Co-Designing Peace
Co-Designing Peace is a movement to leverage the mindsets and methods of Design to achieve effective actions toward peace.
We are asking, “What if we used our creative abilities to collaboratively improve the world around us, aiming for the ideal of peace? ”
TEDx UT Austin
Redefining Peace
Peace should not be defined as the antithesis of war. We do not define love as the absence of hate. If we seek to expand our understanding of peace and use this ideal goal as our new north star, then how might we change the way we go about our daily lives?
Volume 3 of the Newspaper is hot off the presses! Download a digital copy for yourself.
Five Expressions of Peace
Co-Designing Peace is an aspirational guide toward how to best use our creative skills. We have personal definitions and Design Principles, and we have categorized our creative actions into Five Expressions for Peace: Peace with Yourself, Peace with your Community, Peace with all Living Beings, Peace with Planet Earth, and Peace with the Unknown.
Each of these expressions of peace provides a structure for how to consider the interconnectedness of peace as a system. One can start with any expression for peace and strive to engage all the expressions in time. Yet this is not a task to be completed. It’s more like a wave that has cycles of high and low tides that are ever cycling and evolving.
DOWNLOAD THE CO-DESIGN PEACE ZINE VOL. 2
DOWNLOAD THE CO-DESIGN PEACE ZINE VOL. 2
This publication is Volume 2 of the Co-Designing Peace Zine. We’ve structured the document around our Five Expressions for Peace. In each section you will find articles about peace movements, creative art, and methods that you can use to reflect and build your own peace practice. Our hope is that you will read, write, make, and be inspired to take action. Once you are done with the zine, consider passing it on to someone you think would benefit from being part of this growing peace movement. Our hope is that you will be inspired, hang the zine on the wall, or even write your own article and create your own methods. We look forward to seeing what you do.
Finally, we are not experts on this topic. We are instigators. We are designers and creative people looking to align our skills and our values with the human desire for peace. Anyone can practice these mindsets and methods, and it isn’t out of anyone’s ability to make or contribute to peace in our world.
FAQs
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I was a designer in residence with the Buckminster Fuller Inistitute and the Design Science Studio in 2020-2021. I created the Co-Designing Peace project and zine as my work from this residency.
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Volume 2 was a part of class called ITD 150: Co-Designing Peace. This was an opportunity to continue the co-creation process with a group of 16 students at The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Integrated Design. This five-week course met on Thursday evenings, and for three hours every class we worked as a collaborative group to imagine, develop, and share our designs. Through the practice of research, writing, photography, drawing, and more, we were able to expand upon our collective understanding of peace. On the final pages of this document, you will find a list of all the students and their personal definitions of peace. The students come from a wide range of disciplines such as business, psychology, advertising, biology, liberal arts, and engineering. This multidisciplinary cohort brought a breadth of thinking that inspired us all to push our ideas to new heights.
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Send Gray an email and lets talk about how we can collaborate on the next iteration.