Design professors Beth Ferguson, Gozde Goncu-Berk, Tanuja Mishra and Jiayi Young led an intensive workshop at the recent International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) Congress held in Milan, Italy. Their workshop, “Toward an SOS Design Manifesto: Guiding principles for ecology, care, and shelter,” was held on Oct. 10. 

The SOS Design Manifesto workshop is a call to action to address the urgent social and environmental challenges of our time through the lens of design responses at different temporal and social dimensions. We define our framework for discussion and ideation for SOS design in a range of continuums: rapid responses to gradual changes, and individual to collective impact.

The goal of the SOS Design workshop is to co-author, with participants, a collective manifesto on designing for social and environmental emergencies through the imagining and the designing of possible solutions that prioritize ethics, responsibility, and inclusion in establishing design goals and intentions. 

The workshop was broken into three focus teams: Ecology, Care, and Shelter, each exploring the role of design by reviewing example manifestos, analyzing real scenarios, generating SOS design principles, and manifesting / visualizing creative solutions. At the end of the workshop, each team presented their design process and outcomes.

In this post-pandemic era, humanity is at a crossroads between restoration and change. “Life-Changing Design” was the theme of the tenth IASDR congress, geared towards exploring the role of design in these transformation processes; and how it’s renewing and transforming itself.

The congress took place Oct. 9-13 at the Politecnico di Milano’s Bovisa Durando Campus in Italy.