundamental human act and undisciplinary practice by which people can improve their material conditions and social wellbeing, and represent their claims as citizens.
We have realized about a hundred design projects in St. Pauli and beyond. The design consultancy has worked for a pub in trouble, solved a single mother’s storage space problem, co-developed a semi-public dye garden, dramatized a demonstration by refugees, redesigned a drug counseling center, erected a memorial for relatives of concentration camp prisoners, supported rent protests, designed a cozy tutoring room, installed a loft bed with a cat tree, helped move a non-profit counseling center for refugees, renovated a broken trailer, stretched a tent across an apple meadow, laid bricks for a group barbecue, transformed an undemocratic classroom, and more.
Many of these projects ended up either unfinished or not meeting expectations. Some have ended in frustration and exhaustion, while a few others in friendship and fun. But while Public Design Support worked as a pedagogical experiment in an academic context, when viewed as an alternative model to design practice, we by and large failed. The shortcomings of Public Design Support (in terms of its aspirations) become particularly visible when it is classified in the wider category of “Social Design.” It is hard to say if any projects achieved any substantial social benefit, or if they only smooth the experience of poverty, exclusion, and exhaustion. But what they do, I would argue, is problematize our conceptual understanding of the social and the way it grounds design practice.
The Desire for Community
While embraced by many well-intended designers, planners, (social) workers, artists, and activists, the term “Social Design” is not only problematically underdefined, but also misleading. It is misleading because it implies that there is such a thing as “non-social” design, and thus fails to recognize and even obscures an essential character of design: that it is always socially integrated and operative. While there is design that disavows the social, or has detrimental effects on it, if it is not social, it is not design. Societal effect and its situatedness in social structures are design’s inescapable foundations. As opposed to the term “social design,” then, “socially-engaged design” focuses not so much on the fact of design’s social character, but rather its active, critical, and political engagement with the social’s potential.
Public Design Support is predicated on making the anger, problems, desires, conflicts, and ideas from the St. Pauli neighborhood the starting point of design. Its social engagement is therefore based on design commissions formulated by local groups and individuals. Public Design Support is deliberately dependent on people and their issues, and on being accepted into the existing neighborhood’s social dynamics and conflicts. This, however, is always easier said than done. Language barriers, invisible hierarchies, everyday trouble, misunderstandings, timing, and very tangible difficulties like money and weather create barriers and made us inaccessible to people who have limited resources to engage in the arduous process of co-creation. Further, Covid-19 made us completely lose contact with the neighborhood.
We are currently in the process of rebuilding our relationship with St. Pauli. We are back on site, hanging out and chatting with people. We are informing neighbors with flyers in different languages, and have started to meet more regularly with community organizers and social workers. At the same time, we are reflecting on how we can work in a more accessible and needs-based way. We have extended our opening hours and are making an effort to communicate more simply (and in more languages) what we can offer and how we work. We have invited neighborhood initiatives to informal get-to-know-you talks, and even arranged to meet with the local priest. We desperately want to get to know the district better. We want to open up to the community. We want to be part of the neighborhood. We want to work on local problems.
Statements such as these reproduce tropes that inform and establish the horizon for many contemporary artistic, architectural, and design practices: the community, the local, the neighborhood, the borough. These terms, taken from the arsenal of socially-engaged design practice, point to the fact that the values and criteria that define contemporary design are not the profession, the firm, the academy, the market, consumer desires, or even legal regulations. Rather, it is smaller social units with everyday knowledge and experiences of reality that build design’s contemporary frame of reference. The community, the local, the neighborhood, and the borough ensure a connection to people’s life worlds and make it possible to relate to (and resist) everyday experiences.
In many socially-engaged design and art practices, the concept of “community” often stands in for what was formerly meant by the term “social.” In current approaches like community-based design, community-led design, community-driven architecture, or community-centered design, the socio-spatial category of community frames the idea of social engagement and allows it to become practical. In contrast to the “social,” then, “community” seems to evoke emancipatory connotations and allows them to be concretely grasped and located. But the idea of community cannot replace the politics of the social.
The full article is available free of charge on the e-flux website.