The Design Center of the
Philippines celebrated recently World Industrial Design Day 2018 with the
one-day event Designing Wellness at Robins Design Center on Meralco Avenue,
Pasig City.
The annual World Industrial
Design Day (WIDD) is an initiative of the World Design Organization, of which
the Design Center. It spotlights a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal
(SDG) and underscores the role of design in achieving the objective. For 2018,
with the focus on UN SDG Number 3, holistic health and well-being were
highlighted.
In partnership with Robins
Design Center, Designing Wellness featured talks, workshops and exhibitions at
the Schema, Perchand La Europa showrooms.
Leo Lallana of On-Off Group
facilitated a Design Thinking workshop that taught participants to “fail
forward” and to come up with solutions tailor-fit for pain-points of
businesses.
Participants were presented
different challenges during the workshop. One challenge asked them to come up
with designs that took into account the insights of their chosen partners. Activities emphasized empathy and the active
seeking of innovative solutions to problems at hand.
Reimon Gutierrez talked about
his philosophy of art as a tool for self-discovery in his Life by Design
workshop. He encouraged participants to “visualize wellness”, helping them with
the process by instructing them to describe various objects given to them.
The second part of the event,
Design Talks, featured talks by homegrown design champions.
Kicking off the series of
talks, Melanie Go explained that building biology “addresses the ecological
nature of the building – a step forward in harmony and balance with nature” and
made the home “our third skin.”
“These homes are meant to protect what’s going
on inside and what’s going on outside. We should think about the home as a
living organism,” Go said.
A co-founder of Holy Carabao
Farms, Go said the well-being of the soil, the animals and the people involved
were top priorities in the practice of holistic farming.
Waves for Water Philippines
director for operations Jenica Dizon emphasized the importance of immersing
one’s self in the source of the problem he/she wanted to solve. She encouraged
her audience to help effect change while doing what they were passionate about.
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On-Off Group strategist Leo
Lallana challenges participants to come up with creative solutions as they are
instructed to apply Design Thinking in different activites.
(Photo by JC Lucas)
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Melanie Go discusses the
modern built environment and the holistic farming practices of Holy Carabao
Farms. (Photo by Paolo Quiocho)
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Reimon Gutierrez imparts his
art philosophy to participants of the Life By Design workshop. (Photo by Paolo
Quiocho)
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“It’s really hard to advocate
for health, for wellness, when people don’t have basic needs,” Dizon noted as
she talked about how her passion for aquatic activities evolved into her
advocacy to provide clean water for everyone after she saw the plight of
indigent communities. She showed the audience the water filter that Waves for
Water provided communities to make water clean.
Arooga Health founder
Dominique de Leon and Innovable, Inc. chief design officer Christina Guanzon
stressed the need for accessibility of design, particularly in relation to
their respective advocacies, mental health and a safer world for everyone,
able-bodied or not.
“We don’t have convenient
access to mental healthcare,” De Leon lamented as he discussed the impetus for
Arooga Health, an online application that champions improved mental health
policies in the workplace. “Hopefully, together, we could design a future that
we’re all excited to see,” he said.
“In designing products, you
have to design for any possibility,” Guanzon said. She said, as a
hearing-impaired person herself, the difficulties she faced in a world that was
mainly accessible to differently abled individuals served as the inspiration
for Early Action Response System (EARS), a device that would enable deaf
wearers to detect threats in their environment.
“To all the designers here,
we encourage you to make design inclusive even on the basic level,” Chief
Fireball and co-founder of Kick Fire Kitchen Niña Terol said during the
fireside chat she moderated.
“We are proud to be at the
forefront of sparking the much-needed conversation in ensuring that the
physical, mental, social and psychological dimensions of an individual and the
community are top priorities in designing wellness,” Design Center of the Philippines
Executive Director Rhea Matute said.
The Design Center also
partnered with the Saint Brother Jaime Hilario Institute and the School of Deaf
Education and Applied Studies of the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde in
therecent PWD Entre-ployment Expo 2018.
With a grant from the Embassy
of the United States in Manila, the expo promoted equality in employment
opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs).
Design Center set up an institutional booth at
the Henry Sy Hall in De La Salle University that featured its key services of
the agency. It also facilitated a workshop, Do the Dough, that taught the 27
participants techniques they could apply to homemade air-dried dough to create
various products that they could sell for a profit.
“The Design Center believes
in accessibility as embodied by our accessible design services,” Matute
explained. “We hope to continue playing an active role in the advancement of
employability of Filipinos, regardless of their conditions.”
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