The Chiba Care Protocol

The Chiba Care Protocol

 

Authors

Paul A. Rodgers, Craig Bremner, Giovanni Innella, Irene Griffin, Omayma Alqatawneh, Mah Rana, Mark Bradford, Hugh Pizey, Trudy Watt, Tot Foster, Lilo Viehweg, Halima Lone, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Jessica Melville-Brown, Yutaka Yoshinaka, Ida Telalbasic, Sébastien Proulx, Sally Sutherland, Hui Tse Gan, Penny Hilton, Silke Hofmann, Emilene Zitkus, James Fathers, Fangzhou Dong, Antonio Iadarola, Rachel Goldie, Nondo-Jacob Sikazwe, Sarah Morton, Enza Migliore, Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Luka Kille-Speckter, Maria Mullane, Barbara Trippeer, Margherita De Giorgi, Jaime Garcia, Justin Magee, Alison Gault, Lizete Druka, Fiona Hackney, Cara O’Sullivan, Evonne Miller, Julia Backhaus, James Allen, Csilla Nárai, Tom Ainsworth, Jonathan Ventura, David Coyles, Marc Ruaix, Vanja Garaj

 

Preamble

Just as the Lancaster Care Charter (Rodgers et al., 2019) was modelled on the Munich Design Charter, the Chiba Care Protocol is modelled on the Kyoto Protocol. Adopted in Kyoto in 1997, “…the Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement […] setting internationally binding emission reduction targets” (UNFCC). While not tackling climate change, the Does Design Care…? [2] workshop held in Chiba, Japan in July 2019 confronts another ineluctable change – i.e. answers to the question – Does Design Care? A protocol used to express an historic procedure plus operate as instructions and/or a record, but now it mostly operates as sets of rules governing data exchange. The Chiba Care Protocol, sets forth eleven Articles that aim to amplify the Lancaster Care Charter and operate as a set of instructions for design(ing) with care. We, the signatories to the Chiba Care Protocol, commit Design and Designers to using design with care.

 

Article 1. Responsibility

  • RESPONSIBILITY

This act is the designer’s Hippocratic oath suggesting how to take care within design practice when working with others. It encourages the consideration of capacity, opportunity and motivation as potential factors for change. This article is not a definitive set of rules but rather a discursive set of guidelines to prompt an evolving protocol for design and care.

  • EMPATHY

Empathy can be defined as four qualities: perspective taking, staying out of judgement, recognising emotion and communicating emotion. As empathetic designers, we can foster great relationships, empower people and sensitively shape the design process. However, by stepping into somebody else’s world, we can also unintentionally create imbalance, false expectations, trauma and dependency. Sharing the feelings of another is a great responsibility. All activities from conception through delivery to post-care, must be trauma-informed, emotionally-aware and transparent for both the designer and user [See Article 8. Empathy].

  • ETHICS

We advocate design should strive to develop a spirit of integrity. We must be mindful of the people we work with and co-create design engagements with them. Listen to and inform them as fully as possible and clearly communicate all procedural steps. Ensure they have opportunity to ask questions and take care to inform design iterations, accurately representing their feedback. We should collaborate with appropriate organisations that have expertise in ethical protocols to take care of the people we work with and ourselves as design professionals.

  • REFLEXIVITY

To be responsible as designers we encourage reflexivity. It is important to incorporate time for reflexivity within all aspects of the design process, and delivery. Reflexivity within design is about attentiveness and self-consciousness of the impact of our role. Self-awareness of biases and preconceptions enables understanding of how these influence assumptions and engagement with others. To maintain rigor, robustness and impartiality in critical thinking it is important to acknowledge how inter and intra-communications inform our creative practice, and decision-making.

  • POST-CARE

We have the responsibility to genuinely invest in the evaluative stage of design. How does it impact? Who does it impact? A framework is necessary to access and support people, identifying their future needs, and providing a holistic approach to post-care. In understanding the influence, as much as the impact, we can facilitate the co-owned agendas to integrate hard-to-reach communities. Enabling an inclusive process, which is transparent across the breadth of the process, is important. We need to ask ourselves – What does it actually deliver?  What are the results of this delivery? We, as designers, need to plan as much for the evaluative end as for an exciting beginning.

 

Article 2. Dignity

2.1 UNIVERSAL DIGNITY

For the purposes of this protocol, ‘universal dignity’ means all things that are worthy of honour and respect. The term includes the human throughout their life span and extends to the dignity of the more-than-human (e.g. cultures and subcultures, beliefs and ideals, geographies such as soil, water and rivers, and non-human animal and plant species). At this transformative point for design, we argue for an embedded ethical and political commitment to universal dignity in the discipline of design (i.e. practice, research, education). We will take all appropriate measures to acknowledge and respect the dignity of any party that could potentially be impacted by design decisions. The following approaches and principles will guide us.

2.2 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

We recognise that design (i.e. research, practice, education) plays an active role in issues of sustainable development. Precautions will be taken to respect the dignity of those which any work encounters, responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

2.3 UNIVERSAL INCLUSIVITY

We acknowledge the need to include a spectrum of perspectives within all change-making work. This agenda respects ranges of needs, approaches and abilities. We recognise that inequalities that exist as a result of design, and that inequalities within the discipline of design need to be urgently addressed.

2.4 DIGNITY OF DIPLOMACY

We acknowledge that while the designer may have a level of expertise they cannot be the expert in another person’s experience. Design needs to be based on reality and not on fictionalised stereotypes.

2.5 DIGNITY WITHIN THE MAINTAINING OF EDUCATION  

We recognise that there needs to be an appraisal of individual privilege or bias and that social identity can influence your role as an educator or designer. The power base needs to be actively redistributed. Diversity should be embraced, and any inclusive initiatives should be of value and not perfunctory or symbolic. Datasets should be non-discriminatory and open to scrutiny. Research methods should emphasise the contextualisation of data and expose bias and discrimination. Dignity understands respect, competence and ensures that the individual feels valued. Learning environments require the facilitator/educator and learner to be mutually respectful.

2.6 DIGNITY OF LANGUAGES

We recognise that language, beyond its defining technical and linguistic components includes a diverse and layered spectrum of communicative expressions. Language bears the risk to be used to discriminate, exclude and stigmatize groups and individuals and contextually taint members of a certain gender, class, religion or socio-cultural background. We agree that the design of language should consider verbal and nonverbal forms that nurture inclusion and human dignity on every level of communicative expression.

2.7 EVOLVING MODELS OF THINKING

We are aware that ontological and epistemological variations exist between regions, cultures, and individuals, and that the understandings and socially constructed narratives we assign will continually evolve over time. Designers should maintain awareness of how their personal thinking may be reflected in their practice and should consciously consider the diversity of narratives and models associated with a subject to ensure alternative beliefs and ways of thinking are embraced and respected.

2.8 THE DIGNITY OF DESIGN

Championing design research across interdisciplinary platforms and communicating the value that good design contributes is fundamental to the dignity of the discipline of design. We acknowledge that the design, form and function of our works communicate, reproduce or can act to subvert norms and cultural beliefs. Design work can progressively realise, enact and communicate matters of universal dignity.

 

Article 3. Cartography

3.1 A CARTOGRAPHY OF CARE

It is easy to get lost in care – to get lost in the act, to lose sight, to care excessively, to cause harm. To help design navigate the complex landscape of care, it needs a navigation tool, a map to help it understand and practice care, an instrument to get its bearings in unfamiliar situations, to guard against the dislocation of caring altogether. Design needs a cartography of care.

3.2 DUTIFUL CARE

For many, the act of caring is a duty, professional or otherwise. Dutiful care brings to mind images of patient and practitioner – a professional bond. There is one who is looked after, and another who is duty bound.

3.3 DESIGN FOR CARE

Changes in our population – growing older, more numerous, and less tolerant – test the limits of our care professionals and demand that care responsibilities expand into other disciplines. Care becomes the subject of design and, for a moment we must realign our disciplined-self. Facing different limitations than our colleagues in care, we might think about its value not only in the market but also across cultures and social groups. How do different people understand care? What are the priorities? Is it an imperialist instrument? Are we speaking of the same thing when we use the word care?

3.4 CARE FOR DESIGN

Soon enough, the roles are reversed. It is not only that design thinks about care, but also that care rethinks design as a discipline. If we talk of care across different cultures and different peoples, we need to extend it to non-human people. Caring for our materials might bring a different light to environmentalism. It is not that we sustain, but that we transcend means and ends, tools and resources.

3.5 CHANGING CARE

Caring is, by necessity, made of small acts. Care does not try to upend Capitalism; it is not visionary. The unassuming, every-day nature of care tells us that it is omnipresent. It is no surprise that caring can be uncaring. It can be too much or too little. It can heal and it can hurt. It can be used as a technology of control; it can be weaponised. Care needs to be located and it is, perhaps, the social role of design to perform a thorough cartography of care, even if only provisionally. Care is, after all, ever changing.

 

Article 4. – Consciousness

4.1 CONSCIOUSNESS

This article identifies that current care systems are diluted and short-sighted models motivated by monetary gain. The measures, by which care is provided and perceived, should be transformed into a sustainable and human-centred approach to care. Conscious-care imbued with core values and drivers of empathy, integrity and incubation. This should allow for greater innovative scope in designer/user relationships by removing barriers to creativity within care.

4.2 EMPATHY

The path towards true inclusion requires an unrestricted and empathy-driven approach, which is not limited to or by the enforcement of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion regulations and policy, but rather allows the exploration of designers to innovate for inclusion. True innovation for inclusions requires transition mapping from our current design-care systems to an evolved design-care philosophy that enables transparency between design theory and conscious care practices [See Article 8. Empathy].

4.3 INTEGRITY

The use of honesty within conscious-care to create a state of unity for human-centred care. The individuals involved can ideate methods to grow current care models to a wider scope to increase inclusivity amongst parties through transparent, honest and active contribution.

4.4 INCUBATION

The act of nurturing conscious-care through providing the time, space and empowerment of innovation within the act of caring. Parties might practically realise this through creating constructive challenges to care, infrastructure for co-creation or fostering a mindset towards empathic innovation.

4.5 ETHICS

To ensure robust sustainable ethics that are made bespoke and appropriate through self-initiated and co-created, parties practicing conscious care should design for feedback from the primary elements of a given case, thus connecting the theory of design and practical application. In order for the conscious-care framework to result in sustainable care-practices, parties should preserve and integrate their respective cultural and social ethics whilst maintaining the integrity of other core-values of conscious care.

 

Article 5. AI

5.1 WHAT IS AI?

For the purposes of this protocol we define Artificial Intelligence as the area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. This Article proposes conditions for designers considering engaging in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of care.

5.3 IS AI USEFUL FOR CARE?

In a context of increasing pressure in the current care system, new means of caring need to be explored, even if it might result in automating certain areas of care.

5.4 WHEN IS AI USEFUL FOR CARE?

In order to establish whether AI in care is an appropriate solution, the designer needs to understand if they’re dealing with a problem with a standardised solution such as a care service problem or a specific problem involving nuances or cultural sensitivities that need to be addressed with full human dedication. The designer must undergo a necessary triage process.

5.5 IS AI ENOUGH?

Picking the wrong solution can lead to the deterioration of care, care-less care, and wrong distribution of care resources. We don’t recognise general AI, on its own, as an appropriate solution to deal with the design of care problems as giving full care control to another entity is, by definition, careless.

 

Article 6. Education

6.1 EDUCATION

All parties to this protocol shall ensure that, from the level of basic education, Design is utilised throughout as a new way of learning about, understanding and engaging disciplines. The global challenges that societies face are inherently multidisciplinary and multicultural – but the education that prepares us for these challenges is not. By thinking differently about how we educate, we can avoid design becoming instrumental.

6.2 LEARNING

Each party in achieving the goal of utilizing design as a new way of learning, in order to educate within real world contexts, shall:

6.2.1: clarify the value and objectives of basic education to:

– foster learning in successive generations;

– cultivate talents for the multidisciplinary and multicultural context.

6.2.2: design and implement appropriate curricula in accordance with specific circumstances, such as to:

– break the boundaries of natural, social, and technological science;

– enhancement of multidisciplinary project-based curricula;

– create an environment of teamwork and collaboration;

– expand the place of taking courses from classrooms to the real world.

6.3 BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Design should be introduced in pre-university education as a horizontal and cross-cutting approach to other disciplines. Design offers the capability to operate on the boundaries between technology, science and society and through cultural, economic and social lenses. This should be exploited to define a more engaging, interdisciplinary and multicultural learning system.

6.4 NEW CURRICULA

Education must acknowledge and understand the new roles that design now plays in our political system. We must radicalise curricula accordingly and without delay. ‘Designers’ are now valuable assets for Economists, Financers and Managers to understand the utility of their respective laissez-faire environments. But, behind this apparent pinnacle of recognition there lies a note of caution. In this acceptance there is also normalisation. If we do not act now, Design will be systematised by the very systems it once sought to innovate and overhaul.

6.5 FUTURE PROBLEMS, CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES

While students in some settings have adopted, from early on, digital modes of learning (i.e. digital white boards, tablets, etc.), technological mediation in learning is leveraged mostly instrumentally. Analogue materialities allow for expressions, forms of inquiry, and mutual dialogue in ways that digital modes find challenging. A more fluid, flexible, and versatile appropriation of digital and analogue repertoires of learning, dealing with tensions between these, should be cared for, to more productively serve problem-based learning and engagement. It can facilitate and help to unravel and delimit the potential relevance of the natural and technical sciences to the problem-based learning at hand, open up to the multidisciplinary and networked underpinnings of contemporary and future problems, challenges and opportunities.

 

Article 7. Listening

7.1 CONDITIONS FOR ACTIVE LISTENING

It is essential for designers to understand the contexts and people that they engage with. However, listening is currently not understood as a priority in their skill set. Designers are always taught how to draw and expected to practice and hone this skill. However, designers are not taught how to listen to understand the context they engage in. We suggest that this needs to change.

7.2 SEEK TO CONFIRM UNDERSTANDINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Designers will accept that each person’s understanding is different and respect this difference and the owner of this difference. The designer will also accept that their interpretation of a conversation lies in what is presented to them as the other’s understanding. A safe transparent and accountable design process must also be willing to flow with conversations and to allow for the unexpected.

7.3 CREATE CONTEXT AWARE CONDITIONS FOR LISTENING

It is essential that we, as designers, foster and create conditions that enable effective listening that are particular to the context that we want to pay attention to. These conditions should be created in collaboration and agreement with stakeholders and partners that we want to learn from.

7.4 MAINTAIN, THE CONDITIONS FOR AN EFFECTIVE LISTENING DIALOGUE

Having created conditions for effective listening, it is essential that we take the time and care to maintain them. In order to do this, we need to pay close attention to maintaining feedback loops to confirm and refine the information that is emerging and also taking the time to ensure that all parties have the space to be heard.

7.5 OVERCOME POWER HIERARCHIES

It is important that we take the time as designers to recognize the inherent power dynamics in each interaction and work to ensure each participant an equal voice. Aspects of this can be reflected internally within our concept of self as a designer as well as others’ concept of themselves and their voice in the dialogue.

7.6 BE MINDFUL OF LISTENING AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ‘NOISE’

Noise presents opportunity, complexity, diversity and challenge. Engaging in active listening presents significant challenges for identifying the important and relevant features within a listening activity. Reflexivity, transparency, divergence, and convergence, should all be considered as strategies to maximise the value of listening.

7.7 MAINTAIN CONDITIONS FOR MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

It is essential that we monitor and sustain a healthy state for open active listening, to allow the voice of each other to be heard. Like a pendulum, the act of listening needs to swing to and fro to represent the many facets of an interaction, the many dimensions. This can be achieved through a flow of reflective practice in order to maintain a state for multiple perspectives.

7.8 SUPPORT MULTIPLE MODES OF LISTENING

Designers will acknowledge the co-existence of multiple cultures and temporalities of listening. They will commit to equalize power dynamics within each exchange, including all actors involved in the optimization of conflicts or dissonances. Views will be shared on multiple levels and modalities, including but not limited to the discursive plan, analogic as well as mediated platforms and devices.

 

Article 8. Empathy

8.1 EMPATHY

1: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

2: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.

8.2 PROCESS

Designers proclaim the use of empathy as a way to build compassion, trust, and relationships with the community they work with. However, often a designer’s approach to empathy is temporary and does not always follow up with the “cared”. Commonly, empathy is considered at the beginning of the design process. However, designers usually distance themselves from the problem while working on it. Furthermore, empathy tends to be put aside or even forgotten along the process, whereas, it should be sustained and used throughout.

8.3 PRINCIPLES

There is a way to shrink the distance between designer and subject, to close the gap of care. Tools for embedding empathy throughout the design process are envisioned to be progressive and immersive, enabling a multi-sensory understanding to build into the design process:

  • Empathetic behaviour inspires empathy. Seeing what other people do fosters behaviour change.
  • People need recognition for embedding empathic behaviour into the design process. This generates capital with empathy as a new currency.
  • Immerse yourself to the best of your knowledge, multi-sensory practice is encouraged.
  • People who genuinely practice empathy in their design process, build trust and create long-lasting relationships.
  • Don’t make empathy a temporary exercise, take it through the entire design process.
  • If empathy becomes an action, it has an impact.
8.4 PRACTICE

To effectively use these principles, design professionals must empower participants and provide them with the means to express their feelings or experiences. These tools for expression vary from verbal (interviews, storytelling, etc.), visual (collages, sketches, etc.) or they can involve a chain of actions revealing latent levels of knowledge that we might not be able to talk about. Although they are all efforts to project feelings and needs of users and stakeholders in the design process, once they are embedded in the process and reflected on design solutions, they demonstrate that design does care and can be used to give communities a voice.

 

Article 9. Mediation

9.1 MEDIATION

Mediation helps support people to better articulate their views, their wants, their needs. Design acts as a mediator between users and the artefact being created to ensure that the product, service or system being designed is addressed in a thoughtful way, which does not privilege the system above the user.

9.2 FITNESS

A caring perspective within design acts as a mediating lens allowing our contemporary tech-savvy and increasingly complex world to align with the ordinary life of real people. Developing for “fitness” is bound to the capacity to account for local knowledge. Fitness can be defined by how straightforward people connect, as appropriate to the context in which they are operating, and understand the various touch points—visual communication materials, equipment, programs, policies—within which our artificial world is at some point encapsulated.

9.3 IMPACT

By accounting for local, personalized knowledge, a caring perspective of design will ensure that the voice of the user can influence the problematisation of any design project as well as the decision-making. This particular form of mediation hopes to account for a wider array of potential impacts of technology.

9.4 VOICE

Any complex situation calls for compromises. Design can mediate decision making in a way that ensures that the most vulnerable are not forgotten and left out. People are by essence vulnerable. It is design’s role to quantify issues of “justice” in mediating resources on their work in any design situation. Design can therefore act as a proxy to enable populations, which may otherwise experience stigma, to help consider alternatives or question society’s standards of “normal”. It is the hope that through design’s mediation this might amplify the voice of real people, and give voice to their perspectives on what has value and meaning.

9.5 ACTIONS

To become caring mediators designers need to:

9.5.1     amplify the voices and perspectives of people by acting as their proxy.

9.5.2     play an active role in setting policy and project agendas.

9.5.3     recognize technology as having a supporting role in daily life.

9.5.4     consider and pursue alternatives while always remaining critical of social norms or what is viewed as commonplace.

9.5.5     adopt an appropriate ethical attitude in support of engagement within forms of mediating endeavours.

9.5.6     evaluate causes for justification (considering the vulnerable) against an analysis of circumstances.

 

Article 10. Trans-Sensory

10.1 TRANS-SENSORY

Trans-sensory, for the purposes of this Protocol, means perceptions that belong to no one particular sense, but which may travel via one sensory channel or another without their content or their effect being limited to this one sense. We realise that the notion of trans-sensory causes design to treat the gesture of care in imperceptible ways.

10.2 COMMUNICATION

Everything is in constant movement. Even in stillness, the human body keeps continuous and vigorous life—our heart is beating, blood is flowing, cells are dividing, our senses are sharp and always interacting with each other or the surroundings in various ways. The same applies to non-human bodies, materialities, artefacts, things. Their “senses” appear to be acute, as they expand and contract continuously in tandem with changes in the immediate environment. Those expansions, contractions and changes are a constant interaction between different materialities, transcending different media of senses. In those ‘trans-sensory’ movements, one sense is transformed into another and the materialities communicate with each other even when we are not always conscious about it. Care operates in the same constant, sensitive flow of communication and design must be conscious to not disrupt this.

10.3 TRANSCENDENCE

This phenomenon becomes tangible where the human being constantly tunes into vibrations from within and outside the body. The body is seen as just a border between inner and outer worlds that enables abstract sensories from the inner world to transform and transcend into the outer world as expressions of explicit movements. Our inner world is formed by personal experiences, society, philosophical concepts, fears, dreams, and Design must learn to translate and transform inner worlds outwards as gestures of care. This borderless movement and transcendence between inner and outer worlds make Design and Care almost meditative experiences where only sensory perception is at play.

10.4 EXPERIMENTATION

We all begin our journey by awakening our senses at the exact moment we start perceiving and recognizing our surroundings, and connecting these to our inner experiences. Our environment becomes more complex the more details our senses assimilate and, to this effect, there is no technique nor a particular method to extract information from the outside more than facing the situations, collecting memories and sensorial experiences along the way. To design-for-care we acknowledge and embrace the complexity of the inner and outer worlds accumulated by the senses.

10.5 TRANSLATION

Along this process of recognition, adaptation and empowerment [See Article 11. Empowerment] of our own senses, design research can participate as a key mediator, since it uses methods of transforming different media, shifting constantly between tacit knowledge and reflection, and therefore becomes expert in translating interactions into words, images, things, processes and embodied practices. Design can invite others to explore new gestures, new ways to express with acute senses, triggering new sensorialities, memories, experiences and interactions inside and outside together.

 

Article 11. Empowerment

11.1 EMPOWERMENT

For the purposes of this protocol ‘empowerment’ means designing to empower people to do something, plus making sure people are empowered to do something. This article of the protocol argues that Design should work to prevent, protect, pursue and prepare people for change and open channels of communication to the voices that tend not to be heard.

11.2 ENGAGEMENT

We recognise the possibility of any real change to the trajectory of our future is dependent on empowering people at all levels of society. Therefore, the voice of the marginalised must have as much effect as the voice of the masses. Given that those with influence are already heard, designers should work to include the silent and the silenced. Design must help the vulnerable and overlooked break through the noise. Designers must take the lead to effect meaningful empowerment.

11.3. FUTURES

We accept that many people are not engaging with the future because they can only care for themselves in the present, particularly when their basic needs are not being met or they have been made to feel that their voice has no value or influence. Therefore, designing must enable people to care for themselves and their futures.

11.4. DIGITAL

We advocate that good solutions often come from the bottom up, from those closest to the issue. With the vast majority of people are already digitally connected design has the means to involve everyone in the project of care for themselves, others and the world. The role of the designer is to use these digital means so that they empower inter-connections to change the imbalance of power.

11.5 CHANGE

We acknowledge that Design has the potential to understand the language of impact and the culture of reflection, learning and growth concerning Care. Design is well placed to take a lead to counterbalance asymmetric power systems and use the digital to tackle future problems of care. The designer’s role should bridge the visions of individuals, the needs of local communities, and the flow of Capital. Averting disaster and caring for the future cannot be left to individuals, but must be a collective effort—everyone has to be meaningfully engaged and empowered. It is all too easy for corporations, institutions and politicians to ignore the quiet, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. Design must work to change that.

11.6 CARE TOGETHER

We state that we will implement a Design-led agenda to prevent fragmentation by encouraging inclusivity; protect the vulnerable by bringing all people into the conversation; pursue a culture of co-design; and prepare for a realistic future by empowering everyone to do what needs to be done with care, together.

 

Conclusions

The Chiba Care Protocol maps out (Article 3.) a set of instructions that should be read as new fundamentals for design. Not fundamentals to replace the historic prescriptions for the elusive ‘good design’ but, because we must develop the consciousness (Article 4.) of designing with care and take care with design—fundamentals that revisit the origins of Design. These origins—the split of idea from manufacture—presented design with infinite possibilities and imposed infinite responsibilities (Article 1.), which, from its outset, made Design something that must be applied with care. More recently, always in search of the infinitely possible, design has targeted Care as a potential field of activity, especially health and social care—both demanding dignity (Article 2.). The Chiba Care Protocol, read in conjunction with the Lancaster Care Charter, expands Design’s knowledge (Article 6.) in the ways in which it can actively participate in the design of care. Should Design wish to adhere to its historic fundamentals it is more than likely it will be reproduced eventually by machines (Article 5.). Designing in dark times without the new set of instructions outlined in this Protocol will tempt design to chase cosmetic attributes, like the speculative or fictional or transitional. There is now no time for these distractions. In a massively mediated (Article 9.) environment, Design must be listening (Article 7.) attentively to the conversations of others to empower (Article 11.) those without voice. And it is important for Design to understand that it is the listener who constitutes the conversation. This trans-sensory experience (Article 10.) is the basis of a widespread recognition within design that perhaps empathy (Article 8.) is quality the most required of the designer. No longer sustaining the unsustainable but sharing the feelings of others mindful that this does not make Design something that it is not.

 

This Protocol is open for signature and subject to ratification, acceptance or approval by the disciplines called Design and the people who call themselves Designers. In their act of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, Design and Designers shall declare the extent of their competence with respect to the matters determined by this Protocol.

 

Written at Chiba University this third day of July two thousand and nineteen by the undersigned:

 

Paul A. Rodgers, Craig Bremner, Giovanni Innella, Irene Griffin, Omayma Alqatawneh, Mah Rana, Mark Bradford, Hugh Pizey, Trudy Watt, Tot Foster, Lilo Viehweg, Halima Lone, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Jessica Melville-Brown, Yutaka Yoshinaka, Ida Telalbasic, Sébastien Proulx, Sally Sutherland, Hui Tse Gan, Penny Hilton, Silke Hofmann, Emilene Zitkus, James Fathers, Fangzhou Dong, Antonio Iadarola, Rachel Goldie, Nondo-Jacob Sikazwe, Sarah Morton, Enza Migliore, Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Luka Kille-Speckter, Maria Mullane, Barbara Trippeer, Margherita De Giorgi, Jaime Garcia, Justin Magee, Alison Gault, Lizete Druka, Fiona Hackney, Cara O’Sullivan, Evonne Miller, Julia Backhaus, James Allen, Csilla Nárai, Tom Ainsworth, Jonathan Ventura, David Coyles, Marc Ruaix, Vanja Garaj.

 

References

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