“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water,” advises Bruce Lee, film and martial arts star. Lee's famous quote advises martial arts practitioners to be adaptable to circumstances, the environment, and the unexpected. In wider society, when design frameworks are applied rigidly and hastily, unintentional ethical dilemmas may arise down the line. To foresee ethical dilemmas and mitigate harm, designers likewise must be “like water,” says Yvette Man-yi Kong, instructor of 4.360 (previously 4.s32) Transversal Design for Social Impact.

A half-term course, 4.360 is a collaboration between the MIT Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) and MITdesignX academic programs, integrating principles of artistic approach with entrepreneurial innovation for thoughtful design. Students of transversal design, an emerging art-informed design methodology, cultivate the capacity to “go deep” into one’s own motivations, passions, and social position, which informs their ability as designers to “go wide” in addressing broad, complex social problems. Kong asks:

Just as water poured into a tea cup “becomes the tea cup” — as Bruce Lee counsels — Kong recommends a designer must “forget the preconception of who you are and what you think.” She adds that transversal design aims to produce “not just ethically-sound, but culturally-resonant interventions.” To do so, designers go wide — fostering empathy, perspective-taking, and dialogue with collaborators to develop more effective questions for more effective answers.

Transversal design likewise centers the production of questions informed by an artistic process. But as modern problems grow more complex, transversal design identifies a need to “cut across traditional boundaries.” Just as a transversal line in geometry illuminates the relationships between lines, transversal design articulates new knowledge between disciplines. How does it weave together widely different disciplines, perspectives, and ideas? Just as in Wodiczko’s interrogative design, transversal design digs for the root of the complex, systemic issues through the artistic process.

Beyond aesthetic concerns, art provides tools for designers to make inquiries. Like peeling an onion, transversal design aims to interrogate problems layer by layer, allowing space for questions and dialogue rather than jumping to solutions.

At the end of its half-term duration, students submit a final poster project — widely interpreted — charting their journey into themselves and their communities toward posing a relevant and resonant design question. Informed by performance psychology, Kong encourages students to tap into the power of intrinsic motivation to fuel their projects.

Nanvi Jhala, a Harvard Graduate School for Education master’s student, meditated on the “onion-peeling” metaphor. For Nanvi, design carries a power to “[uncover] hidden truths.” The materiality of layers inspired her to create an interactive flipbook to reflect the layered complexity of mental health struggles “revealing hidden curriculum as each page is flipped.”

Lydia Yan, a Master of Design Studies student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, hails from Guangzhou, China, where electronic waste (“e-waste”) is a growing crisis posing health problems to e-waste disposal workers and their families. Her poster project calls attention to the issue by posing the question “What do we feed our children?”

Anna Savino invited attendees of the final poster presentation event to participate by building their “dream city” on her poster — a microcosmic articulation of her view that through “engaging in artistic participatory practices that evoke creativity and play, cities can restore a sense of embodiment and joy and give residents a voice in shaping the look and feel of their city.” Savino is a Master’s of City Planning student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a background in arts and design.

As an MIT Sloan Fellow, Jun Arima aimed to address generational gaps in financial technology (FinTech) literacy inspired by dialoguing with his ageing parents and learning from management courses at Sloan. A digital collage of large, looming waves overtaking natural land (pictured to the left) is juxtaposed against a positive vision of socially-connected technological development (pictured to the right).

says Kong. With empathy and perspective-taking skills, designers shed limiting assumptions, question biases, and expand speculative imagination. With this expanded capacity, designers and stakeholders together can weave multiple perspectives into a cohesive cloth — a bandage for collective healing. In transversal design, the metaphor of a bandage holds power when a design does not conceal “symptoms,” but exposes the presence of pain while simultaneously healing it.

By centering the world “as seen by the wound,” a guiding principle offered by Professor Emeritus Wodiczko, transversal design does not limit designers from being able to contribute to projects outside of personal experience. Rather it foregrounds the necessity for designers to be aware of their positionality — one’s social position in relation to a problem. By maintaining awareness and engaging in self-reflection, designers move past limiting assumptions and biases to to pose more informed, expansive, and far-reaching design questions that mitigate downstream harm.

With interests knitting together education and mental health, Nanvi embraced feelings of doubt and uncertainty as an “integral part of any creative process.” She explains:

For Anna Savino, the classroom culture of trust and support allowed for a “deeply vulnerable, introspective process” and provided “a sense of freedom to pursue design challenges that were personally meaningful.”

Though initially thinking of himself as neither an artist nor designer, Jun Arima came to believe “art is not something special only for talented people but natural expression for everyone.”

Maintaining a design journal throughout the course, students charted down their unique takeaways from each seminar. Shared as an integral part of each lecture, these deeply personal notes encourage peers to expand their minds and consider multidisciplinary perspectives on the subject. Kong concludes: