Rosten Woo, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, will be speaking at the SoHo Apple Store this evening. Please join us to hear him speak about CUP, its most recent project—Making Policy Public, and the opportunities for designers to take part in it.

Making Policy Public is a “fold-out poster series” that aims to share and rouse interest in public policies. Posters already in print are The Cargo Chain, “an organizing tool for longshore workers,” and Social Security Risk Machine, which explains “where the money comes from and where it goes” in the Social Security system. Designers and advocates are selected by a jury of experts for each poster.

Sound interesting? I caught up with Rosten to get some details on Making Policy Public.

What initiated the Making Policy Public project? When did the need for these collaborative publications manifest itself?

The Making Policy Public series is really an extension of the kind of work that CUP had been producing and continues to produce “in house” (for example our television show about Public Housing (PHTV) or our Housing Rights Posters.) We’d long had some really wonderful graphic designers involved both internally (Stella Bugbee was one of CUP’s founding board members) and as collaborators (too many to name here, probably). We’d been developing great collaborations with other designers and community-based organizations for years. As we grew as an organization, we were looking for ways to make it clear to people who weren’t already involved with CUP projects that we were interested in getting more people involved, that we weren’t just a closed “firm” but an organization that was dedicated to promoting art and design that had a truly “educational” (and therefore political) power. We developed the MPP series as a way to a) formalize CUP’s ability to act as a beacon for designers who wanted to create collaborative work that engaged social issues. and b) make our own process more transparent and open. We hope that the net effect in the design community will be to create more and more opportunities for designers who see these kinds of collaborations as more than “good works” but actually rich opportunities to create engaging, meaningful works of design. I think this is what draws designers to CUP already. MPP is a way for us to organize some of that energy (and direct resources towards it).

Are there specific kinds of people that would benefit the most from these publications?

Well, we hope there are a lot of specific people that will benefit! Most immediately, each publication is designed with a specific distribution plan, and target audience in mind. Our most recent issue, The Cargo Chain, is meant to be used as a teaching tool for workers who are involved in the shipping and manufacturing economy. At the same time, we do hope that the publications achieve a broader or more “meta” goal, which is to highlight the really interesting opportunities for design to help explain and involve people in social decision making (aka politics).

How is CUP reaching them?

Well, each pamphlet has (at least) two different kinds of audiences. We’re relying on our advocacy partner to do the heavy lifting of distribution to their audience. The Longshore Workers Coalition (LWC), one of the partners on The Cargo Chain, raised money to print an additional 9000 copies of the poster and distributing it to their rank-and-file coast to coast. Another partner, Labor Notes, has been distributing the poster through their network. The railworkers’ network requested about 50 of the pamphlets, one for each of their stewards. The steelworker’s union are working on an international solidarity project with the West Coast longshore workers, dockworkers in Australia, and miners is South Africa and Australia. They are using the map as a framework for thinking about their own project. They’ll be distributed at the Labor Notes conference in a few months to about 1000 union leaders. CUP is handling the outreach and distribution to the folks who are interested in the series as works of art and design. We’re working with independent stores and distributors like Printed Matter to get the series out to those audiences.

A lot of great designers and collaborators are involved in “Making Policy Public.” What is the process like in selecting talent?

Well, for these first two the process has been informal, much like all of CUP’s projects. We reached out to friends and friends of friends and asked them to participate. The goal of the MPP series going forward is to establish a more open process. Our gambit is that there are a lot more interesting designers committed to this kind of work than we know personally, so our process is really designed to engage the people we dont know yet. So, going forward, collaborators (both on the advocate side, and the designer side) will be selected by a four person jury, made up of professionals from the art and design and organizing and advocacy fields. We’ve just opened the call for proposals to advocates, we’ll be selecting four proposals and posting them to our new site in May. At that point we’ll be opening our call to designers and we’ll have our teams selected by July.

Finally, what kinds of designers are strongly encouraged to participate in the project. Any special skills or interests?

We’re looking for designers who are interested in truly collaborative work, more than an “over-the-fence,” “make-this-information-pretty” approach. Outside of that, I think we’re open to a lot of different design talents and approaches.

Thanks, Rosten!

Admission to Rosten’s talk at Apple is free. Please come by!

the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)

Wednesday 19 March 2008 6:30–8:00PM

Apple Store, Soho

103 Prince Street

New York, NY 10012