We are among six students and one professor, from the University of Minnesota Architecture School working in Haiti on the Collège Mixte LaConcorde Orphanage project, under the auspices of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), to design a school and orphanage complex from site-work to construction documents in Carrefour, Haiti.  AFH’s relief efforts here are currently being operated out of the Petion-Ville based Rebuilding Center, where they support reconstruction efforts through coordination and collaboration with other NGO’s, education and training for Haitian masons and other building trades, and directing the design and construction of primary and secondary schools. We are privileged to work with AFH in Haiti on a number of projects over the course of our six week stay, having the opportunity to support and serve the reconstruction needs of the Haitian people.

In the city of Carrefour there’s a small orphanage and school that symbolize Haitian resilience and perseverance, despite the devastating earthquake that occurred more than a year ago. Over the last two weeks, our team has visited LaConcorde Orphanage and School twice: first, an initial site visit to understand the client’s programming needs, and later to present our schematic design. From the moment we met our clients, the director Frantz Bastien and his mother, Mama Bastien, their dedication to the children was apparent. Read more…

Tim Brown and Michael Murphy at “State of Design.” Photo: Sean Hemmerle.

Assessing the state of anything, let alone the whole design profession, seems a daunting task today. But Tim Brown, the CEO of the design firm IDEO, and Michael Murphy, of MASS architects, got together to do just that at “State of Design” last month.  Responding to questions by Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy, they turned the tables on the audience by arguing, among other things, for developing new methods of assessment. Read more…

How can introducing a design curriculum to a high school, in one of America’s poorest rural counties, create new opportunities? Emily Pilloton, author of Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, published in 2009 by Metropolis Books, shows us, in her TED Talk about her recent project Studio H.

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The Druk White Lotus School in Shey, India, which I wrote about back in 2009, was seriously damaged in a recent flood and mudslides that took place in the remote Ladakh region of the Himalayas in last week. Preliminary estimates of the damage and repair of the buildings and infrastructure will cost over $130,000 (this does not include the cost of re-equipping the school with furniture, books, and computers, etc). Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

The ripple effect of the stalled housing market has impacted countless industries—including the purveyors of those storage pods that pop up on the curb when someone needs to move. A few months back, Charley MacKenzie, the owner of the Maryland-based SmartBox USA, told his friend Gregory Pitts about his company’s overstock of plywood storage boxes, each about the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts, a designer with the furniture company David Edward, had an idea. What if the pods could themselves become home? Read more…

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The recent exchange between Bruce Nussbaum and Emily Pilloton on humanitarian design frustrates me to no end. It reminds me of the age-old duel between the generations, the older one (Nussbaum) with preconceived notions of humanitarian design and cultural imperialism versus the new generation (Pilloton), which is bravely venturing forth to right the world their elders have wronged for so long. While Nussbaum plays into the design community’s (and their followers’) paralyzing cynicism, Pilloton opens up new doors, finds friendships, makes things happen, and uses design as a conversation about place, object, life, usefulness, and human worth. Read more…

Considering that we’ve seen some of the century’s worst catastrophes in the past few years, it is only natural that design for disaster has been on all our minds. I’ve seen reconstruction plans and pre-fab shelter designs galore, but a recent event in New York takes the cake for bizarre inventiveness.  Last Thursday the Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction (UASDC) hosted an “Iron Designer” fundraiser—yes, like Iron Chef, only for design—challenging contestants to build a full-size emergency shelter in three hours. Read more…

Forever cementing its image as the champion of mobile telephony in emerging markets, Nokia launched a new product last week: a bicycle-powered cell phone charger. The idea isn’t new in the developing world—a couple of Kenyan students came up with a similar product last year—but Nokia’s will be the first commercially produced version. The device will initially be sold in Africa, for about $18, and will go on sale worldwide by the end of the year. Nokia wins all around: it adds to its eco-credentials with a great new sustainable product; and allowing people with limited access to electricity to charge a cell phone will not, I’m sure, harm Nokia’s already amazing sales figures in Africa, China, and India. Read more…

For this year’s Metropolis booth, we’re hosting the last stop of Emily Pilloton’s Design Revolution Road Show, which has been traversing the country since February, bringing a selection of products that empower people to high school and university students (and Stephen Colbert). Earlier today we caught up with Emily in the vintage Airstream trailer that has served as her traveling exhibition space—and living quarters!—for the past three months. Click the play button to watch her final Road Show appearance.

Video shot and edited by Eve Dilworth; text by Mason Currey.

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Photo: Emily Pilloton

Nothing—not even well-intentioned design—is above reproach. The confluence of organizations and individuals working to bring design practice to those who might not normally get it seems to have hit a critical mass, and with it comes the inevitable backlash. In an entry written last fall on his Design Altruism Project Web site, David Stairs lit a firestorm of debate when he argued that “social networking has struck the design world with the force of the Indonesian tsunami bringing changes of sorts, but no guarantees of lasting change.”

So what do we mean by humanitarian design and is it really making an impact? Read more…