It used to be that the only time you saw the interior of someone’s home was when you got invited over. But living online has brought a proliferation of snapshots of spaces once kept intimate. As we tweet and upload images of our new headboard, reclaimed wood coffee table, or redesigned kitchen, our design choices become public domain. And because we are sharing the “after” shots of these design choices, it makes sense that if we crave the most “likes” for them, we crowdsource them.

Given the Millennials’ tendency to strive to be part of a group and our technical agility, it makes sense that we’re the generation most likely to crowdsource our design choices. We’re doing this by starting Facebook conversations around paint color, or pinning design ideas on Pinterest and then only using the ones that get the most comments or “repins” from friends.  (In fact Pinterest is bringing in so much traffic and sales to other sites that it recently launched an open source analytics to show just how much shopping is happening in the space.)  As consumers look for more design savvy groups to crowdsource inspiration from, they’ll start conversations on design blogs, seeking advice in the comment thread. Sites such as Apartment Therapy allow us to comment on design choices we’re struggling with, so that others can help us make the right one. But don’t be fooled into thinking only Millennials are participating in this trend.  Like many other trends, our generation is passing our habits on to Boomer parents and Xer older siblings.

My own Pinterest page where I collect communal ideas and inspiration for design

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What if you could create a network of libraries in Africa to feed communities with knowledge, creativity conduits, and revenue? David Dewane, a young architect with Gensler and a visiting assistant professor at Catholic University, is working with a diverse team—and a campaign through Kickstarter, the online funding platform—to make it real. (There are only a few days left in the campaign.)

Dewane (who trained with Pliny Fisk III at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin) and his partners have conceived Librii as “a network of low-cost, digitally powered libraries deployed along the expanding fiber optic infrastructure in the developing world.” The idea is to bring digital and physical resources, managed by professional librarians, to emerging markets to that people in those communities can address their own educational, informational, and economic challenges.

“This is a new kind of library,” Dewane says. “It will be the first that will actively engage users as content creators, the first that will operate on a sustainable business model, and the first designed to maximize the potential of high-speed information exchange in developing markets.” The business model involves Librii paying the construction costs and content costs up front, after which revenue streams will shift operating costs to the users.

Dewane, and his team, believe that this is an answer to a major need: one billion people living in Africa, and only three percent of them have access to broadband Internet. They see access to knowledge as an essential component of social mobility, and view Africa as a place to demonstrate that link. They chose Ghana as their launch point because it has been a technology leader on the continent.

Why Kickstarter? Seeking funding this way was not the easiest path, Dewane says. “It would have been simpler to solicit big companies, such as those in the energy sector that extract resources from Africa and put in infrastructure.” Through his firm, Dewane would, in fact, have had a way to reach some of those companies. “We chose social funding instead because we wanted to draw attention and energy into the project,” he says. “It would start to build a community excitement around the idea, not just get a check from and go off and do it. So far that is exactly what’s happening.” Gensler has been supportive. The Washington, D.C. office of the firm will produce the drawings and the firm has provided some pro-bono time to help get the project off the ground. Read more…

The word “resilience” is bandied about these days among environmental designers. In some quarters, it’s threatening to displace another popular word, “sustainability.” This is partly a reflection of newsworthy events like Hurricane Sandy, adding to a growing list of other disruptive events like tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves.

We know that we can’t design for all such unpredictable events, but we could make sure our buildings and cities are better able to weather these disruptions and bounce back afterwards. At a larger scale, we need to be able to weather the shocks of climate change, resource destruction and depletion, and a host of other growing challenges to human wellbeing.

We need more resilient design, not as a fashionable buzzword, but out of necessity for our long-term survival.

An illustration of a resilient architecture: fossils of a marine ecosystem from the Permian period, about 250 to 300 million years ago. These ecosystems were resilient enough to endure dramatic changes over millions of years. Image by Professor Mark A. Wilson/Wikimedia

Aside from a nice idea, what is resilience really, structurally speaking? What lessons can we as designers apply towards achieving it? In particular, what can we learn from the evident resilience of natural systems? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Resilient and non-resilient systems

Let’s start by recognizing that we have incredibly complex and sophisticated technologies today, from power plants, to building systems, to jet aircraft. These technologies are, generally speaking, marvelously stable within their design parameters. This is the kind of stability that C. H. Holling, the pioneer of resilience theory in ecology, called “engineered resilience.” But they are often not resilient outside of their designed operating systems. Trouble comes with the unintended consequences that occur as “externalities,” often with disastrous results.

On the left, an over-concentration of large-sale components; on the right, a more resilient distributed network of nodes. Drawing by Nikos Salingaros. Read more…

While the mind seeks out the reassurances and comfort – the known workability – of familiar patterns, and as we become habituated to our styles and surroundings, the hungry senses, always alert for changes – and surprises – are still hunting for the rewards of “the new” – new territory, wealth, status, knowledge and ideas, personal and social alliances, sensations and new levels of security. We have the eyes of “prey,” constantly alert to danger, but also the eyes of “predators” searching environments for advantages and victories.

What’s happening “in-here” parallels and fuels the impulse for exploration. Our, vigilant early warning system is quick to identify anything new as a threat or opportunity; it’s given a top priority, and our response is reinforced by the flows of body-chemistry, triggered often by fear but, for others, by the always-ready anticipation of pleasure. After the “first impression” comes the exhilarating release from confinement – a sense of liberation from limitations of the past and its inadequate technology or subjection to others’ priorities, symbols or styles. There’s the sense of a fresh start – like a “sea change” that rejuvenates and rebuilds channels of thought and creativity. Equally fundamental is the pleasure of feeling “first” – establishing in a place we design or “own,” a unique “number one” identity for ourselves, for our clients or community, as a presence on the turf that we have won.

As a result, we constantly pursue the competitive edge of the “next” new thing because survival and stature has depended on it. In built environments both basic technologies and fashions multiplied as each generation found startling new ways to exploit discoveries, solve problems or express feelings of “transcending” with long spans, heights or speed – the “conquest-of-space” – or a succession of ornamental visions of other romanticized times and places, from democratic Greece, Republican Rome or exotic China and Japan, to crisp, efficient, contemporary, innovative machine production – visions that we want to add to our identity. And the industries of built environments have institutionalized promotion of “new” in massive expositions from London’s Crystal Palace to today’s trade shows.

The lure of “the new” is reinforced, too, as we look back on the happy-ending stories of once-shocking monuments – Eiffel’s Tower, that became the lasting symbol of a renewed France or the embattled classics of our own new world by Le Corbusier, Mies, Sullivan, and Wright, that opened tradition-bound eyes to the culture that was changing all around them – and to the opportunities we take for granted today.

Eiffel’s Tower – the shocking new architecture that became the lasting symbol of a renewed France – and of Paris at a peak of its cultural leadership.

Finding, evaluating, and applying “the new” is, of course, already in the mainstream of design education and practice. Today’s schools and professions are among the avant gardes in the revolutions of Modernism.  But again, many leaders in our professions and schools have erected obstacles to be overcome. First, many, naturally aspiring to personal fame, seem to honor, above all, introspection, expecting that inventive, “new” personal languages will be readily understood, admired, and accepted by others, when, in fact, they haven’t learned – they haven’t been taught – how their audiences are likely to experience the places designed for them. Second, creative designers and their clients, thrilled by the promise of discovery, and relief from the rigidity of exhausted ideas, believe they can skip over years of accumulated learning, and the fine distinctions debated in past generations. The result, of course, has been novelty and diversity with as many failures as successful breakthroughs. And often in the struggle for our voices to be heard in a crowd, we confuse striking eccentricity with the creativity that our own sometimes careless, promotional, utopian language has led our publics to expect.

Still, these are exciting times.  Many of the people we design for are obsessed by innovation and the “new.”  At the same time, advancing sciences of human behavior and ecology are opening up a deeper understanding of the people and places we are designing for. And that is why I draw parallels with the creative avant-gardes of the Italian Renaissance years, when liberation from settled, familiar medieval patterns prepared the way for new, open-minded self-awareness – a new understanding of what it is to be human – and waves of a world-changing new humanism flooded into the arts and sciences. Now, as in the past, some pioneering designers will give their clients and publics – again and again – what they never imagined they could have. Some will achieve what we call “celebrity,” and some, after a generation of successes, “greatness.” Others will hesitate. There are always elements of uncertainty, and any form of “the new” may be rejected.  But the hunt will go on. Read more…

If you look up Industrial Design on Wikipedia today, these are the pictures included with the article: an iPod, a blender, a rotary phone, a typewriter, a guitar, a car, and a chair. It is the last of these objects that I’m thinking of today. As I’m drinking coffee and writing this, I sit on a chair. The chair I am sitting on is certainly not the product of a brilliant industrial designer. It does serve its function as ‘chair’, so it must have followed some sort of design. It’s made of cheap particle board, has a trapezoidal seat which gets wider toward the ledge, and a slightly obtuse back rest made up of a frame and three vertical slats. To be honest, it’s not very comfortable. But it does serve its purpose, at least until my back starts aching and I’m forced into all kinds of neurotic personalized stretches.

Whenever people talk about industrial design, the chair is almost always one of the main cultural objects discussed. Indeed, almost every famous designer or architect has their signature chair: from the first industrially mass-produced No. 14 chair by Michael Thonet, to the Bauhaus like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer, to more modern designers like Alvar Aalto, Charles Eames, and Arne Jacobson, to name a few popular figures. So, why the chair?

An over-simplification of industrial design goes something like this: we need objects that function, and most aren’t found ready-made in nature. So someone somewhere needs to conceptualize what it should look like, how it’s made and with what materials, and how we interact with its functionality. The degree to which aesthetics, artistry, and innovation come into play can vary from non-existent to excessive formalization. Great industrial design sits at the crossroads between form and function. Read more…

In our last post, you met the finalists of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award, a biennial program that recognizes excellence in urban placemaking. This is the first of our dispatches from the field, as the Bruner Foundation team travels the country to examine the five selected projects. During our intensive, two-to-three-day visits to each site, we’re conducting interviews, taking photographs, and gathering information for our selection committee’s meeting in Oklahoma City this coming May, during which they will select the Gold Medal winner.

Congo Street, Dallas, TX

For our first trip, we headed south late last month, trading cold and snowy Boston for the relative warmth of North Texas to visit Congo Street Initiative in Dallas.

The project is among the smallest of this year’s five finalists. Located along a reconstructed block-long street in the East Dallas community of Jubilee Park, it involved the construction of a new “Holding House” and the reconstruction of five existing houses in collaboration with the street’s residents.

Congo Street Site Plan

The idea for the project emerged from a desire to stabilize home ownership for the families who live on Congo Street, many having occupied their homes for generations. The modest 640 square-foot houses, built in the 1920s, were in various states of disrepair, targeted for demolition and redevelopment.

Working with the residents, city, corporate, and nonprofit partners in the Dallas community, buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a local nonprofit community design center that submitted the project, crafted an alternative strategy for redevelopment. It focused on rebuilding the existing homes and street infrastructure over the next five years without displacing a single inhabitant. Staff from bcWORKSHOP and architecture students from the University of Texas at Arlington began working with Congo Street residents in 2008, exploring approaches that would enable them to remain in place without undue financial burden. Read more…

Agility and adaptation are central to any professional field.

Those about to enter a profession must learn practical and intellectual skills. But the days when specialized and narrowly defined skill-sets guaranteed a steady and reliable “living” are gone. Today’s practical skills need to be accompanied by rigorous and critical modes of thinking.

One case in point is the graduate program at Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices (MDP). In conjunction with the school’s initiative, Designmatters, which provides a blueprint for design education, the Field track of MDP provides students with a unique foundation of theory and on-the-ground training. Faculty member Sean Donahue describes the program as structured around “Investigation and intervention—how designing can be an inquiry and mode of knowledge production to inform other disciplines and issues in a unique way. Also, how can these be combined with work being done in areas of ‘good’ and social impact?”

Proposals for collective farming models for women, image via mediadesignpractices/judytoretti/Six-Weeks-in-Uganda

While “activist” design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in their haste to be in the vanguard of a “new” approach and school-based design projects. These can be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while reinforcing cultural assumptions about the “other.” This is especially true of built interventions. These can be unnecessary, unusable, and often are left to decay. Wasted resources and human effort that fail to correct culturally essentializing narratives have been well documented in ecotourism and voluntourism. These consumer-based activities exemplify the perils of modern cultural colonialism. And while there are many defenders of the “good” they do, the fact remains that they, educational institutions, and even NGO’s like Oxfam struggle with their long histories of colonialism hidden yet still entrenched in many current activities.

Organization chart displaying the roles and structure of the [anti-NGO] NGO, image via mediadesignpractices/filter/field/mlamadrid/Planification-and-Self-Evaluation-Guide-for-Social-no-empowerment

To avoid producing solutions based on invalid, often fantastical cultural projections, proposals must be rooted in a deep understanding of the culture, people, economy, and politics of the places chosen for intervention. This is, after all, an intervention. The key, according to Donahue, is “to start not with what has been created by others to ‘solve problems’ but instead start with the realities of lived life. This more holistic and community-led approach develops an understanding of the conditions as they are now—not as they were 50 or even 20 years ago. These social conditions are a set of ongoing and changing situations that are embedded in social contexts.” Read more…

I have satisfied my first order for a large retailer, Anthropologie, and I must say I feel great. I feel great because for young designers, it is increasingly difficult to have our voices heard. And further still, most companies won’t even recognize that you have a voice until you have “proven” yourself. But I did it.

The paper vases, Om, that Anthropologie ordered have been loved and hated. I cannot, sadly, tell you why people like or dislike them; however, I can tell you how they came to be and let you judge for yourself.

The concept of OM grew out of research for my graduate thesis at SCAD. While most of my peers had some working knowledge of furniture’s holy three: leather, wood, and fabric, I was more familiar with industrial processes and plastics—my background is in industrial design. To me the smell of leather was foreign. The differences between quarter-sawn and half-sawn wood were lost on me. And the warp of a fabric was indistinguishable from its weft. I was naïve. But it was this beautiful ignorance that gave me a perspective not shared by most of my peers.

I was intrigued by simple things; the things most people take for granted. I was in love with the pedestrian things of our world. So I felt no embarrassment when I informed my professor that I would be exploring the qualities of wood and its by-product paper. And explore I did! I dyed it. I dipped it. I burned it. I pureed it. I mixed it with plaster. I even sewed it (inspired by a pair of Tyvek pants made by Maison Martin Margiela). I did countless studies and tests searching for…I don’t know what. Then, as things almost always happen long after my class and academic requirement to explore had ended, I came to it.

I was reading an article on the alterity of felt when I realized that this entire time I’d been attempting to bully the paper, bend it to my will. I had ignored the desires of the material, of the paper. After having this aha-moment my process changed. I would no longer tell the paper what to do; instead I endeavored to see if it had the capacity to achieve what I had in mind. I began bending instead of creasing—I viewed a crease as a command, irrevocable once committed, whereas a bend was a suggestion. I would let these bends and folds create both the aesthetic value of each vase while simultaneously acting as their structure. Through this process of “call and response” each vase became nothing like anything else. The shadows became design elements; the surface of the paper became a canvas for diffused light. I was pleased. But not everyone was onboard. Professors thought they were disrespectful; peers thought they were a joke. Others, though, thought of them as poetry made tangible. I thought of them as the zenith of my process. Read more…

In 1975, musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies” to break through writer’s block in the studio. Their idea was to collect phrases that would return them to an artistic state of mind when they found themselves struggling under pressure. The cards provided inspirational words of wisdom such as, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” or “Work at a different speed,” or “Gardening, not architecture.” The latter is a personal favorite, and here’s why.

Architecture is envisioned, planned, and executed. It is a singular expression or provision, closely conforming to a plan, always requiring control. Ideally the architect achieves success when all the elements are arranged as presented. The architect makes the physical world obey.

Gardening is attentive, responsive, and warm-hearted. It’s about helping living things grow to their potential—living things that are under your influence, but not within your control. The elements provide or destroy, and the gardener is in dialogue with the plants to encourage and heal.

“Gardening, not architecture,” has become my guiding statement for leading a studio of wildly talented, creative, and sensitive people.

While there is certainly a place for highly structured approaches in the design world, I think the gardening metaphor is best suited for studio culture. If creativity is gardening, creative leadership is about selecting and nurturing its gardeners. Let me illustrate.

On the fourth floor of our IDEO Boston studio is a large common area. Three years ago it was essentially a peninsula of empty desks surrounded by project spaces. Sometimes they were occupied, but most of the time they were vacant because people were on projects. After some time it just seemed counterproductive to have this space outfitted as such. We asked everyone with a desk on the fourth floor to move their belongings upstairs with the rest of the gang. We intuited that this newly made blank canvas could serve as a flex space.

It must have been winter because the new space sat neglected for some time until one day a project team decided to make something of it. Frustrated with being confined to their corner project room, they took an afternoon to build a new lounge in the flex space. Sofas, lamps, and chairs (including airline seats from a former project) were relocated from different parts of the studio. The team built a standing height table in the shop and painted it turquoise with an intricate gold interior pattern. The space quickly went from “abandoned” to “owned” and found new uses—from gaming, to coding, to reconciling credit card statements. New life had sprung.

Soon after things were organized and rearranged, an exhibition of non-billable work brought the space to life in a new way. A documentary film series, “The Sundown Film Festival,” sprouted during the darkness of our short winter days. Spring and summer passed and it appeared that interest in the space was waning. Read more…

Photo: Lynn Saville

If I could write about something for more than four lines that didn’t have to be set to music, I’d write about my old friend fear.—Bill Withers

The sun has set. I leave my house. I close the door. I am outside in public. It is nighttime.

The pavement is where I left it this morning. The trees are in place. The building is still standing. Yet I have entered into an entirely different kingdom. Same place + different time of the day = different world. It’s after dark. I see my world differently. I act differently. Now a new set of rules governs my behavior and that of everyone around me. My brain is on high alert and in a nervous dialogue with itself.

At night we step into an environment where—in an evolutionary sense—we’re not supposed to be. As a species, we have less than stellar vision in the dark; we can’t see detail or color. We lack all the basics that nocturnal species have: we don’t glow like cephalopods, nor do we have eyes that enhance and collect light like cats.

As a lighting designer and environmental psychologist, I know better than to fear the dark in my own neighborhood. But like everyone else, I have read the studies on rape and crime. As a woman I know that I’m statistically in more danger from a relative or acquaintance than from a random attacker in the park. Reports show that a young man of color is far more likely than I to be a victim of nighttime assault, and that most after-dark crime happens to people living in poor communities. Yet I still feel cautious, wary, and a bit unsettled as I walk down my safe, well-lit street.

In the city, strangers are everywhere—people to whom we’re not related, people we don’t know, people who inhabit a totally different cultural space from ours. In the daytime, this isn’t a big deal. Then we make countless small judgments, nearly imperceptible, about whom to walk next to and whom to avoid. But at night, under the glow of the moon or streetlights, we strain and peer at each other. Who looks interesting? Who might be dangerous? We may feel an excitement and glee at being out at night—the joy of after-dark social life. But we may also feel our “old friend fear.” Read more…