Image courtesy of Living Principles.
President of Emergent Structures, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the landfilling of building materials, Scott Boylston teaches in the Graphic Design, Design Management, and Design for Sustainability programs at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is the founder of the Design Ethos Conference. It is impossible to measure the impact of Boylston's work, but Design Ethos showed us the tip of the social innovation iceberg Boylston has brought to the city of Savannah.
Core77: How did you get the idea for Design Ethos?
Scott Boylston: The first one was in October of 2010 and that was really a result of a conversation that was probably five years old by the time between a number people who were speaking via the internet about changing design and design education. Most of the people I had never personally met; I knew their work and corresponded [with them]. We shared our work, we shared our students' work, and we said, 'Alright, what would be the best first step in terms of getting together?' 'Well, how about a conference?' In any case, the seeds were sewn about five years before.
During the first one, we were talking about the need to challenge ourselves to kind of 'walk the walk'—not to say, everyone here [the Do-ference participants themselves] isn't already walking the walk in their own cities—but the idea was having a convention with a 'designed function.' When you have people sitting there, talking about the importance of engaging with community, and then you have a conference where everyone goes right to that little sweet spot and doesn't go anywhere else, there could be something else.
So, that's the conversation we had. Let's try to do something different with a conference. There could be something else totally. That's where the Do-ference idea came from. I was like, 'Alright, let's ask them to come and show what they do rather than talk about what they do.'
How did you go about structuring the Do-ference?
The idea had been floating out there, but, really, when you talk about conferences, they pour more energy into old conversations. So that conversation had been out there, and we all came together and were like, 'Maybe we should try this.' A conference is a design; it's like anything else.
I started going to a lot of people I know, just through projects in Savannah, city folks, MPC (Metropolitan Planning Commission), locals and all that and that's when we focused on what was happening.
So, looking at a conference as a design, how did you approach that as a design problem?
Re-design the idea of convening so that they are doing.
In Sustainable Design, we talk a lot about 'wicked problems.' Design for Sustainability is very much about entering into a system in a way where you first assess. I use a web as an example, all these strings being not people, not organizations, but the relationships between them. So, if you imagine a cobweb, those are relationships. Those are the intangibles, and we just happen to get a glimpse of those.
Pluck a string. Assess the system. Know you'll never understand it fully. Know that you might not be able to effect change; the frustration is built into it, but somebody has to be addressing it. Someone has to be looking at it with a tolerance of discovery, being able to really wade through all the complexities, manage the ability to explore that without too much frustration, but with all the human complexities.
The Do-ference was this idea that you have in every city, you have archetypes, in terms of problems. You have poverty, you have racism, you have social inequity, economic inequity, you have all of these problems. This is the South, so you have another layer of social dynamics. It's historical and it's typical. Yet, it's Savannah, so Savannah is it's own unique mix of those things.
The composition of the Do-ference teams.