I asked a few of my favorite public interest designers:

“What was the pivotal moment in your career that led you to social impact design?“

Each moment is unique, whether it be a person, project, or place, yet they all tie back to how design can affect people and communities in positive ways. I hope you are inspired by each and see how each of our paths may be different but we all lead back to the same intention.

When you’re done, I would love to hear about the moment you knew you had to be a social impact designer in the comments!

Katherine Darndstadt, Latent Design

In 2010 I was newly licensed and newly laid off. I realized quickly that I was not going to land a job and had to decide whether I wanted to practice architecture or not.  As I started work, I found that I could make this my dream job and practice in a way that was meaningful and integrate a strong social mission into the firm.  I did not know I was practicing in the field of ‘public interest design’ as that term was just starting to coalesce publicly around the same time.  I have been fortunate to be able to practice and collaborate with many individuals in this field and hope to be able to provide a model of social impact design for small firms.

John Cary, Public Interest Design

Every day, I am grateful for a career shift that I made back in 2005 or so. Until then, for roughly the first third of my career, I focused on everything that was broken about the architecture profession, especially related to our archaic internship and licensure processes, which remain in great need of reform today. That work was exceedingly taxing and down-right depressing. In public interest design, I found a much more positive, much more contributive culture. Public interest design is a movement or field that still needs a lot of investment, to be sure, but it’s beyond heartening to see how far it has come, especially in recent years. More recently, I’ve pushed myself and the field to look well beyond architecture, which has historically dominated the public interest design space. I’m equally or even more interested in the design of products and systems as I am in the design of environments and spaces these days; now that I have my bearings, I feel a responsibility to bring that expanded awareness to the field.

Emer Beamer, UNEXPECT and Butterfly Works

At 28 years, my new husband and I were imagining our futures together, suddenly I knew I was ready to start on my life’s mission. That moment was the start of my global social innovation path.

Bryan Bell, SEED Network and Design Corps

In 1985 when I was still in grad school, I happened to meet a partner of Mocbee Coker Howorth. In my interview I met Sambo who had completed one “charity house.” He hired me at $4 per hour to be in charge of designing 3 more houses. We worked with a nun and United Way to find three eligible families. Watching Sambo work with these families, nine years before he started Rural Studio, was life changing. The houses were individually designed for each family. Sambo did one, I did one, and we did one together. Even though the houses were not funded and never built, it taught me how great design was of great value to all. Main lesson is that design is about people not things.

Geoff Piper, The Global Studio and Five Dot Design Build

I realized that I wanted to focus on public interest design during my graduate school education. I was on a public interest design program that was cleverly disguised as a design/build program and I saw the affect that architecture could have on a disenfranchised community. I learned that good design could empower people who had little public voice and bring together a community to create positive change. We built a library with the community and that building has become the focal point for the neighborhood, helping them to craft an identity and advocate for better services and more inclusion within the municipal government.

Stephanie Houston, Urban Matters design lab and NOMADgardens

It was a visit to see a relative in Amsterdam. I was finishing up my M Arch, but decided to travel a bit (Barcelona + Amsterdam) with a friend. Coincidently, I met a past friend who would later become my husband on that trip. And as luck would have it my husband had just been introduced to architecture and urban design and he had reunited with his Dutch relatives, one of which was Philip Spangenberg – a great teacher, friend and human being. He was a well known Dutch urban designer, sociologist and architect, and  I was the lucky person that Philip toured around Amsterdam and England. He taught me how to see the world, how design affects people and I was forever changed. Soon after I took an Urban Design position where I learned first hand just how much sociology, economics and politics affect how we experience the built environment. He passed away just before I moved back to the States and to honor him, I named my design firm Urban Matters after him. I wrote a piece about this very visit which can be found on my website.

Charles Newman, Afritekt

All design has a social impact.  From an effective tool that improves access to basic needs – to a painting that simply makes one think, all design has the potential to improve lives in numerous ways. I first became interested in improving lives while sitting at my desk job in New York City.  I was picking out curtains for wealthy clients… and realized that this was not what I was made for.  A few weeks later I stumbled upon Engineers Without Borders.  I found my way to Africa and haven’t looked back since.  I am challenged, I am learning, I am working. This is what I was made for.

Sharon Davis, Sharon Davis Design

I have been involved in volunteer and charitable work, in some capacity, throughout the entirety of my life, but the moment that allowed me to make social impact design part of my career occurred through Lekha Singh. Lekha is the donor who contributed the funds to build the Women’s Opportunity Center in Rwanda, and when she chose my firm to design the WOC that is the moment I knew that my career in design could also positively impact society.

Yashar Hanstad, TYIN tegnestue Architects

We went to Thailand to build the first orphanage as a reaction to the teorethical education we were receiving at university. We were trying to find more meaning to architecture than just shapes, surfaces, and intelligent designs.

Gregory Kearley, Inscape Publico

The pivotal moment in my career that lead to social impact design and eventually to Inscape Publico was a series of events, rather than a singular point in time. I had the opportunity to work on two projects early in my career that helped form the long-term mission of my practice. The first was the design of the ARCH Training Center. ARCH is Action to Rehabilitate Community Housing. Located in an abandoned Woolworth store in Southeast Washington, DC, Inscape’s design created a forum for the many community based educational programs including ARCH’s youth-build program. During the course of 18 months, the youth-build program’s participants are taught construction skills and in turn rehabilitate housing in communities East of the Anacostia River. The second project was the design of the Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts, now the Sitar Arts Center. The Sitar Arts Center provides multidisciplinary arts education to the children and youth of Washington, DC. 80 percent of the over 700 children who participate in the Sitar’s after school, weekend, and summer classes come from low-income households. Inscape was awarded an AIA Pro Bono Publico Award for the design of the Sitar Center. These two projects, along with the work we did on the Afghan Women’s Development Centers, were significant design opportunities early in my career and rewarding, both professionally and personally.

Stefan Schwarzkopf, Inscape Publico

The pivotal moment in my career that lead me to social impact design was a collaborative pro bono project that I worked on with three architect friends while we were employed by Gensler.  The project, called Park Life | City Movement, was an installation in Patterson Park in Baltimore, MD, part of the citywide Urban Forest Project. Patterson Park is fairly large and we wanted to maximize the visibility and therefore impact of our installation, and draw people into the park who otherwise may not go there so they could experience the benefits of trees and green space in the city first hand. We decided to design on a large scale with large quantities of just a few basic materials. Many colleagues helped with fundraising, materials procurement, the review and approvals process with the city, and the recruitment & management of over 100 volunteers to quickly install and then de-install the 500 tree stakes, 6,000 feet of rolled grass sod, and 8,600 feet of bright red burlap. These materials were installed throughout the park in trees, on the ground, and interwoven through a central activity zone. After de-installation, all of the materials were re-used by the city for tree planting and soil stabilization & cover. This project, with its grass roots process of achieving a vision for the greater good of a place, was very inspiring and rewarding to me both professionally and personally.

Kate Ferguson, CoDesign Studio

When I was a student I was invited to a project called the Global Studio. A group of architecture and planning students spent 3 weeks in Istanbul learning about participatory design, and working with residents in the historic, low-income neighbourhood of Zeyrek. It made me realise the impact that design professionals could have on improving the lives of people living in poverty, but also that the way I was being taught at university was not preparing me to do this work effectively. That experience led to co-leading a design build project in Papua New Guinea with Rosemary Korawali, and eventually connecting with Lucinda and Hugh to co-found CoDesign Studio, where we are working to provide opportunities for young professionals to gain experience in community oriented design, and also to provide services and benefit to socially excluded people in Australia and internationally.

 

Jason Minter, Pedestrian Design

The “moment” in my career in which I pivoted towards social impact design was more of a year than a moment.  I was a project leader at AT103, a boutique architectural office in Mexico City.  At the same time that I was crafting designer flats for the Mexico City’s elite, I lived at Casa Victoria, a hostel at 11 Rio Volga.  Casa Victoria was not the kind of hostel targeted by westerners for a Central American excursion; instead its inhabitants were predominately young Mexican workers who lived there long term in cheap ($130 per month) communal rooms—and I roomed with them.  Here I enjoyed the community of a group that took care of a stranger.  Here I also spent months in winter dreading the shower because it was ice cold.  I lived the double life of a creative professional by day and as a poor American living among working class Mexicans by night.  The sharp contrast between these worlds was biting.  In time, I realized that my place is actually between these worlds, applying the highest quality of design I can provide to the causes of my peers –the general public.

Jim Taylor, Proximity Designs

Debbie and I worked in Cambodia in the 1980s with the Mennonite Central Committee. It was a time when there weren’t that many organisations there, there were limited resources but yet huge needs. That was when I I really became concerned with how we could use this little bit of money that we had to create a big impact, the biggest possible impact. And that was through clever service design. That was the time that everything changed for me.

Steven Lewis, Thinking Leadership

I grew up in a household where the breadwinner was an architect. My dad, Roger C. Lewis, was one of a fraternity of New York area Black architects who came into their own in the post-civil rights period of the early 1970’s. Many of these pioneers had steadily perfected their craft under the rarely forgiving eye of majority-owned companies until, thanks to a perfect storm of sorts, the stars aligned and circumstances led to their emergence as firm-owners. Once armed with autonomy, survival became the first priority. After all, these gentlemen, and the occasional lady (Norma Sklarek was a dear friend and mentor) were rarely invited into the board room, or conference room, or wherever partners and owners were discussing marketing strategy, business development, employee benefits, etc. Part of that survival was accessing a client base that would be accepting and hopefully supportive. Included among that cohort were community organizations, churches, and other “liberal” institutions whose social conscience often left them more concerned with the “act” than the result. I was a teenager during that time, and as the oldest of four children, happened to be my dad’s compatriot, accompanying him to normal days at work, as well as special events such as the community design charrette that we helped lead in Newark. That experience of working with residents of the affected area, along with civic leaders and other concerned professionals made a true imprint on my sensibilities and planted the seed of SEED, so to speak. However, I will make one important distinction. Public Interest Design, or whatever you want to call it this week, has always existed within the ranks of minority architects. It is inextricably woven into the value system of how we practice (not that other non-minorities don’t share the DNA). It is not something that can be added on, or taken on and off like a fine suit of clothes, but rather a way of feeling, thinking, and practicing that elevates an architect to the level of citizen leader. We can only strive to honor that opportunity at a time when there is so much need.

Now that you know about these 15, I’d love to hear about you. Introduce yourself and your ideal outcome by commenting in the box below and click “post comment”. No pressure to write an essay; I just want to get to know you a bit!