Background
Humanity, culture, and the planetary condition need our creative attention. The global climate is rapidly shifting, and our planet is asking for our cooperation. As we globalize, commoditize, and ‘revolutionize’ with technology, humanity is forgetting its pivotal connection with its mother and, consequently, its sense of community and collectivity. As a result, the indigenous worldview and our rich sense of creativity are slowly diminishing from the collective conscious. With solemn respect to our planet, we must advocate a collective mindshift from mindless consumption to active participation and cooperation that once emblazoned the earth-driven communities of our indigenous past. We must get back in touch with our ancestral roots. We must reassert the diverse, vital power of the community and the creative power it affords us!
What is Design Tribe?
Design Tribe is a non-profit organization of thinkers, designers, teachers, children, artists, researchers, and free spirits who are awakening to the need for creative systemic changes. Design Tribe reunites planetary cooperation, indigenous practices, sustainability, design, right-brain thinking, and the creative process so that we can adequately restore an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on Earth. Within the rubric of unity and in functioning outside the confines of our failing systems, the Tribe aims to facilitate prolific, divergent, and creative thinking and problem solving to repair existing systems and establish new ones. New systems must meet the needs of communities while remaining mindful to the fragility of our planetary ecosystems. A polymathic, collaborative, and imaginative approach to design is fundamental in fostering a shift in the way we view our relationship to the planet, our mother. As hearts and minds begin to open to the necessity of this relationship, the need to design more sustainably, practically, and creatively becomes more urgent. Our planet desperately needs our cooperation, and the creative process, design, and our imaginations are the only lifelines left to catalyze such change.
Link to Design Tribe Concept Pitch
An Emphasis on Creativity
Creative cognition seems to be dying. In a world now ruled by repetitions, copies, trends, and patterns, there seems to be little room for a concept that once flourished so vibrantly. Creativity, in its heyday, sent man to the moon, overthrew rigid architectural styles, and opened the world to a whole new way of thinking about art and design. Creativity has challenged archaic ideologies and has opened the minds of many to the social realities we are facing in our present moment of this ever-changing planet of brilliant minds. Despite all of the profound changes the concept has bestowed upon us, however, creativity seems to have become a collective mental afterthought, but why? It seems that never before in human history has the average person been as connected and in tune with the power and opulence of design, art, technology, and sustainability; yet, so many of us fail to realize the transformative power importance of the creative process. By restructuring the creative process, Design Tribe thereby aims to discursively unite the strengths of modernity with the earthly wisdom of our elders to develop creative solutions that will usher in a novel paradigm of creative opulence, humanitarianism, earthly love, imagination, and unbounded, sustainable artistic practice.
The Tribal Custom
Design Tribe unites the creative process with the collective power and community-driven approach of indigenous custom. Design Tribe aims to therefore revitalize the creative drive in communities through discussion, workshops, and collaborative projects. The Tribe will also function as a collaborative think-tank in which members partake in engaging, collaborative projects and discussions by sharing their own ideas, wisdom, and skills. In collaboration, members will design and conceptualize smart solutions for community issues and problems facing the world at large.
Utilizing the creative feedback from the mind power of collaboration, all members will aid in the visual and conceptual delivery of these solutions. Each Design Tribe chapter will thereby creatively address the needs of its own community and then share its creative systemic solutions with other communities around the world. Within a kinship framework, members will share, collaborate, and teach one another through creative practice. Tribal collaboration will emphasize the importance of divergent, unconventional thinking, roleplaying, imagination, and interactive storytelling. Design Tribe will encourage members to always think “outside the box” and far beyond to manifest the creative expression and diversity present within the community. Communities will also utilize the raw power of technology in a proper, sustainable manner to regenerate holistic, dynamic, and creative thinking, making, and doing. Design Tribe thereby aims to revitalize a sense of community in order to empower members to cultivate social change, creative learning, collaboration, and ultimately the prosperity of humanity and the planet.
Sustainable Solutions
When undergoing the creative process it is key to consider sustainability, social responsibility, cultural adaptation, ethnography, and systems thinking. Understanding the creative process empowers minds to dig deeper and think beyond the reaches of the imagination in order to facilitate idea and design development that has the power to purposely and appropriately propel innovation into the future. Smart and sustainable systems design is the key to a better future for all of humanity, and it begins with the creative process.
Sustainability will punctuate all Design Tribe workshops and collaborations, empowering members to consider all aspects of the creative process and how these processes ultimately effect others and culture on a larger scale if translated into solutions. Design Tribe therefore emphasizes the importance of considering longevity and impermanence within design and idea development. Understanding how the earth manufactures, tools, and recycles things is paramount to mastering smart and sustainable design. The transformative power of divergent and convergent thinking fosters the necessary foundation for sustainable learning in all workshops and design solutions produced within a Design Tribe community. Ultimately, these solutions aim to reveal that the best designs (and all thinking in general) do not use the past to solve the complex problems of the present, but instead use the present to reveal the possibilities of the future.
Areas of Address
Innumerable problems currently need humanity’s creative attention. Social marketing, publications, educational material, exhibitions, informational design, public services, television, and charitable causes are among the many realms that are in drastic need of creative and collaborative help. Design Tribe collaborations will creatively and sustainably address these among many other struggling systems on both a local and global level, yielding unique, unusual, yet appropriate solutions. Solutions will sustainably address brand identity, web design, consumption, creative education, artistic practice, outreach, community systems design, marketing, advertising, social media, and technology among others. Insights from diverse communities and collaborations with local organizations will aid each Design Tribe in conceiving and fabricating meaningful solutions to highly problematic and relevant issues.
Goals
- Restore vitality, dynamism, and diversity.
- Promote and encourage creative, divergent, and “out of the box” thinking.
- Restore the power of the creative process.
- Facilitate a return to a cooperative, collaborative worldview.
- Encourage sustainable living.
- Help communities regain control over economic hardships.
- Redefine the outmoded landscape of contemporary education.
- Restore the eminence and impact of the imagination.
- Restore the connectedness and natural reliance with mother earth.
- Help communities regain control over economic hardships.
- Encourage local exchange.
- Strengthen community fabrics by encouraging networking and interaction.
- Increase self-reliance and skillful alliances.