Voices of Hope: Designing Social Change

Donald Tarallo, CMW's graphic design consultant since 2003, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship by Bridgewater State University to spend the 12-13 academic year engaged in a project that Don has created to benefit the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative. Below are excerpts from the text of Don's successful proposal.

I will devote my time to employ graphic design toward creating positive social change for youth living in the urban neighborhoods of Providence, RI. The change my project will embody addresses a paradigm shift taking place in the graphic design community as the focus moves from design as a practice that fuels a market to the awareness that graphic design is a social practice and that it can be vehicle for powerful and sustainable social change. This project embraces a culture of heightened social awareness and practical application of visual means to address real world problems.

I will work within a regionally established network of after-school arts programs organized under a body called the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative (PYAC). This network of organizations is regarded as one of the top programs in the United States for their efforts in offering quality after-school arts education to urban youth.

My project will entail working with a team of youth from this network to investigate how graphic design can act as a tool of intervention directing youth away from negative life choices toward positive ones. I will investigate how graphic design can intervene at points in life where youth are confronted with important choices through mapping various social systems in the Providence community (education, social/peer groups, cultural, recreational, etc.) and identifying opportunities for intervention and persuasion. The results will yield a method and approach to graphic design as a civically engaged practice encapsulated in a process book or video and a visual outreach campaign that accomplishes the above mentioned interventions.

Congratulations Don, and we're looking forward to seeing how this project will unfold!