07 Feb DERTlab Launches: Our First Literacy Promoter Project
DERT was founded with a vision to re-invent literacy as a social phenomenon with a global outreach. Much of what is considered “literacy” is changing, especially with new electronic media. We are in the process of creating a book-selling model around this idea, connecting the purchase of books with social activities that sponsor the cause of spreading literacy in communities.
Literacy is about reading and writing, but it is also expanding to visual, tactile, and electronic aspects of communication. This massive change is what explains some of the mystery behind our name, “DERT”, and how it remains undefined on many levels. DERT, which stands for Design Enhancement of Reader Technology, is our motif to guide the real work of defining how the book and the social aspects of the book are changing. Essentially, we want to re-invent the book from the ground up, through social and book-related interactivity projects.
We think the best model to make this happen in the real world is collaboration between global partners to design literacy projects in line with Twentieth Century changes. We have begun just such a project in mutual agreement with a local group of social activists in El Salvador, called The Tamarindos. We first conceived this project at a party where DERT and local Olympia, WA, activists met with El Salvador activists to sponsor social projects. At this meeting, DERT and the Tamarindos began a discussion of a longer-term project to promote literacy in their Central American community.
(Above: DERT co-founder Ernesto Chavez describing DERT’s literacy promoter role in El Salvador to Parsons’ design students)
Now that project is taking shape. This week saw the first stage in a collaboration on a new literacy movement. DERT is partnering with Parsons The New School for Design and has created a special “Collabs” class. The class will explore how communication design can be used to create literacy tools for the humanities. The goal is to work with a diverse group of design students to create prototype literacy tools that can be implemented at a local level in small communities. The literacy tools will span holistic levels of literacy, going beyond basic reading and writing and will encompass a broad cultural awareness of the arts and humanities. The class is designed as a collaborative project that brings in both DERT and the multidisciplinary design firm TODA as external partners working with sixteen design students.
To start, these tools—such as flash cards, board games, and flip books—will be designed to appeal to global middle-school age children and then introduced to the Tamarindos’ community in El Salvador. Later, the project results will be introduced in other communities to enhance literacy on a new visual and tactile model. In addition, DERT envisions the transformation of these tools into electronic media, such as apps and much more!
Follow our collaboration efforts as we ready these design tools for the Tamarindo community soon. More on this project in our upcoming posts.