Josef Pacal

Josef Pacal is a designer focused on Social Responsibility and participatory design. During an over 10 year-long career spanning graphic design, branding, user-experience, entrepreneurship and innovation he has designed successful brands, co-founded start-ups, led teams, and strategically consulted public and private institutions on creativity and innovation.

He has worked in both public and private sectors, with brands and organisations such as Yousician, Wallius, SMBC Aviation Capital, Irish Health, Inclusive Innovation, NIH, Global Young Academy, Future Earth, Thai National Science Museum, and more. He is a Laureate of Czech Student Design (2013), RCA Grand Challenge Winner (2020), and an Honors graduate of Tampere University (2017).

At GID, Joe is focused on Systemic Design and Design Interventions for large-scale public benefit — namely social systems, international development, mental health, and social challenges brought on by contemporary culture.

Among his GID projects are Yellow Box (2020) – a public Mental Health intervention; Science Speaks! (2021) – a science communication training program for the ASEAN region, Re:Design the Mars Bar (2020-22); a distinction-recognised inquiry into the benefits and harms of global supply chains and design; and Intersectional Design (2022) – a participatory design method for including marginalised voices in design process.

Design is systemic, political, and must be rigorously contextually and factually informed through research, user-participation, prototyping, and validation.

If design and engineering create the future by building products and services shaping the behaviour of people. How can we ensure that we design and engineer justly and with equity to build a better future for everybody, not just the already privileged ones?

The world isn’t designed for everyone equally. Wittingly or not—designers can contribute to structural discrimination by failing to consider people’s social contexts.

Did you know that autocorrect often moulds Black into different words? That women’s pockets are on average 48% shorter? Or that all first aid manikins are based on the male body? That many traditions are outdated and actively harmful to some?

Things like these make the world inconvenient or even hostile to many people. What if we could design our traditions, services, products, and spaces with social contexts in mind?

Intersectional design is a method for designers to actively think about the social conditions of their users in addition to typical user-centred approaches. This can help avoid micro aggressions and discriminations built into products, services, and environments. It is a participatory design protocol, a set of thinking canvases, and a guidebook.

These tools work together to raise the voices marginalised by design and enable designers to take an active stance against discrimination.

Participatory contribution:

Tahira Resalat, Disha Mittal, Zahra'a Nasralla, Naomi & Wanda Holopainen, Aley Baracat, Oihane Amurrio, Sama Beydoun

Mental Health challenges affect 1 Billion people worldwide and 1 in 5 children. On average up to 800.000 decide to take their life each year. The amount of suffering is incalculable. It doesn’t have to be that way.

How might we prepare future generations to face mental health challenges safely?

We researched the context, designed and tested a public-facing health intervention to make children equipped to talk about emotions and face emotional challenges,

The Yellow Box is a three-part systemic intervention — Educational Workshops (7-12), Safety Reminders Signage (teens and adults), and a website with simple Emotional Emergency tips (teens and adults).

We’ve tested the design in the UK and in the US to validate its global scalability and to ensure all components culturally and safely translate.

The project has won the RCA Grand Challenge, and recognised by an additional award for the Best Narrative.

We are currently seeking academic collaborators to help us clinically validate the solution, as well as, for grants to fund further development. Please contact me (hello@pac.al) for more questions.

In Collaboration with:

Thai Scientists are facing a challenge of lack of access to Science Communication education. This has negative impact on the public understanding of science, as well as, evidence-based policies. It also has impact on the youth’s interest in pursuing STEM fields as science is not widely publicised as exciting.

The National Science Museum and Thai Young Scientist Academy have collaborated with us to create an educaitonal workshop, helping Thai academics, reserachers, and scientists learn and practice the fundamentals of communications.

We’ve co-designed the workshop together with practicing researchers and delivered a trial version of the workshop to a group of scientists.