This studio course is one of the Senior Labs in the Spring semester 2013 in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The context for the studio was first proposed in October 2012; at that stage guns were an issue in the USA, but nothing like the high profile social phenomenon — in everyone’s context — that they became post the Newtown Shootings, Dec 16, 2012. The students that elected to take this course, did so initially out of an interest in design for social innovation, social change and sustainability. The topic of guns was secondary at that time. That changed with the shooting. Guns at that point weren’t just a part of American life, they were a design issue to be explored. As such in this course we are exploring two phenomena :

1. guns and their social meaning and impact;
2. design’s social and material capacity to enable place-based transformation — scaling from the local to national.