Karen Lorena |
Social issues and the effects of art and design
Our community demands arts as necessity, not as nicety. We are now in a creative crisis that is mandatory to address. Whenever there's a budget to cut arts and culture are the first things that get cut and the lasts investments made. It is a shame that is happening this way since there is no discipline that nurtures the cognitive ability to imagine and unleashes creativity and innovation more than art and design. This is partially due to the fact that these approaches break barriers between cultures and engage social and shared values. They connect us to one another, which is what we need.
According to Eric Friedenwald-Fishman's article what we need to lever this change is-among other things-to "focus on strategies that foster real collaboration".
Therefore it is interesting enought that Yu-kai Chou's TED Talk talks It about how Social Influence is one of the eight Core Drives of the Octalysis framework they created to motivate us towards certain activities.
Learning about motivation and engagement from games is how Ocalysis pictures Human Focused Design, which they then began calling "Gamification" since the gaming industry, according to them, was the first one to master Human-Focused Design.
Poverty alleviation, educational equity, environmental health, are just a few of the social issues that can be positively addressed by art, design and gaming. We are social entities and it is compulsive for us to find support, motivation and leverage from our surroundings. On the activity done in class we learn the impact we have as a community and as individuals and how despite of everyones engagement on the activity, the result affects us everyone equally.