Care-Driven Design Modes for Criminal Justice Reform
A proposal for a set of care-driven design strategies to engage and redesign for world of mass incarceration.
Faculty Lead:
Laura Forlano
Class:
Critical Contexts
Student:
Alexandria Rengifo
“This project was an amazing opportunity to learn how to translate social theory into grounded principles and strategies for change. I finished the project feeling a stronger relationship to a piece of text —the “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times”—than ever before. As a designer, I was excited and inspired to think about what kind of designer I need to become to be part of a shaping a radically-care-driven world, and to be able to situate that imaginative work into an issue I feel a strong connection to. This project pushed me to think, engage, and imagine from a critical lens, and has in some ways, set a roadmap for myself as to the theories and principles I need to test through actual community-led design work. It was an interesting combination of critical analysis and thought with imaginative play, where I followed my inspiration and intuition along the way. Ultimately, I hope this lives on as more than just an intellectual brain child. I hope this can be a living document, that can be amended and reshaped by other people and projects. I hope that this becomes that informs future work I do. We will see!”
The theory of Radical Care, as presented by Hobart and Kneese, takes root within contexts of severe disadvantage. It calls upon “what it means for individuals and groups to feel and provide care, survive, and even dare to thrive in environments that challenge their very existence.” The U.S. criminal justice system challenges the very existence of millions of people, disproportionately of which are black and brown, and throws them in a system formed by racist, capitalist, and punitive ideologies. So what would caring, survival, and dare-say thriving look like in this setting? To be able to imagine answers to this question, we must translate the principles of radical care to practical design modes. This project aims to do just that, identifying four design modes within the traditional human-centered design process that are limited, and must be shifted, in order to be effectively engage within this work.
To read more this project, click here.