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Posted: September 23
(Rome) Switzerland was great, but the pile of emails waiting to be answered on my return home was a bit daunting. Fortunately, I know how to deal with them—just ignore them and do something I enjoy. This week that new project was creating a way to collect and show the official suggestions coming in for the next General Congregation to consider when it begins a little more than a year from now. This will only be the 35th such major meeting in the more than 450 years the Society of Jesus has existed, so a general congregation is a big deal. Fortunately, we now have an intranet in place to make it much easier for the people who have to deal with hundreds of suggestions to sort and view them.
One newspaper article caught my attention: a story about a graphic designer doing a new project in Guatemala. My own professional training is in graphic design, which I studied long ago in the age before computers; we worked with X-Acto knives and rubber cement. The technology is different now, but the mental skills that Pratt Institute stressed are still important. Besides, I lived right next to Guatemala for three years during regency when I taught literature and writing at St. John's College in Belize. And I visited Jesuits there on several occasions, especially after the genocide that took place in the early 1980s when the army turned its weapons on its own people and killed somewhere over 200,000 Mayan people. That war is long over, but the psychic wounds still ache.
"A visual campaign for change in Guatemala" said the subhead in the newspaper article which described the work of Bruce Mau, a Canadian designer who is working with the Guatemalan education minister on a nonprofit foundation called Project of Life. Their idea is to use the techniques that design usually focuses on selling luxury goods to try to deal with the social problems that still stymie progress in Guatemala. Originally, Mau was just asked to do a logo, brochure, posters and a web site—the normal kind of identity items that a publicity campaign needs. As the work progressed, Mau expanded his scope to helping his colleagues broaden their vision. Their goal was to help Guatemalans imagine a better future after nearly 40 years of civil war and human rights abuses. They wanted people to imagine a future not haunted by past traumas.
This socially ambitious type of design even has its own name, "geodesign." It involves applying the analytical and creative thinking used in the design process to organizational, behavioral and cultural problems. One of the first activities in Guatemala was a 12-day forum in the capital city. Organizers hoped 1,000 would join as volunteers; 11,000 signed up in two days.
It remains to be seen what the long-term impact of this project will be. Just the idea excites me. I know how much power good visual materials have. Social activists usually don't consider them as part of the methods of working for change. Now I know the name for this new approach, and it is something that Jesuits and colleagues could adopt. Geodesign. Cool.
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