Author Archives: laurenev

The why of guns

Over the past few weeks or months really, I have been more engaged with the issue of guns, gun safety, gun violence, deaths, shootings and rights to bear arms than I have ever been before. I have found this to be both fascinating, depressing and frustrating. I have tried to listen and make sense of the various perspectives, to overcome my innate dismissal of any pro-gun for personal protection, and as a vegetarian for hunting either – and it isn’t easy.

I follow the twitter stream ‘gun deaths’ and am infuriated at the idiocy of the number of deaths; of mindless shootings; of police shootings; and of children being shot, shooting others or themselves.

I listened to the first episode on guns from this American Life podcast yesterday and felt myself despairing. The teachers and principal at the School are amazing. Their love and belief in their students is phenomenal, the tragedy of the situation is incomprehensible. As I listened I found myself thinking that well, if this WAS a war zone – if it was Baghdad, Bosnia or the streets of a war torn South American mythical city, I might feel a little bit better about it, but even that is reprehensible. This account of kids feeling so threatened on their walk to and from school, of accepting being shot as being a norm, and this is all because of where you live with your parents and not because you choose to join a gang is out of control. This is a future generation that has a matter of fact attitude to violence, to threats of being shot, of death or injury. They have plans for how to fall to minimize injury – this is the stuff of battle. And not the battle of the sports field, but battle that we might think has some meaning.

It leaves me wondering – is this a war zone? Are the streets really to be conceived as that? And not by all, but only by our youth – the future? What or where is the sanity in that? What does it mean for the future? To my mind it doesn’t bode well… hopefully I am wrong. But, when you couple it with all the other inequalities of contemporary life in one of the leading, modern, richest and most civilized nations – is that really what this is?

Today whilst listening to the podcast ‘How to think about guns’ on Freakonomics – many things in the podcast annoyed me, but others didn’t. And, what struck me most was that this was the first time that I have read any commentary on the ‘why’ of guns. What is the social phenomenon that makes people so afraid, so embittered, so battle hungry that they need to be in this state of protection or attack?

Some things that came to mind as a result of their conversation were:

  • if guns were invented now, then we most likely wouldn’t make them available to everyone
  • the argument that if we take away guns then knives will become the norm is not really sound as knives are still less cumbersome
  • most gun deaths are suicide
  • guns in the USA are historically part of the culture and that is being held on to – but relatively this was true elsewhere as well – so why did they stay on here and grow as they have? the 2nd amendment or an arms industry that could make more money?
  • there is a marked difference linguistically between naming something as being a robbery, burglary and a home invasion – and with that, how does that affect my perspective of needing to protect my home and family?
  • when and how did Pittsburgh in particular transform from being a place of community, of generosity, of unlocked doors to becoming a place of fear and protection?

Interview questions

Each pair should have a clearly stated strategy for the questions that they are going to ask when they meet with their respective interviewees.

From our schema of different stakeholders and their contribution to the issue of child safety and guns – what is it that we need to know, what can we learn from them, what is the best way to structure the interview/conversation, how will you record the interview/conversation – write notes, collect images or diagrams, record it.

Remember we are doing these because we want to understand the issue from different perspectives as is relevant to the breadth of stakeholders involved in this problem.

 

Monday Feb 11

What a great week of refinement and clarification we had in the studio last week. We now have a clearer idea of what the issues are, of what we know and what we don’t.

What has become increasingly apparent is that although there is a lot of information available and still even more that isn’t, that even with all this, making sense of it, connecting to it, and realising what it means for individuals in everyday life, or for organasitations seeking to introduce a child protection law – is hard. Over the next few weeks we are going to be working on ways to make the data/information more meaningful.

To do this, students in the studio are going to go and speak to different people in the community who represent the many different people involved in the gun ecology of Pittsburgh. We are also going to explore ways to make the ‘data’ have more meaning or be more accessible to different members of the community. And finally, we are going to play with some design futuring to help us imagine future scenarios.

Where is all this leading us you may ask?

Through this process we are working toward the design and development of Strategic Briefing Publication that will help others who might want to design into this area, to identify and think about the many aspects that inform/influence this social phenomenon.

Monday February 4th

In this class the three groups who formed last Wednesday to start to analyse the studio date around the three questions of: what we know so far, what we don’t know and what we need to know more about.

There will most likely be overlaps and that is ok. Students should just try to convey there observations and questions as clearly as possible.

studio leader – why am I here?

LV_Office_BWMy name is Laurene Vaughan and I am the 2012 – 2103 Nierenberg Chair, Visiting Professor in Design at Carnegie Mellon University. I am the studio leader, working with Anna (our TA) and the students on this exploration into design, place and social innovation. The theme of guns and kids came about long before the Newtown shooting, but since then it has grown to become one of the hot topics for social change. I normally live in Melbourne Australia, where I am an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. I am also part of the Design Research Institute there, and of the Design Futures Lab with colleagues in the Communication Design Programme at RMIT.

In designing this course I am working with a great range of students and colleagues from in the States and internationally. My approach to this class is one of co-design – in conjunction with the students we are designing our way into the problem space and out again. what that will be and what will result we have yet to know.