Design Center leads conversations on holistic health, equal opportunity
The Design Center of the
Philippines celebrated recently World Industrial Design Day 2018 with the
one-day event Designing Wellness at Robins Design Center on
Meralco Avenue, Pasig City.
The annual
World Industrial Design Day (WIDD) is an initiative of the World Design
Organization, of which the Design Center. It spotlights a United Nations
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) and underscores the role of design in
achieving the objective. For 2018, with the focus on UN SDG Number 3, holistic
health and well-being were highlighted.
In partnership
with Robins Design Center, Designing Wellness featured talks, workshops and
exhibitions at the Schema, Perchand La Europa showrooms.
Leo Lallana of
On-Off Group facilitated a Design Thinking workshop that taught participants to
“fail forward” and to come up with solutions tailor-fit for pain-points of
businesses.
Participants
were presented different challenges during the workshop. One challenge asked
them to come up with designs that took into account the insights of their
chosen partners. Activities emphasized empathy and the active
seeking of innovative solutions to problems at hand.
Reimon Gutierrez talked about his philosophy of art as a tool
for self-discovery in his Life by Design workshop. He encouraged participants
to “visualize wellness”, helping them with the process by instructing them to
describe various objects given to them. The second part of the event,
Design Talks, featured talks by homegrown design champions.
Kicking off the
series of talks, Melanie Go explained that building biology “addresses the
ecological nature of the building – a step forward in harmony and balance with
nature” and made the home “our third skin.”
“These homes
are meant to protect what’s going on inside and what’s going on outside. We
should think about the home as a living organism,” Go said.
A co-founder of Holy Carabao Farms, Go said the well-being of the soil, the animals
and the people involved were top priorities in the practice of holistic
farming.
Waves for Water Philippines director for operations Jenica Dizon emphasized the importance
of immersing one’s self in the source of the problem he/she wanted to solve.
She encouraged her audience to help effect change while doing what they were
passionate about.
“It’s really
hard to advocate for health, for wellness, when people don’t have basic needs,”
Dizon noted as she talked about how her passion for aquatic activities evolved
into her advocacy to provide clean water for everyone after she saw the plight
of indigent communities. She showed the audience the water filter that Waves for Water provided
communities to make water clean.
Arooga Health
founder Dominique de Leon and Innovable, Inc. chief design officer Christina Guanzon stressed the need for accessibility of
design, particularly in relation to their respective advocacies, mental health
and a safer world for everyone, able-bodied or not.
“We don’t have
convenient access to mental healthcare,” De Leon lamented as he discussed the
impetus for Arooga Health, an online application that champions improved mental
health policies in the workplace. “Hopefully, together, we could design a
future that we’re all excited to see,” he said.
“In designing
products, you have to design for any possibility,” Guanzon said. She said, as a
hearing-impaired person herself, the difficulties she faced in a world that was
mainly accessible to differently abled individuals served as the inspiration
for Early Action Response System (EARS), a device that would enable deaf
wearers to detect threats in their environment.
“To all the
designers here, we encourage you to make design inclusive even on the basic
level,” Chief Fireball and co-founder of Kick Fire Kitchen Niña Terol said
during the fireside chat she moderated.
“We are proud
to be at the forefront of sparking the much-needed conversation in ensuring
that the physical, mental, social and psychological dimensions of an individual
and the community are top priorities in designing wellness,” Design Center of
the Philippines Executive Director Rhea Matute said.
The Design
Center also partnered with the Saint Brother Jaime Hilario Institute and the
School of Deaf Education and Applied Studies of the De La Salle-College of St.
Benilde in therecent PWD Entre-ployment Expo 2018.
With a grant
from the Embassy of the United States in Manila, the expo promoted equality in
employment opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs)
Design Center
set up an institutional booth at the Henry
Sy Hall in De La Salle University that featured its key services of the
agency. It also facilitated a workshop, Do the Dough, that taught the 27
participants techniques they could apply to homemade air-dried dough to create
various products that they could sell for a profit.
“The Design
Center believes in accessibility as embodied by our accessible design
services,” Matute explained. “We hope to continue playing an active role in the
advancement of employability of Filipinos, regardless of their conditions.”
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