Why I'm an architect that designs for social impact, not buildings | Liz Ogbu | TEDxMidAtlantic

00:12:54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0MnGZ1gB4k

الملخص

TLDRIn her talk, Liz, an architect, explains her non-traditional approach to architecture focused on designing for social impact rather than creating typical buildings. Having both read and disliked "The Fountainhead," she has found herself at odds with traditional architectural expectations. Instead of building physical structures, Liz works on creating opportunities for impact, wearing hats like that of an expert citizen, storyteller, and translator. She draws on her expertise and humanity to empower communities, especially in poorer areas, treating them as partners in design. Examples include redesigning cookstoves in Tanzania to better suit users' needs and creating Day Labour Stations to provide essential services to day laborers. Although traditional architectural projects, such as the Day Labour Station, faced setbacks due to economic downturns, Liz emphasizes the importance of transforming perceptions and narratives about spaces and people. Ultimately, she urges a reevaluation of the role of architecture and design, highlighting their potential to address social issues while encouraging the audience to apply these principles in their respective fields.

الوجبات الجاهزة

  • 🏛️ Many architects are asked about 'The Fountainhead,' a popular but divisive book and film.
  • 👷‍♀️ The speaker doesn't design traditional buildings but focuses on impactful opportunities.
  • 📚 Designing for impact involves roles like being an expert citizen, storyteller, and translator.
  • 💼 Communities possess valuable knowledge and should be partners, not just benefactors.
  • 🔥 Issues with cookstoves in communities highlighted the need for user-centric design approaches.
  • 🏗️ The Day Labour Station project aimed to dignify labor sites but faced economic challenges.
  • 🗣️ Storytelling can transform public perceptions of people and spaces, fostering social change.
  • 🌍 Combining hard design skills with empathy is key to addressing social challenges effectively.
  • ❌ Economic downturns can dramatically affect social projects aimed at vulnerable communities.
  • 🤝 The principles discussed are applicable in various fields, not just architecture.

الجدول الزمني

  • 00:00:00 - 00:05:00

    Liz, an architect, often faces questions about her profession. Interestingly, she admits not designing community centers despite claiming to do so. Instead, she focuses on designing opportunities for impact. This involves assuming roles like an expert citizen, storyteller, and translator. In her role as an expert citizen, Liz emphasizes creating spaces for community voices, as exhibited through her interaction with Tanzanian communities on cookstove adoption. The challenges faced by these communities highlighted a need for solutions focusing on cooks' needs rather than solely improving cookstoves.

  • 00:05:00 - 00:12:54

    Liz discusses her role as a storyteller and the creation of a Day Labour Station for day laborers like Roberto. By understanding the needs and experiences of laborers, Liz and her team designed flexible stations to improve their work conditions. Although the project ceased due to an economic downturn, it sparked important conversations about these under-recognized workers and their spaces. As a translator, Liz intersects stories and needs to create tangible designs serving societal issues. She encourages viewing architecture as a blend of technical and human skills, influencing social impact and addressing human aspirations.

الخريطة الذهنية

Mind Map

الأسئلة الشائعة

  • Has the speaker read or seen "The Fountainhead"?

    Yes, the speaker has both read the book and seen the movie "The Fountainhead," but did not enjoy them.

  • What kind of buildings does the speaker design?

    The speaker does not design traditional buildings but instead focuses on creating opportunities for social impact.

  • What does "designing opportunities for impact" mean?

    It involves designing solutions that create social impact rather than just physical structures.

  • Who is an expert citizen according to the speaker?

    An expert citizen is someone trained in a specific expertise who still retains human emotions and insights, and collaborates with communities to create meaningful solutions.

  • What is the significance of storytelling in the speaker's approach?

    Storytelling helps convey the real-life stories and challenges of communities, increasing awareness and driving social change.

  • What role does the speaker see herself playing when working with communities?

    The speaker sees herself as an expert citizen, storyteller, and translator, facilitating understanding and engagement.

  • What was the issue with the cookstoves in the example given?

    Although many understood the benefits of cookstoves, adoption was hindered by cost-related issues, such as the high price of fuel.

  • What is the Day Labour Station?

    The Day Labour Station is a prototype structure designed to provide basic facilities and improve conditions at informal labor sites.

  • Why did the Day Labour Station project face challenges during the economic collapse?

    Cities faced financial constraints, making it politically and economically unfeasible to prioritize the needs of undocumented workers.

  • What message does the speaker want to leave the audience with?

    The speaker encourages viewing design as a tool for social impact and to apply both design skills and humanity to solve societal issues.

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التمرير التلقائي:
  • 00:00:00
    Translator: Anton Zamaraev Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
  • 00:00:12
    Hi, I'm Liz, and I'm an architect.
  • 00:00:17
    Whenever I tell people I'm an architect,
  • 00:00:19
    one of the first questions they often ask me
  • 00:00:21
    is whether or not I have read or seen "The Fountainhead."
  • 00:00:26
    And for those of you -
  • 00:00:28
    Clearly, some of you have.
  • 00:00:29
    For those of you who are familiar with it
  • 00:00:31
    and have just now silently asked yourself this question,
  • 00:00:34
    let me just get that out of the way.
  • 00:00:36
    Yes, I have both read the book and seen the movie.
  • 00:00:38
    No, I didn't really like either of them.
  • 00:00:41
    (Laughter) (Applause)
  • 00:00:45
    And yes, this probably should have been some indication to me
  • 00:00:48
    that I was well on my way to an architectural identity crisis,
  • 00:00:51
    which then leads into the second question that I often get,
  • 00:00:54
    "What kind of buildings do you design?"
  • 00:00:56
    And for me, for the longest time,
  • 00:00:58
    this has been a hard question to answer.
  • 00:01:01
    Usually, I hem and haw, and then I often say,
  • 00:01:04
    "Oh, I design community centers."
  • 00:01:06
    Partly because a lot of my work is with communities,
  • 00:01:08
    so it's kind of true,
  • 00:01:10
    and community centers is a typology that people can relate to.
  • 00:01:13
    So they're like, "Oh yeah! Great! Cool!"
  • 00:01:15
    And then we move on with the conversation.
  • 00:01:17
    But the truth of the matter is I actually don't design community centers.
  • 00:01:21
    And so what I wanted to try to do here today
  • 00:01:23
    is to explain to you exactly what it is that I do.
  • 00:01:27
    I'm an architect that doesn't design buildings.
  • 00:01:32
    The things that I design, the things that I build
  • 00:01:35
    are actually opportunities for impact.
  • 00:01:39
    Right now, you're probably asking yourself one of two questions
  • 00:01:42
    which I can safely say that my family, friends,
  • 00:01:44
    and even architecture school professors have asked themselves more than once.
  • 00:01:47
    The first is, "What the heck is designing opportunities for impact?"
  • 00:01:51
    That's a good question.
  • 00:01:53
    The second is, "What kind of architect doesn't design buildings?"
  • 00:01:57
    Also a good question.
  • 00:01:58
    By the way, that second question is often known as,
  • 00:02:00
    "Wow, did she really go $75,000 into debt at a prestigious architecture school
  • 00:02:04
    only to not practice architecture?"
  • 00:02:07
    I'm still trying to work that one out.
  • 00:02:09
    But let me see if I can explain to you
  • 00:02:11
    what it means to design opportunities for impact.
  • 00:02:14
    It often means that I'm wearing one of three hats:
  • 00:02:17
    that of the expert citizen,
  • 00:02:19
    that of the storyteller,
  • 00:02:20
    that of the translator.
  • 00:02:23
    Expert citizen is this great term
  • 00:02:25
    that I came across a couple of years ago in a book called "Spatial Agency,"
  • 00:02:28
    and it so perfectly encapsulated part of what I do
  • 00:02:32
    that I have used it religiously since.
  • 00:02:34
    An expert citizen, I imagine, is many of us in this room here today.
  • 00:02:38
    We've been trained in some type of expertise,
  • 00:02:40
    in my case as a designer.
  • 00:02:42
    What I love about this is the pairing with the citizen.
  • 00:02:45
    The idea that we're still humans at the end of the day.
  • 00:02:48
    We have emotions, we have assumptions,
  • 00:02:50
    we have intuition.
  • 00:02:52
    And the idea of expert often means
  • 00:02:54
    people think of it as we're looking at things
  • 00:02:57
    purely in this objective way, almost scientifically.
  • 00:03:00
    But I think it's important to remember that when you combine that human element,
  • 00:03:04
    it's actually a really rich combination.
  • 00:03:07
    Many of the communities that I work with are considered to be citizen experts.
  • 00:03:11
    Whether I'm working in a poor African-American community
  • 00:03:14
    in San Francisco
  • 00:03:15
    or a low-income Kenyan community in Nairobi,
  • 00:03:18
    those people know more about what it is like
  • 00:03:20
    to live in their communities than I ever will.
  • 00:03:23
    They know about their needs and aspirations,
  • 00:03:25
    their successes and their failures.
  • 00:03:27
    And what I need to do as the expert citizen
  • 00:03:29
    is to create space at the table for them
  • 00:03:31
    to be able to come and share that knowledge.
  • 00:03:33
    Because oftentimes they have not been empowered
  • 00:03:36
    to see that knowledge as expertise.
  • 00:03:38
    And so I try, as much as possible, to issue out an invitation
  • 00:03:41
    in which they feel comfortable doing that.
  • 00:03:44
    I can best describe this through the story of Mama Sama.
  • 00:03:47
    Mama Sama and many women throughout the global South
  • 00:03:50
    face a problem when it comes to cooking.
  • 00:03:53
    The traditional technology is actually a three-stone fire.
  • 00:03:56
    And it actually creates a lot of issues
  • 00:03:58
    including health, from the smoke inhalation,
  • 00:04:01
    and environment,
  • 00:04:02
    from the deforestation and air pollution,
  • 00:04:05
    and then also safety, when people go out to fetch wood.
  • 00:04:09
    Cookstoves, particularly improved cookstoves,
  • 00:04:11
    is something that has been around for over 30 years
  • 00:04:13
    as an effort to try and alleviate the issues that come up with the fire.
  • 00:04:18
    And there has been a huge push from many governments and NGOs
  • 00:04:22
    to try and rapidly increase the adoption of the cookstoves
  • 00:04:25
    by the year 2020.
  • 00:04:27
    Last year, when I was a fellow at ido.org, my colleagues and I were hired
  • 00:04:30
    by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
  • 00:04:32
    to try and investigate a way
  • 00:04:34
    to close that gap between the adoption of the stove
  • 00:04:36
    and the potential that it could still have.
  • 00:04:40
    And so we spent three weeks in Tanzania, which was one of the target countries.
  • 00:04:44
    We went into many homes,
  • 00:04:45
    talked to many citizen experts, like Mama Sama.
  • 00:04:48
    And we even cooked with them.
  • 00:04:51
    And what we found is that many of the women
  • 00:04:53
    actually were familiar with the idea of the cookstove.
  • 00:04:55
    They even understood its benefits.
  • 00:04:57
    The problem was that when it came time
  • 00:05:00
    to cooking a lot of food for their extended family,
  • 00:05:02
    a single cookstove was not enough.
  • 00:05:05
    When they wanted to cook ugali, which is a traditional dish,
  • 00:05:08
    it is just as hard to cook on a cookstove, if not harder,
  • 00:05:11
    than cooking on a woodfire.
  • 00:05:14
    And when it came to the cost of fuel, particularly if they were using charcoal,
  • 00:05:18
    the cost of a month's supply of fuel
  • 00:05:20
    was equal to 10 times the cost of a single stove.
  • 00:05:23
    In that case, the benefits of a cookstove were not enough.
  • 00:05:26
    So we were sent into the field to answer the question of
  • 00:05:29
    "How could we use design to increase the adoption of the cookstove?"
  • 00:05:32
    But what we found was that adoption really wasn't the problem.
  • 00:05:35
    Many of them owned cookstoves,
  • 00:05:37
    they just couldn't afford to be able to use it often.
  • 00:05:40
    And if you don't use it often,
  • 00:05:41
    you actually can't get the benefits from it.
  • 00:05:43
    So by taking the time to listen to Mama Sama
  • 00:05:46
    and the other citizen experts,
  • 00:05:47
    and really understand their needs and aspirations of their daily life,
  • 00:05:51
    what we found is that in order to generate design solutions
  • 00:05:54
    that would be appropriate,
  • 00:05:55
    we had to actually design from this question,
  • 00:05:58
    "How might we design for the cook and not the cookstove?"
  • 00:06:01
    It wasn't about improving the actual technology of the stove,
  • 00:06:06
    it wasn't about increasing access to markets.
  • 00:06:08
    It was about designing things
  • 00:06:10
    that actually responded to the women themselves.
  • 00:06:12
    And so we came up with a bunch of different design solutions,
  • 00:06:15
    everything from implements that could be added to the stove
  • 00:06:18
    to make it easier to cook
  • 00:06:19
    to actually creating fuel-saving initiatives,
  • 00:06:22
    something the Global Alliance had not previously looked at.
  • 00:06:26
    Next, I want to talk to you about being a storyteller.
  • 00:06:29
    And through that, I'm going to tell a little bit about the story of Roberto.
  • 00:06:33
    Roberto and his colleagues are many things:
  • 00:06:35
    they are artisans, they are craftsmen, they are tradesmen.
  • 00:06:39
    They're also day laborers.
  • 00:06:41
    They're some of the over 115,000 men and women
  • 00:06:44
    who look for a day’s work
  • 00:06:45
    for a day’s wages in cities across the US every day.
  • 00:06:49
    And the vast majority of the sites that they do it at
  • 00:06:51
    are informal sites,
  • 00:06:53
    meaning that they were designed for other uses.
  • 00:06:55
    They are the street corners, the gas stations,
  • 00:06:58
    the Home Depot parking lot.
  • 00:07:00
    And usually at those sites, they lack even the most basic of human necessities.
  • 00:07:05
    There's no shelter,
  • 00:07:06
    there's no water, there's no toilets.
  • 00:07:09
    A few years ago,
  • 00:07:10
    I was the design director at a non-profit called Public Architecture,
  • 00:07:14
    and my colleagues and I felt that there was something
  • 00:07:16
    that we could do about this.
  • 00:07:17
    But it wasn't like a day laborer was ever going to walk into our office
  • 00:07:21
    and say, "Hi, I'm Roberto, and I'm having a problem at the corner.
  • 00:07:24
    I could really use your help."
  • 00:07:26
    So we actually, had to go out into the streets to them.
  • 00:07:29
    And we treated them both as our clients and our co-designers.
  • 00:07:32
    And the product of those conversations, several years of conversations,
  • 00:07:36
    resulted in this -
  • 00:07:38
    the Day Labour Station.
  • 00:07:39
    This is a prototype, a semi-permanent structure
  • 00:07:41
    that can be deployed at informal hiring sites.
  • 00:07:44
    It's based on an idea of a kit of parts
  • 00:07:46
    so you can reconfigure it to meet the needs of a given site.
  • 00:07:49
    In this case, what you see is a rather large station
  • 00:07:52
    because it was supposed to be a proposal for a site in Los Angeles
  • 00:07:55
    that was going to house over 150 workers.
  • 00:07:58
    But the central elements were always the same:
  • 00:08:00
    a seating area and pods that could house a bathroom,
  • 00:08:03
    an office for a work site coordinator,
  • 00:08:06
    or even a kitchen so that you could have an income-generating food business
  • 00:08:09
    that could help to sustain the station.
  • 00:08:11
    It's flexible in use,
  • 00:08:12
    everything from an employment center to a classroom
  • 00:08:15
    so you could teach additional skills to the workers.
  • 00:08:18
    I often get asked if by building this, was I not making it worse
  • 00:08:22
    for Roberto and others like him.
  • 00:08:25
    But the fact of the matter is that many of these hiring sites
  • 00:08:28
    have been around for years if not decades.
  • 00:08:30
    If you think of most cities
  • 00:08:31
    when you go around and you're looking, there are no giant signs saying,
  • 00:08:35
    "Day laborers here!"
  • 00:08:36
    But if you were to ask anyone, they would be able to tell you,
  • 00:08:39
    "Oh, yeah. You go to that corner, and that's where you pick them up."
  • 00:08:42
    The fact that there is nothing there
  • 00:08:44
    belies the fact that they're actually rather permanent.
  • 00:08:47
    I recall Juan, who was a day laborer that I met in Houston
  • 00:08:50
    when we were looking at building one of these there,
  • 00:08:53
    and he said to me, "I've been coming to this site for many years.
  • 00:08:56
    It is a place in which I earn my living.
  • 00:08:58
    It is sacred to me.
  • 00:09:00
    But because there is nothing here, no one else sees that."
  • 00:09:04
    And so for Juan and others like him,
  • 00:09:06
    building this wasn't about trying to create something
  • 00:09:09
    that would bring unwanted attention to them.
  • 00:09:11
    It was about trying to create something
  • 00:09:13
    that is actually emblematic of the permanence of their site
  • 00:09:16
    and that could help actually bring dignity to them.
  • 00:09:19
    In terms of an architectural project, this was actually a bit of a failure.
  • 00:09:23
    We launched it right before the economic collapse,
  • 00:09:25
    and although I flew all around the country at the invitation of cities
  • 00:09:28
    who were really interested as this is a novel solution,
  • 00:09:31
    when the collapse hit,
  • 00:09:32
    as you're closing schools and cutting services,
  • 00:09:34
    it simply was politically untenable to spend money on illegals.
  • 00:09:39
    But that actually forced us to think
  • 00:09:40
    about what were some of the other outcomes that came out of this.
  • 00:09:43
    We treated this project not as a design exercise
  • 00:09:46
    but as an opportunity to create transformation
  • 00:09:49
    of the way in which people saw a particular type of space
  • 00:09:52
    and saw a particular type of people.
  • 00:09:54
    And to that end,
  • 00:09:55
    we tried to tell the stories of Roberto, Juan, Gabrielle, Leobardo
  • 00:10:00
    and others like them.
  • 00:10:02
    We tried to tell the stories of them and their American dream,
  • 00:10:05
    their desire to come here for a better life for themselves
  • 00:10:07
    and for their families.
  • 00:10:08
    And we tried to tell the stories of their sacred spaces,
  • 00:10:11
    the places in which they earned a living which would support that dream.
  • 00:10:15
    And we took that story far and wide.
  • 00:10:17
    We took it to The Los Angeles Times,
  • 00:10:19
    the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,
  • 00:10:21
    the Venice Bienalle.
  • 00:10:22
    And what you see here is actually a poster from a big international award
  • 00:10:26
    that we won for this project.
  • 00:10:28
    And on this poster are actually quotes from emails
  • 00:10:30
    that I received over the years from doing this project,
  • 00:10:33
    both good and, actually, a lot bad.
  • 00:10:35
    And the thing that we felt really important
  • 00:10:37
    was that this was a catalyst for a conversation.
  • 00:10:40
    No one was talking about these sites before,
  • 00:10:42
    and by opening up the conversation
  • 00:10:44
    we were talking both about what they are now
  • 00:10:46
    and what they have the potential to be.
  • 00:10:48
    It was also really important to tell the story not only to the wider public
  • 00:10:52
    but also to the workers themselves.
  • 00:10:56
    One of my favorite moments from this project
  • 00:10:58
    was that I had the opportunity
  • 00:10:59
    to present it to a convention of day laborers -
  • 00:11:01
    and yes, there is such a thing.
  • 00:11:03
    And I only spoke for a short period of time,
  • 00:11:05
    but after I did, many people came up to me,
  • 00:11:08
    and I was truly touched by how touched they were
  • 00:11:11
    at being able to see up there on that big screen
  • 00:11:14
    something that acknowledged that they had been seen,
  • 00:11:17
    that they had been heard, and that they had been valued.
  • 00:11:20
    And that's the power of being a storyteller.
  • 00:11:23
    As for the translator hat, you have actually seen that
  • 00:11:26
    over the ten plus minutes that I've been talking.
  • 00:11:28
    It's basically taking the things I hear when I listen at the table
  • 00:11:32
    and the stories that I know that I need to tell to create impact
  • 00:11:35
    and combining them into something that is tangible -
  • 00:11:38
    a reflection of all of that.
  • 00:11:40
    And that allows us to move forward on whatever the social issue is
  • 00:11:44
    that I'm trying to address.
  • 00:11:45
    And so, that is what it means to design opportunities for impact.
  • 00:11:49
    It means that I'm an expert citizen
  • 00:11:51
    who creates space at the table for citizen experts.
  • 00:11:54
    That I'm a storyteller that tries to tell authentic stories
  • 00:11:57
    of the people I meet and design with.
  • 00:11:59
    And that I'm a translator
  • 00:12:01
    who tries to bring tangibility to a vision of places and services
  • 00:12:04
    that speak to the needs and aspirations of the human experience.
  • 00:12:09
    And so I hope that if you take anything away today from my talk,
  • 00:12:12
    well, there is sort of three things.
  • 00:12:14
    The first is never really ask that Fountainhead question to an architect.
  • 00:12:17
    We don't like it.
  • 00:12:19
    The other thing is that I hope
  • 00:12:20
    that you think about architecture and design a little bit differently:
  • 00:12:24
    about what it is and what it has the potential to impact.
  • 00:12:26
    And the third is that the things that I have shown you
  • 00:12:29
    are about the combination of both the hard skills of design
  • 00:12:32
    and the soft skills of humanity.
  • 00:12:34
    But those soft skills are not the domain, the exclusive domain of design.
  • 00:12:39
    They can be used by all of you
  • 00:12:41
    in anything that you are trying to do in your own lives and in your own crafts.
  • 00:12:44
    And so I hope that you move on today
  • 00:12:46
    trying to figure out exactly how to do that.
  • 00:12:49
    Thank you.
  • 00:12:50
    (Applause)
الوسوم
  • architecture
  • social impact
  • design
  • community engagement
  • expert citizen
  • storytelling
  • sustainable design
  • Day Labour Station
  • human-centered design
  • cookstoves