Seattle Design Festival

Equity is a big and complex idea; its relationship to design perhaps only complicating how one defines the word or identifies with the concept. This installation however, intends to be small and straightforward, picking one path within this labyrinthine idea. That path is about connection and ways in which human beings can relate to each other and to design as a means to enhance our community.  

For this installation, two pieces of information are being solicited: your name and something you identify as beautiful. Names are important. Everyone has one. Your name represents a way to identify you independent of any other information other than that you are a human being. A name is democratic in that way while at the same time being uniquely individual. Although quotidian and seemingly inconsequential, acknowledging someone by their name is in fact a very humanizing gesture.

Our perception of what is beautiful is similarly equalizing and idiosyncratic. Beautiful can describe an infinitely diverse group of things. However, a beautiful object, whatever it may be, has the capacity to elicit a response in its viewer; regardless of viewer’s background, gender, race, education, means, or even understanding of the object at hand. A beautiful object has the capacity to be enhancing in ways that can be both personal and shared.

Providing those two pieces of information creates an opportunity for connection and embodies the broader idea of the installation. In finding points of connection with others, we find same-ness in difference. We learn. We are enhanced. Our contributions to our communities become better: more intelligent, more empathetic, more beautiful. In design, there is opportunity to employ this enhanced self.

After all connections are made, all taped lines struck from one dot to another, the panel will be painted and all dots and tape removed, leaving an artifact of connections made, an art object. Created in an unforeseeable way, with the minimal constituent parts of color and line, the object suggests that perhaps equity can be less big, less complex. Perhaps it can be simple: your name, something beautiful, a connection.