Enacting Change Through Transdisciplinary Design

As the child of two designers, Alix Gerber knew from an early age that design was in her future. She studied design and environmental analysis and interior design at Cornell as an undergraduate, but it wasn’t until she attended the Parsons School of Design to study transdisciplinary design that she found her true passion. Gerber describes transdisciplinary design as using “design as a mindset to address complex systemic challenges that go across disciplines.” She notes that large societal issues such as climate change or policing can be studied from different disciplinary perspectives. “But design is a unique way to go across those because it's about making tangible things in the world, and that can allow people from different perspectives to look at it and have a conversation.”

Gerber has also had a longtime interest in human-centered design, and her work both before and after grad school included projects in which she sought feedback from users in order to make a design work better for them. The “learning from people” part of her work has always been crucial to her and over time has become central to what she does. During her time at Parsons, she did participatory workshops with groups of people “who lived in overpoliced neighborhoods, learning about their experiences with the criminal legal system,” then imagining with them what a different future could look like. She continued this type of participatory transdisciplinary design work at Washington University in St. Louis, where she worked on a project with the residents of Ferguson, MO, envisioning three possible futures that achieve public safety without policing.

Gerber came to Smith in 2022 as a Post-Graduate Fellow in Interdisciplinary Design Practices, teaching courses across the Art Department and the Design Thinking Initiative. She also has been running the “Making Radical Futures” humanities lab. Gerber’s current work is rooted in both prefigurative politics, or working towards the world you want within the world you have, and speculative design, which involves making things from an alternate reality. “You could think of a sci-fi prop,” Gerber says, “but the idea is to make this thing that provokes conversation and tries to get people thinking about what if these different futures came to pass.” In her class called “Making Radical Futures,” students use speculative design to make objects from a future without capitalism. “I talk with students about this idea of strangeness,” Gerber says, “It should look like you're not in Kansas anymore.”

A faculty fellowship from The Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS) has allowed Gerber and her students to work with members of the local community to create an illustrated map of the Connecticut River Valley one hundred years after the fall of capitalism. Their collaborators are people from local groups whose work is “already envisioning and enacting these futures.” Participants include, among others, workers from Pedal People, the Northampton-based “human-powered delivery and hauling service”; the Stone Soup Café in Greenfield, which offers community meals, a free store and a tuition-free culinary institute; and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center in Springfield, an organization “of, by, and for immigrant workers” that organizes for workers’ rights and shares food through mutual aid.

Gerber notes that some collaborators have spoken about the luxury of taking time to envision the future; many participants are so busy doing their day-to-day work that they have little time to dream. The workshops Gerber offered allowed them time to think and envision collaboratively. Gerber and her students asked participants about their work, their location and what kind of world they’re hoping to build through their efforts. Then, the participants worked in pairs to choose one priority about the world they were building, and “imagine a future one hundred years beyond the fall of capitalism, where this value is the most important prioritized thing, and all the social systems in this place are based on that.” The pairs responded to prompts such as, “If there is no private property ownership, how do people access land to live on?” And, “If there are no bosses or working for a wage, how is labor organized to produce what we need? Who does what?” Then, based on their ideas, participants drew scenes showing what living in this future might look like. After the workshops, Gerber and her students synthesized the drawings and ideas into the final map where the different groups’ visions exist side-by-side. Gerber points out that in these imagined scenarios, “people are still people and physics is still physics . . . But the thing that changes is the way that we organize our social systems. What impacts does that have both positive and negative? And how can we explore that through imagining this future?”

Gerber also asked Smith faculty and staff with expertise on climate science and river landscapes (Greg de Wet from Geosciences, Reid Bertone-Johnson from Landscape Studies, and Heather Rosenfeld and Kala’i Ellis from the Spatial Analysis Laboratory) to consider what the valley might look like if, say, there were fewer dams in the Connecticut River. What would be the impact on the valley from a wilder, more tumultuous river as well as from rising sea levels? Gerber did not want mapping this particular future to “terrify people,” but she and her students have incorporated potential impacts from climate change into the map, though not the most extreme versions that showed the mountains of the Holyoke Range becoming a series of islands in a rising sea.

As her final year at Smith as a Post-Graduate Fellow is coming to an end, Gerber is busy now planning a public panel called “River Valley Radical Futures: Co-creating Visions Beyond Capitalism” that will feature a conversation with some of the workshop participants and distribution of the map. Gerber and Emily Norton, Director of the Design Thinking Initiative at Smith, have also organized an art exhibit that will open at the A.P.E. gallery on Main Street in Northampton in early May and later travel to Artspace in Greenfield and the Taber Art Gallery at Holyoke Community College. They have commissioned five artists to create artifacts excavated from the future envisioned by the local groups and represented in the map. The artifacts will include a tool sharing station with homi (a Korean hand plow), an apothecary, and body extensions and creature masks.

Wherever she ends up next, Gerber is eager to continue to design collaboratively with those who are creating a transformed world. “I think what's so cool about prefigurative politics as a movement strategy is that it often feels like we're limited to either trying to make this kind of incremental change, or not doing anything at all . . . But this is a way to say, you can envision fundamental change and do something right now . . . [you] can create change by just making the dominant system less necessary. You never know what tiny shifts might make bigger differences down the line.”