Moving Design: Call to Action

Moving Design asked what might happen if graphic designers, artists, and engineers responded to the issues effecting the Great Lakes basin. How might they see the issues? How would they take their insights public?

The model of a Moving Design initiative is simple. Invite passionate design citizens to gather twice a week for six weeks. Inform them with presentations by experts, activists, and conversation. Direct their design expressions in response to what they encounter. Make everything public with the goal of reshaping public opinion of the subject at hand.

This call to action was the first of this scale. Since then the model has been put in practice many times. It is now in the second of a three-year initiative called Deep Breath in Beijing, where designers respond to the issue of (the lack of) Fresh Air.

Early work focused on dramatic infographic interpretations of what 2 billion gallons per day of fresh water that Chicago removes from and never returns to Lake Michigan might look like. Seven Soldier Fields of water per day!

Bud Rodecker created a video following the 2 billions of Great Lakes water down the Chicago River, then the Mississippi River, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico with Google satellite.

Matthew Hoffman designed a desk ornament for then Mayor Daley.

All surfaces were canvases for conversation. Here Matt Wizinski led nighttime projections on Wacker Drive complete with a portable generator (and without a permit to do so).

Todd Childers, a design professor from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, gave the lake a calling card.

We are 16 designers, architects, engineers and artists working to engage, inform, and activate an awareness of Chicago's (ab)use of our irreplaceable resource: Lake Michigan. Don't just watch it wash away.

Scott Reinhard and his colleagues plastered poster graphics everywhere they could.

By using water to discuss the issues of water, Nick Adam and Scott Reinhard made ephemeral impressions throughout Chicago.

Interventions all over the city directed attention to a temporary website and offered an invitation to a citizen's parade from the Water Tower to the Oak Street beach. Police escorts and proper permitting were secured.

Moving Design facilitator, Rick Valicenti walked the parade as the 2-Billion Gallon Man in a costume designed by Matthew Hoffman.

Baptized by the spirit of design activism.

Client: Moving Design

Service: Research