Two years ago, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York displayed 30 humanitarian design and engineering projects, including a biodegradable shelter, a low-tech food cooler, and a straw that helps prevent the spread of cholera and typhoid. They were exhibited, incongruously enough, on the back lawn of the museum's headquarters, the former Carnegie mansion on Fifth Avenue. The show, called "Design For the Other 90%," was a reminder that only a tenth of the world's population benefits from the services of designers.
"Design For the Other 90%" marked the unofficial beginning of social design, a movement that coalesced and found new urgency during the financial crisis as the design community started to rethink its role in a culture less fixated on consumption.
The latest chapter in social design occurred earlier this month in Aspen, where the latest iteration of the 50+-year-old Aspen Design Summit (PDF file) teamed up designers including Tim Brown of IDEO, our own design blogger Robert Fabricant of Frog Design, and Carnegie Mellon faculty Renna Al-Yassini. The designers assembled in studio groups to come up with real-world solutions to global problems as well as a plausible plan for funding and implementation within two years. You might think of it as the TED Conference with homework. "This isn't a conference where people meet and agree to have another conference," said William Drenttel, a graphic designer and a founder of the Winterhouse Institute, which organized the event with the AIGA. "We ended up with six projects and all have people committed to working on them."
The 64 participants broke up into five groups to develop solutions to real problems: a box containing toys, games, and other early development tools that can be dropped from an airplane into refugee camps and other disaster areas; a low-cost sanitary pad made of local materials for East African girls so they don't miss school when they menstruate; medical clinics for rural areas; and a campaign to encourage Americans over 50 to undergo screenings and other preventive treatments.
One assignment was radically reframed. A proposed national designer center to help alleviate rural poverty--to be located in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest areas in the country--was rejected as a case of design imposed from on high. Instead the group focused on how to establish an apparatus that would help coordinate existing grassroots programs.
In addition to the designers, officials from UNICEF, the Mayo Clinic, and the CDC, as well as other non-government organizations, sent participants. While none of the projects are funded, these groups have expressed interest in developing four of the projects germinated at Aspen. "This is not a weekend effort," Drenttel said. "This is about sustained engagement over a decade or so."
Imagine for a moment that a business needs a radically innovative approach to a vexing problem. Designers and managers start with an intense focus on the human aspect--the real problems their customers face in daily life. Somebody gives the obligatory talk about out-of-the-box thinking. Then they step back--way back--and let creativity, not the cold exigencies of logic, reframe the problem. When it works, this process can lead to startling new solutions. In the parlance of the moment, this is called "design thinking."
In this fix-the-world Obama moment, when all is up for review, design thinking is applied to everything from new auto showrooms to health care.
Can it also refine your personal life? Warren Berger (above) thinks so. In his new book, Glimmer, Berger argues that basic design strategies can be adapted to everyday issues, such as how to get along with colleagues, how to balance work and life, and how to ease gracefully into old age.
Berger says the book's title expresses that moment when a new solution to an old problem comes into view.
"The designer's job is to solve problems every day and create alternative solutions," Berger says. "What can the rest of us learn from that?"
To find out, Berger interviewed 100 designers and 100 other innovators and creative types about their methodologies, though most of the book focuses on Bruce Mau (above), the Canadian graphic designer who made his studio's inner workings available to Berger.
In a recent interview, Berger sketched out three ways that design thinking can be applied to your life:
1. Designers are good at asking stupid questions. "Step back and reassess everything. Ask fundamental questions: Why are we living in this city? Why am I in this job? There are all sorts of assumptions in your life to reconsider."
2. Designers put problems into visual form. "Bruce Mau never thought he'd apply design principles to his own life, but when he was overwhelmed by travel and work he created a graphic representation of how he spent his time. Designers know that when you see everything in front of you, connections and patterns become more understandable."
3. Designers think laterally. "They force their brains to go sideways and consider solutions that are off the path. For example, a bank can transform into boutique hotel or a community center. Most of what Dean Kamen does is apply technology to new areas. The trick is to avoid problems in a straightforward manner so that you're open to left-field possibilities. It's all about getting away from heuristic bias."
Lurking behind this discussion is a fundamental question: Can design thinking promote happiness? "You can design your life so that it's stimulating," Berger said. "Richard Saul Wurman, creator of the Ted Conference, is always learning about a new field. When he's done with the project or book he moves on. I think that's a good model for designing one's life so that it has flow. We tend to be happiest when we're challenged. But not over challenged."
The extra-large architectural complex--art museums, libraries, office complexes--built so prolifically over the past decade are commonly described as expressions of civic pride. They might just as easily be called grandiose expressions of runaway prosperity and municipal vanity. Whatever you call them, shrinking government revenue and newly parsimonious corporate donors have combined to bring the curtain down on mega-projects. Welcome to the post-big epoch.
Nothing signals the death of an era more conclusively than academic post-mortems. On Saturday the Cooper Union held an all-day conference, "Arrested Development," to discuss the dubious fate of mega-projects. Point of debate: Are projects like the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and sustainable neighborhoods like the Beddington Zero Energy Development in England (above) beneficial or harmful to surrounding communities? Like many such mega-projects, Atlantic Yards would eliminate existing streets, overwhelm the surrounding brownstone neighborhood and add an estimated 40,000 new car trips every day.
At a symposium called "After Bigness" held Monday at the school of architecture at Columbia, Alan Berger, an MIT professor and specialist in the reuse of industrial landscapes, argued that the realities of efficiency and waste will shape large-scale architecture in the coming years. "The solutions aren't coming from spatialists and formalists," he said.
The chatter this week about the end of big-projects comes three weeks after the opening of a performing arts complex in Dallas (left), which is among the last of its kind. "No doubt many saw the recent opening of Dallas's imposing new performing arts center as a welcome sign of civic confidence during hard times," Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The New York Times. "But it also signaled a closing."
There is at least one cultural complex still in the pipeline before the breed dies out. A cultural district in Miami on a 30-acre landfill beside Biscayne Bay is already funded, so it appears likely to be built. It will include a science museum by Grimshaw Architects and an art museum (right) by Herzog & de Meuron.
If big projects are dying, is it because of the intractable difficulties of working on a large scale? It took five years to build the World Trade Center towers in the early 1960s. Not a single structure has been completed in the eight years since 9/11.
The Post-Big Era arrives, fittingly enough, along with renewed interest in Jane Jacobs (left), the activist and writer who in the 1950s and 1960s fought off the huge public-works projects that Robert Moses tried to impose on New York. Among other things, Moses would have built a 10-lane elevated highway through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. Her campaign to preserve the messy vitality and small-scale ingenuity of the streets is chronicled in Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, a new book by Anthony Flint.
At 9:40 a.m. on Thursday, a white van pulled over near the corner of 68th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. A cameraman armed with a telephoto lens watched from the corner. A video crew snooped from a rooftop. Half a dozen operatives on the street murmured discretely into walkie-talkies, calling each other "Hound Dog," "Crow's Nest," and other code names. Within minutes Andrew Haarsager, an interaction designer with the technology firm Tellart, removed a white steel chair from the van and placed it on the sidewalk. He crouched over to activate a Motorola cell phone with GPS software affixed to the underside of the seat, then skulked away.
Over the course of two days this week, Mono, an advertising firm based in Minneapolis, dropped off 25 Real Good Chairs, a $129 item designed and manufactured by Blu Dot. Whoever found the chairs was free to take them. The chairs were left outside the Apollo Theater on 125 Street (below), at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and atop the Highline, elevated park on the West Side, among other New York locations.
The recipients did not know that the video crew documented their snatch and get-away, sometimes trailing them for blocks. "I've never actually trailed anybody before," said Henry Joost, an executive producer for Supermarche, the video production firm. "The only thing I know about surveillance is from movies."
The 10 chairs equipped with GPS have their own twitter feeds updating their locations in real time. A Web site will display the drop point of each chair and its current whereabouts until the GPS batteries run out.
Some chairs have traveled surprising distances. A chair dropped Wednesday on the lower Bowery had migrated dozen or more blocks to Union Square by yesterday afternoon. And within a few hours a chair left on Central Park West showed up a couple of miles away in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Mono considered Twittering the drop locations in advance in the style of flashmob events, but decided against it for fear of drawing unmanageable crowds.
The drop-offs are an exercise in interactive marketing timed to the first anniversary of Blu Dot's Soho store, which opened Dec. 11, in the thick of the economic collapse. The company will show a short video documentary about the project at an anniversary party held in the store next month. "We want to be the friendly modernists," said Medora Danz, director of sales for Blu Dot. "We're Midwesterners and we want the showroom to reflect that. We want to emphasize that we take design seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously."
This weekend the Supermarche video crew will try to track down the chair's new owners for interviews. The GPS may lead them to a building or a stretch of buildings but not to individual dwellings. So they're planning to post leaflets asking for help. "It's going to be tricky," said Heather Burnikel, a Mono project leader. "That's the biggest mystery of this project: Will they talk to us?" Each chair comes with an 800 number and the promise of a second chair if the owner calls in.
The only hitch occurred Wednesday in Chinatown, where a chair sat in Cunfucius Plaza (above) for an hour and a half without gaining notice. The crew eventually twittered its location, and it was snatched almost immediately. Minutes later a woman showed up asking passersby if they'd seen a chair sitting around anywhere.
Yesterday the crew on West 68th Street conducted themselves with utmost caution, suspecting that chair stalkers might have sussed out their location. "A treasure hunt mentality has taken hold," said Danz. "We have fans who are willing to cyber-stalk us."
Meanwhile, the crew was watching for potential takers. A handful of passersby double taked, but walked on. Danz spotted a hipster in a hoodie and porkpie hat approaching. "He'll be the one," she predicted. Sure enough, he stopped and sat on the chair, but unaccountably strolled off. At 10:23 a.m. a man with long hair and an army jacket abruptly picked up the chair and carried it into a Christian Science reading room. Moments later he left and walked west without it. A crew member went in to investigate on the pretense of needing to use the ladies room, but did not see it. "It's so cloak and dagger," Burnikel said. Within moments the chair showed up on the Web site, joining the constellation of other chairs loose in the city.
Here's one for the annals of experimental marketing: On Wednesday and Thursday a white van carrying a stack of powder-coated Real Good chairs by Blu Dot, a Minneapolis design firm started by three college friends, will patrol Manhattan neighborhoods dropping the chairs one-by-one on the street. No promotional material or sales pitch will accompany the drop-offs. The chairs will be free for the taking. But what the adoptive owners won't know is that Blu Dot will be watching them.
It sounds like one of the unconventional strategies from the pages of Free, Chris Anderson's book about the unlikely new routes from product to revenue. In fact, the event was planned to mark the first anniversary of Blu Dot's Soho store, with a nod to freegan culture.
"The idea came out of the curb mining culture in New York and other cities," said Michael Hart, co-founder of Mono, a Minneapolis advertising firm that developed the project with Blu Dot. "What's the best way to get great design out to more people? You give it away."
Blu Dot isn't the first designer to follow that strategy. Three years ago Tom Dixon, the influential London designer, handed out 500 of his polystyrene chairs to a frenzied crowd in Trafalgar Square. The next year, in the same location, he gave away a 1,000 energy-efficient lightbulbs of his own design.
When Dixon handed over his goods they vanished forever into the world. By contrast, Blu Dot will be tracking its chairs as avidly as air traffic controllers. A video crew stashed in the van--the design world's version of Candid Camera--will capture passersby as they circle and inspect. Each chair will be equipped with GPS, so as soon as they're claimed the Blu Dot crew can begin tracking their whereabouts. The location of each chair will be shown in real time on a Web site. (It may also be projected on to the wall of the Soho store.) As if that weren't enough documentation, each chair will have its own twitter feed updating its movements.
If all goes according to plan, the video crew will use the GPS to find the chairs a few months from now. They'll knock-on doors and interview the owners--homeless people, Apartment Therapy readers, whoever they turn out to be--about why they took the chairs and how they use them. "Where does great design end up in New York? What sort of a person invites these chairs into their homes?" said Hart. "It's all an experiment, but in our experience consumers appreciate brands that come up with new ways of interacting."
Like everyone else, the design field braced for the fallout from the financial meltdown. At the time, some of us argued that good things could come from a period of constraint and reexamination. The consumer culture of design had become overwrought, with limited edition candleholders that sell for $2,700. For all its pain, the downturn gave design a chance to revitalize by taking on the pressing problems of infrastructure, energy efficiency, and transit. Who better than designers to come up with inventive answers to complex problems?
To be sure, green design has produced some unqualified successes, like the California Academy of Sciences (above) by Renzo Piano. But the first wave of designs associated with the new efficiency is also being met with some murmurs of disappointment. In our zeal to be conscientious, are we creating designs that fit our notions of what green should be, but which don't actually look good? To put it another way: Is virtuous design always good design?
In an article published in the Sunday New York Times, curator and critic Alice Rawsthorn lays into the new fleet of electric cars. "Can you think of a better opportunity to wow us with an amazingly seductive object than a brand-new type of car? Probably not," she wrote. "Why then do so many electric cars look so boring? Or, if not boring, ugly?"
The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf (above), she said, "look dishearteningly like the dullest of Nissan and Chevrolet's gas guzzlers."
The Tesla Roadster Sport "isn't quite foxy enough." The plug-in i-MiEV from Mitsubushi (above) "looks chillingly like a Smart car that's been pigging out at Krispy Kreme."
Does the new plug-in mark the end of the car as a romantic icon? In Detroit, form always followed fantasy, with exaggerated tail fins and hubcaps gaudy with chrome. It's hard to imagine people collecting the new electric cars as they do vintage Mustangs and MGs. They may be worthy advances, but they hardly quicken the pulse.
In some cases, the urgency to appear green may actually stand in the way of good design. That's the argument Kriston Capps makes in a recent issue of American Prospect. Capps reports that Robert A.M. Stern was hired to design parts of the 2010 Olympic village in Vancouver, but the city fired him when his scheme didn't look sufficiently green. A local firm, Arthur Erickson Corp., filled in with a mandate to focus squarely on function and sustainability. As a result, Capps says, the village structures have "a default 'green' look to them: blocky, all glass, covered in matted foliage. It looks as though the developers simply forgot to design the place."
I suspect that a lot of mediocre design, particularly furniture and accessories, is making its way into the marketplace simply on the dubious claim of sustainability. Is the use of, say, a recyclable metal a raison d'être, or should a table or chair be judged by its appearance and day-to-day function?
Green design may simply be going through an unfortunate adolescent phase as it evolves its way into the new era of efficiency. In truth, it's hard to object to design that emphasizes function and responsibility after so many years of wanton styling from designers like Studio Job,Marcel Wanders and Philippe Starck. But it would be good to have a eye-popping piece of new work to rally around.
Sir Terence Conran, the designer and founder of the Conran Shop, has made preparations to design a dozen hotels and resorts in Cuba.
Sir Terence, who revolutionized the sale and marketing of home furnishings in the sixties and seventies, has applied for a series of 75-year leases with his development partners, he said in an interview yesterday at the Conran Shop in New York. The projects are on hold until the U.S. lifts travel restrictions to Cuba. "To build tourist facilities, you need investment," he said.
The projects include golf courses which, he said, are made possible by the development of turf that can be irrigated with salt water. A fresh water system would be prohibitively expensive in Cuba, he explained.
What would a modernist Cuba look like? The crumbling Communist outpost had a brief mid-century modern period shortly after the revolution, the remains of which Sir Terence has found moldering in and around Havana. But his main impression, not surprisingly, is of abject poverty. "They get by by smoking cigars, singing and dancing," he observed.
Business executives love stability and the cold imperatives of logic. Ambiguity gives them fits. Designers, by contrast, can't abide the status quo. "That tension never goes away between inventing the new and preserving the old," Sam Lucente, vice president of design for Hewlett-Packard, said yesterday at a panel discussion conducted by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum during its National Design Week. "It's like navigating no man's land," he said.
The panel, entitled "The Business of Design," addressed ways to integrate designers, and design thinking, into organizations that usually resist change. Here are some of their observations:
The most effective designers know instinctually how to navigate bureaucracies. They handle matters "often in subversive ways," Lucente said. "They quietly figure out how to end run the system and get things done. They know how to work it."
It helps for a designer to have multiple interests. "The people who are going to flourish are the schizophrenic ones," said Bill Moggridge (shown at left in the photo above), co-founder of IDEO. "A lot of people at IDEO have degrees in different areas than they work in. You have to be great at one thing, but interested in working with people in different areas." His term for this personality type: "cross-dressers." Example: Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfus both designed theatrical sets before turning to industrial design.
Design thinking works best when integrated. Engineers start with technology. MBAs start with funding. Designer start with people. The trick is to get interdisciplinary teams to raise their collective I.Q. by working in the overlap of those three areas. "That's where innovation flourishes," said Moggridge.
PowerPoint is the enemy. The kind of discourse associated with Power Point presentations, with bulleted observations marshaled in support of an argument, tends to be team divider, not a unifier. “What organizations are good at is debating,” said Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. “Debating very rarely leads to real solutions.” That’s because debates tend to revolve around data and examples drawn from the past. Design thinking should be about future possibilities.
Be stupid often, but early. Executives often harbor the
unrealistic ambition of being right 100% of the time. A few stupid
mistakes can actually make you smarter, in the same way that physical
exertion rounds you into shape. For obvious reasons, mistakes are less
costly if they're committed early in the process.
You don't have to try very hard to spot the architecture students on a college campus. They're the ones with the carefully considered shoes (and artful eyewear). It's easy to see why architects are so selective about their footwear: What are shoes, after all, but mini buildings for your feet? Design and fashion are kissing cousins, and moving closer all the time, so it makes sense that a group of well-known architects have begun designing shoes, especially since the economic slowdown may have left them with spare time. Though it's hard to say whether these shoes are full-square design efforts, vanity projects or glorified licensing agreements.
Frank Gehry and his son, Alejandro Gehry, an artist, collaborated on a foppish two-tone boot for the high-end French shoemaker J.M. Weston. The boot is based on a 19th-century design for Prince Albert, though it looks like the kind of thing Keith Richards might have worn in swinging London.
Last year Melissa, an eco-conscious Brazilian shoe label, introduced an all-rubber high heel by Zaha Hadid with the same swooping, futuristic lines as her recent Star Trek-like furniture.
Hadid also designed limited-edition boots for Lacoste with a tail that entwines the ankle--a serpentine version of Crocs. In both cases Hadid transferred the blobby design forms made possible by rapid prototyping to shoes.
Rem Koolhaas's nephew, Rem D. Koolhaas, left the architecture field six years ago to start a shoe company with Galahad Clark, scion of the Clarks shoe family. Their brand, United Nude, produces shoes "inspired by an architectural idea or an existing design object, like a chair." There is at least a passing resemblance between the metal foot of the famous aluminum office chair by Charles and Ray Eames and the heel of their Eamz shoe shown above.
Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, creator of several versions of the Air Jordan, worked in architecture until age 28, when he Joined Nike as in-house architect.
Marloes ten Bhömer, a London-based fashion designer, may be worth mentioning because of her architectural sensibility. Her Beigefoldedshoe (above) is made from a single piece of folded leather with a stainless steel heel.
Thirty years ago, in the badass seventies, the warehouse loft was cutting-edge real estate. The loft was then the height of bohemian cool; now it seems tame and utterly conventional. The conversion of offbeat industrial spaces--designers call it ‘adaptive reuse’--has moved on to more adventurous ground as architects and developers try to preserve the past and keep building materials out of landfills. As these five projects illustrate, the art lies not in what’s removed but in what industrial memory is preserved, and how it’s woven among new materials.
Architects Brian Bell and David Yocum, principals of bldgs, found this abandoned repair shop and car parts warehouse in an industrial backwater of Atlanta. Their renovation is based on the notion that a decaying repair shop has its own form of beauty. They converted it to a studio for their firm and an apartment they call Villa de Murph without losing the paint-chipped cement block walls and rusted canopy. Inside is a courtyard with a fireplace, a table that seats 18, a glass-walled studio looking onto the courtyard and an apartment with skylights in a corrugated metal roof.
The Turtle Creek Pump House was built in 1915 to supply water to the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas. It was bought at auction in 2000 by a neighboring couple and converted to a gallery and guest house by Cunningham Architects with plantings by Julie Bargman of D.I.R.T Studio. Steel benches were made from old electrical panels; a well-head was turned into a cocktail table; the old concrete reservoirs were replumbed as rough-hewn fountains.; 70-year-old broken concrete slabs form stepping stones in a garden path.
The owner of a penthouse loft in a downtown Manhattan building turned this water tank, once used to feed the building’s sprinkler system, into a retreat for reading and zoning out in front of skyline views. Messana O’Rorke Architects rehabbed the cylindrical cast-iron tank, most notably by blowtorching a hole for a 12-foot window and lining the interior with sheetrock and oak flooring.
Behold the the mother of all rehabs: Over the course of three decades the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill converted an abandoned cement factory with more than 30 silos and enormous engine rooms into his home and office, with a cavernous space for lectures, exhibitions and concerts occupying the largest of the former silos.
The chatter this week about the end of big-projects comes three weeks after the opening of a 
There is at least one cultural complex still in the pipeline before the breed dies out. A cultural district in Miami on a 30-acre landfill beside Biscayne Bay is already funded, so it appears likely to be built. It will include a science museum by 
The Post-Big Era arrives, fittingly enough, along with renewed interest in Jane Jacobs (left), the activist and writer who in the 1950s and 1960s fought off the huge public-works projects that Robert Moses tried to impose on New York. Among other things, Moses would have built a 10-lane elevated highway through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. Her campaign to preserve the messy vitality and small-scale ingenuity of the streets is chronicled in 
