Design in Community is an entirely volunteer-driven space that strives to offer good company and make meaningful connections. The stories we tell matter.
The new year brings new opportunities and challenges. Once again, the Seattle Design Festival will undertake the task of inviting designers and the public to celebrate the city’s design culture and practices. It presents another opportunity to tell that story.
In that spirit, the Seattle Design Festival seeks volunteers to sustain and expand the storytelling initiative the festival launched last year. Design in Community is a volunteer-driven storytelling effort that explored the process of route-setting and co-production at the Fremont location of the Seattle Bouldering Project. It wandered through the simple joy of connecting to a place routinely captured through the Seattle Walk Report. It documented the ways design practices at Fruitsuper find inspiration in everyday objects that help build resilience and community.
As a volunteer for Design in Community, you can apply your interest to storytelling in a few ways:
– If you have a passion for photography, you will have opportunities to visually develop stories by photographing subjects.
– If you are a fan of StoryCorps and podcasting, Design in Community presents a unique platform to learn about audio recording and production. You will be able to help gather natural sound to lend stories additional depth or record interviews. You may even choose to learn more about audio and multimedia production.
– Similarly, if you are enthusiastic about using social media to engage the festival’s followers and to reach new audiences, Design in Community can use your help in creatively delivering these stories on social media. The festival hopes to leverage social media to source new opportunities to tell stories that influence the quality of diverse communities.
Design in Community also intends to respect your time, interest in learning and desire to bring stories about design to life. It will always be focused on production. Learning will be self-directed. Meetings will also be kept to a minimum. Instead, story development and production will rely upon one-on-one support.
Lastly, Design in Community benefits from your networks and the ways you practice community. It’s an invite to find and celebrate the better parts of people. And as much as Design in Community focuses on voices in design, it also depends on your voice as someone who appreciates storytelling the subjects that animate good design.