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…

We know, both intuitively and practically, that socially interactive spaces, furnished with warm materials and rich textures, are beneficial and useful to the people who occupy them. But how do you convince the data-driven person who pays the bills? Buildings cost money. Owners want their dollars to go far. That’s reasonable. It’s because of this that architects are asked to prove that their designs marry performance and efficiency with inspiration and user comfort.

Federal Center South

Our practice is focused on designing amenity-rich architecture, from spaces where interaction can take place in laboratories to art rooms and family lounges in hospitals. Atriums are utilized in all kinds of building typologies to bring daylight deep into a floor plate, create a natural gathering spot for users, and aid in wayfinding. Our recently completed U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle, illustrates this approach. The building uses an oxbow-shaped atrium to connect conference rooms, amenities, and offices. Here the atrium is particularly successful because it utilizes biophilic strategies that connect employees to living systems through the use of daylight, views, fresh air, vegetation, and natural finishes. All of these strategies, together, enhance the user experience. But such amenities add to the building’s square footage and often the construction cost – thereby reducing the efficiency of the cost per square foot. Measuring their appeal to the users’ humanity can be proven by the employees’ enhanced performance and satisfaction.  Still, making the case for this can be challenging from a purely quantitative standpoint.

We were recently challenged to design a new office building for a technology firm that wanted to measure the efficiencies and performance of the new project. I was part of the team asked that our decision-making process be based on empirical data rather than qualitative emotion.  The company had a strong desire to have a healthy, inspiring workplace for its employees, but required all qualitative design decisions to be based on evidence. They weren’t going to be sold on pretty renderings alone.

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A year ago I didn’t expect to live in Rwanda and be working in health care, but there I was.  All this happened after I got a Global Health Corps fellowship to work with MASS Design Group. For the past few months I have been helping them oversee the construction of a doctors’ housing project in the country’s northern region, near Butaro Hospital. In addition I have been working to design a cancer infusion center, the first of its kind in the country. These two opportunities have given me firsthand knowledge of how much good architectural design can do to improve lives through capacity building as well as the use of local materials and labor.

MASS’s mission is to use architecture to improve lives. This includes creating successful outcomes in what gets built, as well as how people are impacted over the course of the entire project.

The first thing I got to work on as a Global Health Corps fellow was a housing project, which was to be a learning community where foreign and Rwandan doctors could share their knowledge both in and outside of the workplace. The project also created the opportunity to train local residents on how to construct houses.

I arrived at the construction site not knowing a word of Kinyarwanda, the local language. But we were communicating from the start; the workers’ infectious smiles brought joy to my daily experience. I soon learned the words to greet each and every one of them, each morning. Over the next few months, I was able to see a simple laborer move up the ranks to be a skilled mason, and then a team leader. I befriended the female masons on site, proud of their work and proud to be doing a job that, in Rwanda, is considered to be a man’s domain.

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Here is a simple idea: Hoist up a 20 pound bag of soil or rocks and let gravity’s pull turn that bag into a source of energy— energy enough to produce illumination.

Gravity Light is taking this idea and using it to solve a problem: the lack of electricity and its light in developing countries. In industrialized countries, we take illumination for granted. The opportunities that come with lighting up the night—reading, conversations, doing homework— could easily be encouraged with some smart design and can have profound implications for quality of life, especially in education.

GravityLight: lighting for the developing countries.

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We work hard to advance the interior design profession, as well as the success of our members, at the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). To this end, we provide professional development and educational resources, as well as leadership opportunities. For many of our members, building networks is key. And as the design industry evolves, so does our commitment to meet the changing needs and values of our professional members.

During my first year at ASID, while conversing with our members and industry leaders, I heard a recurring theme—the beneficial role of interior design in our living and working environments. These discussions ranged from the work being done to design livable homes for veterans, to creating warm environments in children’s hospitals, and using design to aid an aging population and those with learning disabilities. As I hear more and more about the many inspiring projects our members are working on, it’s becoming clear that we, at ASID, need to create ways to recognize, foster, and communicate these myriad ways that design is improving lives and communities.

We’re starting to do this by adopting the goal of “advancing and communicating the impact of interior design in enhancing the human experience; ” as one of the pillars of our strategic plan — the roadmap that steers our mission. From this, several exciting programs have developed, such as our partnership with The 1% program, an effort that connects design firms with nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance and asks designers to commit one percent of their time to pro bono service.

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