INTERVIEWER: What does public interest technology mean to you, and what are the core principles in your mind?
JEFFERY KASPER: I really believe that, as a society, our interest in technology is always in conversation with controversies around the ethics of the use of technology. We see that within the history of science and tech, but we also see it within the history of art. For example, we can look at the relationship between photography and truth (photography being a technology that now maybe doesn't feel like a technology, because it's now so embedded in our everyday life)—there have long been conversations around questions like, “When we create a photograph, is it reality, or is it something else constructed?” So as we move into the current day, there remains a lot of questioning in the field of art and design around the ethics of using specific tools.
In my own research and my own practice, I'm very interested in questioning the social contexts of art and design. I work as an artist and designer in collaboration with the public, creating public art works or exhibitions that speak to community issues, and I do a lot of work around accessibility, cultural accessibility, disability, mental health. I am trained as a graphic designer, and my artistic practice uses digital tools to create different kinds of projects. The tools that I use are often thought of as neutral, but because my work is people-focused, I'm always considering, “How does this impact the public? How do the tools that I use, the media that I'm most fluent in, support or not support bringing people together in a positive way? What is the public interest element of it?”
I also think that if we look at design history, especially throughout the 20th century, ideas around “This is going to save us!” keep coming up. Designers of all disciplines—graphic, communication, architecture—have been consistently wrestling with those societal responses as the technology that shapes their profession shifts and people, both within the field and outside, get really excited about the potentials of new technologies. It's the same kind of discourse that we have today with artificial intelligence. So I'm definitely very critical of our over-excitement about specific tools, and I think we need to look at our field from a social context.
So that's how I come to public interest technology. And you know, I see public interest technology intersecting with a lot of other bigger domains of thinking like public interest design or social design which are maybe more specific to my field, but are related to PIT. Ultimately, I think we need to understand that art and design is not necessarily divorced from life, and that communities have needs that aren't necessarily being addressed by technology.
INTERVIEWER: Can you speak more to how these ideas figured into your training in design and graphic design specifically?
JEFFERY KASPER: At the beginning of my career, we would focus on the technical aspect of this work, like “This is how you use this tool,” without necessarily thinking about the role of the designer in society. Which is of course a really important element! It's something you should be thinking about as a student of design, regardless of whether or not you want to go into industry or do more humanitarian work. We have to think about our impact regardless, right? But when I was in school it was really not something that was brought up. The field was presented as something that was incredibly neutral.
Then I started to learn about—and experience for myself—how artists and designers were and have historically been engaged with building social movements—communicating important information, being more participatory rather than being the expert, being more of the facilitator—and I began to understand what my position was. I began to think, “Oh, wow! There's a whole world that doesn't have to do with the profession as kind of a neutral thing.” I started to seek out where that existed and then found folks who talk a lot about this.
Graphic design especially has gone through and continues to go through major shifts over the course of its history. It's been around for a really long time, but especially as we look historically from the 1980s until now we see we move from a field that was really print oriented and about producing images through processes of printmaking and mass production of images tangibly—huge printers, cutting and pasting physically—to throughout the 1990s bringing desktop publishing and personal computers, which shifted the practice. Now, we're moving into a potentially even more interactive and digital space. We see this with the advent of careers in UX [user experience] and UI [user interface]. The field is consistently evolving, usually in tandem with new developments in technology. So as a designer who really works with technology as a tool, I think it’s important to remember that the tool is not stable—it's not a stable category. The tools that we learn in class this week, probably in four years, they'll be completely new things, right? So I try to take the long view of the practice after kind of being frankly unsatisfied with the field as something that was thought of as neutral or apolitical.
INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us about the PIT project you're working on?
JEFFERY KASPER: Yeah, so as I’ve shared, I'm really interested in how designers can collaborate with non-artists, non-designers. And that's something I've done for a long time, kind of creating collaborations between what I call non-arts experts and arts experts. I've done that in myriad ways, but because a lot of my current work has to do with questions of health—how we create specifically mental health, how design can be a tool for that—I got the opportunity to form a partnership with a doctor at Baystate Medical Center, who was really interested in how might we use motion images, motion media to communicate stories of health throughout early childhood and educate parents, but also as a way for parents to also share the knowledge they have about the things they encounter raising children from 0 to 6. Baystate Medical Center serves Springfield, greater Springfield, and also areas like Holyoke. We encounter lots of vulnerable and under-resourced populations, which don't always get access to medical services in a direct way, which means they don't often have a say over how they access the expertise of medical professionals. So we wanted to put together this project that can be informed by experiences that are coming from the community to create graphic motion resources that can educate other members of the community about the stages of life, mainly in early childhood, and things that come up in mental and physical health development. So we devised this idea to create what I call little motion comics, which are inspired by stories that we hear in support group meetings with parents in the area. In addition to helping facilitate the long-term project, my role in this project is to help facilitate community meetings, reviews with doctors and psychologists, and work with UMass students to develop the actual graphics and art.
The project with PIT is really at a pilot stage. We've actually been at it for almost two years, but it's a long process of developing a script that's inspired by stories from real people, but also developmentally accurate and grounded in science, but that also kind of looks nice and is funny and like the kind of thing you would want to watch! So we're hoping that in the next couple of months we’ll be able to have our first pilot video that includes both this motion comic element and a live dialogue between doctors. Our goal is that this video series would be something that doctors would actually be able to prescribe to patients in between visits, or something that parents or guardians could watch in the waiting room, and that these videos could speak to questions that might go unasked, like “Why is my baby really cranky when that’s not the case for other families?” or “Why is it that I noticed that when I'm not emotionally regulated that my family also gets emotionally dysregulated?” These are questions that come up in support groups, and so these videos will be able to provide more access to medical knowledge.
The visuals are all digital media generated, and we're using digital technology to do everything from create the character design to start to actually animate out these scenarios. So we started to create some different images of family characters and we're creating a kind of language. What I love about this project is now “generations” of students are working on it: the original character designs were created by previous student cohorts, and the new cohorts take on the characters and redraw them and redesign the scenarios. And you’ll be able to see that there's a humor to it. We want the series to have both these kind of cartoon elements and the live elements, because, even though this is geared towards parents, we want to acknowledge the fact that likely their children will be around as they’re watching these. And so we don’t want these to be super serious, though the live dialogue element of the videos will get a little more serious. And all of this structure is something that we learned by actually engaging with the public, asking for feedback on the way that certain design looks, or bringing drafts to the community, and asking, “Do you like this?” A lot of times we hear, “No, I don't like this,” or “This is something that might be more helpful,” or “This works but this doesn't.” So we're creating the work through digital media, but it really gets produced in collaboration with the community.
INTERVIEWER: How did you get connected to this doctor at Baystate? How do these collaborations start?
JEFFERY KASPER: In this case, the doctor actually reached out and was interested in doing some kind of community engaged project like this, which is kind of the ideal scenario. And I mean, this kind of project could just be created by the hospital’s marketing team, right? Like technically it wouldn't have to have been created by us. But the doctor sees value in folks who are living in western Massachusetts and studying art actually participating in a community engagement process to develop these videos. I think that we were happy to find each other, because, as I mentioned, that is the way that I work in my own career: going through a design process or creative process with stakeholders that have never been engaged in something like that. So we're a good match.
As we were scoping this project in some initial conversations, we started making connections to other stakeholders, like local nonprofits in Springfield and Holyoke that provide parenting classes and organizations that provide school-based programs for folks who need special attention during early childhood. And what we're learning is that this project might be useful to the hospital, but it also might be useful to other organizations who advocate for early childhood development and health education, and who provide resources for parents. These organizations also see that through our community engagement process they are able to provide a new kind of service to their community, which they would normally not be able to do. For instance, in our meetings, parents get to directly talk with a doctor in a format that never usually happens when you have your 15 minute appointment, and you get your prescriptions, and you leave—in that scenario, you can't kind of be real with your doctor.
And the product really benefits from all these different kinds of expertise coming together. For example, we’ve gotten feedback like, “We know you're working with cartoons, but in early childhood a baby would never smile, because developmentally, that's not something that happens, so you might want to think about having facial features be accurate to the age.” Those are things that, as artists, we're not thinking about as I’m working on this with my students.
In projects like this, where we’re developing art with technology, in some ways we could move fast, and we could start animating these characters really quickly. That part is fast, but the process of working with community is slow. That's a dynamic that is important to consider in relation to public interest technology: if we really want to foreground the public interest part, and build relationships with the public, and build projects that are coming from the public, that requires a different kind of time.
INTERVIEWER: What are the challenges to this kind of interdisciplinary work?
JEFFERY KASPER: One of the challenges is that in each field we occupy different sets of constraints, and we have different infrastructures and processes that support our work. So when we come together we have to figure out a new way. Otherwise we're just kind of occupying the same space and not speaking the same language. That translation work is something that takes a lot of time in interdisciplinary projects, and universities don't typically support that kind of thing because we enter into a university and whether we're students or whether we're faculty we go into silos, right? We're all in our different departments and our buildings are not connected. Academic institutions don’t always make it easy to figure out how to understand what the common ground is on a project. We tend to stick to what we know.
Working as a designer, this comes up in my field all the time, because design is always in a gray area; it relates to every discipline. So I feel that designers are well suited to doing interdisciplinary work, especially if they are trained in a way that doesn't only privilege one medium or one technology, or one approach. Because at the very least we’re working with writers, illustrators, printers, and web developers. And in a more expanded sense we might have to work with lawmakers or scientists, communicating information that they are producing. So as designers, we're always translating, and so maybe it's a little easier for us. And eventually interdisciplinarity just becomes a kind of orientation. You kind of know the pitfalls that come up a little bit more readily. The connectors are important, and I often see designers in those kinds of roles.
I also think it really helps to have collaborators who don't dwell on the sort of gray areas of where our disciplines don't necessarily intersect, but that we try to move forward on projects around our shared goal. I think that's really helpful. It’s not easy work, but I think our tools as designers sort of equip us for this kind of work in a different way. We've got a different relationship to interdisciplinarity than other fields.
INTERVIEWER: If a student is interested in doing this kind of work, what would you recommend?
JEFFERY KASPER: I would say, continue to practice your skills and follow what interests you in regards to the technology and tools that you use, but be really critical of them and their impact. I think that's the number one thing: keep in mind that we can do great things, and we also can do not so great things, and that we have a big responsibility as artists and designers who are shaping messages, using technology to shape messages, or even developing technologies. We have a big responsibility.
I would also say to find what you're interested in, what drives you, maybe that has nothing to do with technology or your particular discipline. Are you interested in helping out your neighbors? Are you concerned with the environment? Are you wanting to get involved in labor organizing in your place of work? Think about how to bring your skill sets to different domains, because we need public interest folks in all domains.