Service Design (MA)
Cecilia Santucho
I’m Cecilia Santucho, Argentinean, I studied Political Science (BA) and later, I specialised in Organisation Governance & Management. For 12 years, before joining RCA, I’ve been working as a policy and strategy designer and portfolio manager with a focus on art & culture, human rights and youth issues in different Government Agencies in Argentina.
I had the great pleasure of learning from a variety of multidisciplinary teams and working in collaboration with different communities & sectors to design and implement laws and large-scale policies, programmes, projects & campaigns.
Among those projects that provided me with the biggest personal challenges and happiness,I would like to share three of them:
The Biennale of Young Art of Buenos Aires [2013 & 2015 editions], a project led by the Government of Buenos Aires City and designed participatively with actors from the local cultural system. The Biennale brought together 500 artists who created more than 120 new art works, enjoyed by more than 150,000 people. I had the immense opportunity to be one of the leading designers of the project and to lead the planning and monitoring teams.
"Challenge yourself: your ideas can transform the city" was another incredible project to which I was invited to lead and coordinate. It was a project aimed at fostering innovation and entrepreneurial culture as a tool for social change among young people in Buenos Aires, where they were invited to design together solutions to different challenges that the City was facing. It was a programme designed collaboratively by three Government Departments together with third sector organizations, in which more than 14,000 young people participated.
Finally, it was a great personal challenge and a learning journey to be the chief of negotiations and the advisory team to Congresswomen Nancy Monzon, who was one of the authors of the Law 14459, that established the framework to prevent, fight & eradicate human trafficking and to assist the victims in the Buenos Aires Province. It was a two-year endeavour that involved working alongside with different policymakers, civil society actors, survivors and specialists. A great collective effort that culminated in a law voted unanimously.
I am passionate about championing people voices, understanding their needs, motivations and aspirations to bring them into the creative process & to inform decision-makers. I am in the business of designing for social change, of building shared understandings, reframing problems, co-designing solutions & building multidisciplinary teams to make it happen.
Writing this statement for the online RCA Final show 2020 means that something happened to us. We are all together, as a global community, facing a challenge called Covid-19.
Covid-19 has brought us immense sadness on the human level, for those who left us, and for those who are fighting for their lives. It has also shown us how we are all connected, that the invisible line between “us” and “them” doesn’t make any sense; and how in the face of adversity we can learn from each other. It has also taught us not to take certain things for granted: access to water, food, health, love, movement, connectivity, work.
Lately I have heard many times a new buzzword: we live in a “new normal." In many contexts, it is used to refer almost exclusively to the challenge of adapting to new ways of socializing, working remotely and learning new digital tools. And it seems these challenges are accepted with enthusiasm to help people stay connected and help companies stay alive.
I am absolutely sure that talented designers will be helping everyone to keep moving, connecting and working. However, I also hope that we can design with a critical mindset, understanding that using "the new normal" concept with lightness, naive optimism and a narrow mind can obscure and ignore many things that are happening around us and that we should not accept as “normal”.
Today, people are losing their jobs at rates that governments were not expecting; millions have no access to the internet and therefore, they are kept out of today’s digital “new normal”; many people working online are losing their work-life balance and even some companies are exploiting them, playing with the fear of losing their jobs. People are also facing new forms of discrimination and violence; women are suffering more domestic violence due to the lockdown; and people are facing more mental-health issues due to the confinement. This cannot be the new normal. Maybe it is time to say it out loud. Let’s hope this is a a painful transition to something better.
I trust that we as designers can contribute to the design of a new future, new systems and new ways of doing things better than before and now. Because the way we are doing things today it's not good enough. Because today not everyone is included or treated equally and that should change. It is time to keep changing, but deeper and faster.
Concept
Materialities & elements
Proposition
The aims
The cultural service overview
Some feedback
What is Disrupting Cultures?
Its is a creative powerhouse hosted in a leading cultural organisation with a strong creative network and a powerful production capacity, that helps organisations & companies build inclusive and empathetic environments where people have opportunities to embrace and value their diversity and thrive together.
The creative powerhouse uses art and culture, combined with technology and science, to create and deliver tailored immersive cultural experiences that help people working in the organisation to:
- build awareness about our social and cultural conditioning that can prevent us from valuing people’s diversity;
- hack assumptions that limit people's ability to enrich their perspective and vision of a diverse world;
- generate empathy to champion inclusive behaviours.
What does Disrupting Cultures offer?
The creative powerhouse offers to design and create cultural experiences in many different formats, from medium & large size single installations, ephemeral interventions, or a complete take-over of a building where many cultural experiences can happen at the same time, as a site-specific festival.
How does Disrupting Cultures work?
Disruption Cultures Powerhouse designs & creates immersive cultural experiences based on five principles:
1- Territoriality: the immersive cultural experiences are delivered at the company or in its surroundings, where people are able to engage whenever they want;
2- Alignment with the company’s challenges: the scope of the cultural service is defined with the company to understand the inclusion challenges that need to be addressed;
3- Participatory design: the immersive cultural experiences are designed through a co-creative process with the people working in the companies [the audience];
4- Collective production: the immersive cultural experiences are produced & delivered working in partnership with different stakeholders of the cultural organisations’ creative network.
5- Visual monitoring & feedback.
To know more about Disrupting Cultures Powerhouse value proposition, its associated theory of change, its business model, the key stakeholder validation map, or the methodology used to develop the proposal, please feel free to contact me, I am more than happy to share it with you: Cecilia.santucho@network.rca.ac.uk