Interview in Baltimore Style magazine in 2007. The article, entitled 'Design on the Verge' interviewed leading designers in the region.

In the pages that follow, Style offers a decidedly capacious take on cutting-edge design in Baltimore. We check out video games and ottomans made of egg crates, prosthetic limbs and toilet plungers, jewelry made from broken plates and signs on the sides of buildings. We also learn about anti-design, the perfect cocktail and transforming a grain silo into luxury condos. And we talk with one of the hottest new fashion designers in the country. We hope you find the current state of design in Baltimore as ‘fierce’ as we do.

SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS DESIGN:

Spreading the Word
On a Thursday afternoon in March, one group of students in a classroom in the sleek glass Brown Center at Maryland Institute College of Art is pondering how to convince teen mothers in East Baltimore to breastfeed their babies while another group brainstorms strategies for keeping kids from joining gangs. Still another ponders ways to get more working smoke detectors into Baltimore’s rowhouses.

Yes, this is art school. And, yes, this is a graphic design class. These students are part of the MICA/JHU Design Coalition, an alliance that pairs Johns Hopkins University researchers who have public health messages to communicate with design students eager to create materials for the real world. The guru behind the class is the charismatic Bernard Canniffe, a Welshman who came to MICA in 2001 with plans to teach and write coffee-table books, and instead has become a well-known international figure in the cutting-edge field of socially conscious design.

At the start of each semester, a handful of Hopkins researchers— and, more recently, community activists, as well— present their research to the MICA students. The students divide into groups to tackle each project, taking on the responsibility of talking with community members, developing design proposals, managing the budget and making a final presentation. Those working on the breast-feeding project have visited health clinics and talked with nurses in East Baltimore, in the process learning that most young mothers in the community don’t breast-feed because it isn’t considered normal or even socially acceptable. Now their mission is to make breast-feeding cool by designing what can loosely be called hip-hop health materials.

In the seven years the coalition has existed, MICA students have designed an interactive exhibit on lead poisoning that traveled throughout the public elementary schools in East Baltimore, T-shirts to support an activist’s suit against the city for failing to reduce the yearly homicide rate below 175, an anti-gun violence program called “Steppin’ Up” and the design and logo for a bus that travels throughout Baltimore teaching kids how to avoid injuries.

“This is a completely unique class,” says Canniffe. “You have the beleaguered East Baltimore community. You have Hopkins, the 600-pound gorilla. And then you have a design department that’s willing to engage in all of these really difficult social problems.”

Canniffe, who is also the founder of Piece Studio, a socially based collaborative design studio in Baltimore that has created materials for Martha’s Place, a women’s drug rehab center, among others, has taken his message— and MICA design students— to Korea and Japan, where the design community is tackling the thorny challenge of how to retain an authentic sense of Korean-ness or Japanese-ness in an era of globalization.

This summer he’ll take a group of MICA’s female design students to Dubai to do similar work at a women’s university there. “It will be Hamp-den-meets-Dubai,” says Canniffe. “Our art students with their piercings and pink hair will be meeting with sophisticated Arab women wearing burqas, talking about how design can make a difference.” —Laura Wexler

BALTIMORE STYLE MAGAZINE LINK
LINKS: http://www.baltimorestyle.com/index.php/style/features_article/fe_design_on_the_verge_mj08/ /