Public Interest Design

     Last week I went to a seminar hosted by Bryan Bell and Design Corps on the topic of Public Interest Design and SEED (Social, Economic, Environmental Design). To quote Bryan, "Public Interest Design is the practice of design with the goal that every person should be able to live in a socially, economically and environmentally healthy community." Projects that fall in this category vary as largely as housing designs do. The one commonality is that designers get actively involved in the community they are working in and the outcome generally has a greater impact on the society than just the construction of a building alone.

    The idea behind Public Interest Design is to create and architectural version of what Public Health is for doctors, or what Public Interest Law is for lawyers. Currently, about 90% of people don't have access to design services, and architects want to change that. 

     Projects highlighted by the seminar ranged from providing high school students with real life skills that not only will help them get employed, but also keep them motivated to stay in school in rural North Carolina to developing a hospital in Rwanda that not only provided training and created jobs for construction workers, but aimed to find low tech solutions to health problems such as the spread of tuberculosis by increasing air flow in sick wards and removing all interior corridors.

     They hold this seminar at different universities around the country, with different speakers each time. I was especially excited about going to this one because I had followed a few of the projects and was familiar with some of the speakers. Not only that, the seminars are limited to 35 people, so you really get the chance to hear about and discuss with the other people in the audience are doing and what challenges they face. Speakers at this seminar include:

Bryan Bell of Design Corps and SEED Co-founder, editor of Good Deeds, Good Design, and all around awesome guy

David Perkes, founder of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio which provides planning and architectural design in support of communities affected by Hurricane Katrina, and Associate Professor at Mississippi State University (wish I had a professor like him when I was in school)

Alan Plattus, founder and director of the Yale Urban Design Workshop, a community design center that undertakes design projects throughout the world, and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Yale University (plus he's one of those professors you just love to listen to talk about anything because they know everything and they speak so eloquently)

John Folan, founder and director of the Urban Design Build Studio and Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. He uses his classes to develop design/build projects that actively engage members of resource poor communities in the surrounding area (the amount of work done by the students in one year was incredible, but you have to wonder if any of them got any sleep in the process)

Michael Murphy, co-founder and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, a design firm geared towards improving health outcomes in resource poor communities (designed and built the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda while earning a Master's degree at Harvard, and now, just after graduating, has 24 employees in 3 offices in 3 different countries! Seriously, who does that? The difference between him and me: he sees only solutions or opportunities for learning new things).

Anna Heringer, designer of the METI school in Rudrapur, Bangladesh (her Master's thesis) made from mud and bamboo. Winner of the Aga Khan award, and it was featured at the MOMA in New York City in the show Small Scale, Big Change. Visiting lecturer at BASEhabitat at the University of Linz, and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture Programme. Super nice woman who, when she talks about design as a way of providing dignity has a way of changing my impression of high-end design in poverty stricken areas.

Marie Aquilino, author of Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity, and Professor of Architectural History at Ecole Speciale de l'Architecture, and recent founder of Future City Lab an international consortium concerning itself with the future of urban environments. She has been giving seminars on the architect's role in disaster prevention, mitigation and sustainable recovery as a means of developing a dialog about architecture and social justice. Awesome speaker, and as the last one in the seminar, tried to create more of a discussion of topics we'd been hearing about. Although that was interesting as well, would have loved to have heard more about the work she's been doing in Haiti.

Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H which uses "creative capital to improve communities and public education from the inside out," and author of the book Design Revolution: 100 projects that empower people. Very captivating speaker, who had a great outline of how she did/does what she and her partner do, and the good they are doing for the community they are in and most importantly how she's able to get paid to do what she does. Check out her TED talk here: Emily Pilloton, Teaching design for change