Volunteer & Community Service
topic
Volunteer and community service as creative inputs provide the specific experiential knowledge of working with people and communities outside one's normal professional and social context — encountering the specific challenges, resourcefulness, knowledge, and perspectives of communities whose lives and problems differ significantly from those of one's professional peer group.
Role
Volunteer and community service is the practical input that most directly combats the social homophily that makes most creative practitioners' human reference sample radically non-representative of the population their work is intended to reach. The product designer who has worked with elderly people in their homes understands accessibility differently; the curriculum designer who has volunteered in under-resourced schools understands educational inequality differently; the urban planner who has worked with homeless communities understands housing differently — with direct human contact providing knowledge that demographic data and secondary research cannot fully replace.