Counter Change Toolkit
| Design Fiction + Speculative Design |

This speculative toolkit puts power into the hands of community members who are encountering social change. It serves as a two-fold critique both from the content as well as it’s look and feel.

The Counter Change Toolkit’s content is inspired by true events captured in Project H Design’s documentary, If You Build it, that follows a designer-activist duo’s journey with the sole prerogative of evangelizing design thinking to the poorest rural county in North Carolina. While the content presented in the toolkit aesthetically mirrors IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit system design, HCD jargon, and other visual elements.

Highly satirical, the Counter Change Toolkit reveals the potential responses or notions within a community that is experiencing a proposal for change.

  • CATEGORIES

    + Speculative Design
    + Publication Design
    + Design Fiction
    + Design Research
    + Human Centered Design

  • METHODS

    + Satire
    + Critical Design
    + Design Thinking
    + User Perspective

  • TIMELINE

    2015

True Events & Concept Ideation

“Bertie County is a prime example of the demise of rural America.”

says Emily Pilloton, designer-activist and founder of Project H Design,
less than 8 seconds into the film's trailer.

The designer-activist duo proposed to a North Carolina high school board the value redefining Wood Shop class by introducing design thinking and human centered design. The school board decides to stop all future funding for the class. The reasoning behind the board’s decision isn’t explicitly covered within the documentary, however the film’s synopsis states the board was “change-resistant.”

What actually happened:

The toolkit borrows from the true events but repositions them through the lens of design fiction by proposing an alternative rationale to why funding was stopped. It demonstrates how community members experiencing a proposal for change can combat it with the use of this toolkit. It highlights case studies successful case studies where the counter change approach highlighting how to combat. Rather than school board determining to stop funding, it’s the community at large that comes together to strategically and systematic weed out advocates of change from their town’s ecosystem.

What the toolkit speculates happened:

* see full toolkit below *