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