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