dignifying design
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12/5/12 10:52 AMDignifying Design - NYTimes.com
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OPINION
Dignifying Design
Iwan Baan
An aerial view of the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda. More Photos »
By JOHN CARY and COURTNEY E. MARTINPublished: October 6, 2012
IN 2006 a 26-year-old architecture student, Michael Murphy,approached the global health pioneer Paul Farmer after a lecture atHarvard. Mr. Murphy asked which architects Dr. Farmer had workedwith to build the clinics, housing, schools and even the roads he haddescribed in his talk. An aspiring social entrepreneur, Mr. Murphywas hoping to put his design degree to use by apprenticing with thehumanitarian architects aiding Dr. Farmer’s work. But it turns out,those architects didn’t exist.
“I drew the last clinic on a napkin,”Dr. Farmer told Mr. Murphy.
Soon after, Mr. Murphy flew to Rwanda, where he and afew other students, including Alan Ricks and Marika Shioiri-Clark, became Dr. Farmer’sarchitects. Mr. Murphy lived in the country for over a year while the Butaro Hospital,which laborers built with local materials, was designed. Now, a site that was once a
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12/5/12 10:52 AMDignifying Design - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 3http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/dignifying-design.html?ref=design&_r=0
Good, by Design
military outpost is home to a 150-bed, 60,000-square-foothealth care center that served 21,000 people in its first yearand currently employs 270, most of them locals in an areawith chronic unemployment.
The Butaro Hospital is a breathtaking building withintricate lava rock walls made of stones cut by Rwandanmasons, and it is full of brightly colored accent walls andbreezeways bathed in light and air. Deep-green flora
blossom everywhere. For the 340,000 people who live in this region of Northern Rwanda,the project marks a literal reclamation: an area that was once a site of genocidal violence isnow a center for state-of-the-art medical care. Healing happens there. An unmistakablegrace permeates the place.
Building the hospital under the auspices of the nonprofit MASS Design Group (MASSstands for a Model of Architecture Serving Society), Mr. Murphy, Mr. Ricks and Ms.Shioiri-Clark relied on Dr. Farmer’s theory of a “preferential option for the poor.” The idea— adopted from liberation theology — is that the poor deserve the best quality interventionbecause they’ve been given the least by luck and circumstance. The students’ naïveaudacity, coupled with Dr. Farmer’s wisdom and experience, resulted in a building thathas set a new standard for public-interest design.
It used to be that young people with humanitarian aspirations went into law or medicalschool or applied to Teach for America or the Peace Corps. But today, increasing numbersof the most innovative change makers have, like Mr. Murphy, Mr. Ricks and Ms. Shioiri-Clark, decided to try to design their way to a more beautiful, just world.
This new breed of public-interest designers proceeds from a belief that everybody deservesgood design, whether in a prescription bottle label that people can more easily read andunderstand, a beautiful pocket park to help a city breathe or a less stressful intakeexperience at the emergency room. Dignity may be to the burgeoning field of public-interest design as justice is to the more established public-interest law.
Careful listening is an integral part of this human-centered approach to design. IDEO.org— a nonprofit spinoff of the premier design and innovation firm IDEO — has made radicallistening its hallmark; IDEO.org associates observe and grill would-be clients and siteswith so much rigor that they could easily be mistaken for anthropologists. An IDEO.orgteam assigned to redesign sanitation in Ghana, for example, spent weeks slogging fromhome to home asking families intimate questions about their bathroom habits before theybegan designing a system that would safeguard against cholera and other waterbornediseases.
The relatively young field of public-interest design already faces a crisis: interest inhuman-centered design far outpaces the formal opportunities. Over 500 people appliedfor the four spots in IDEO.org’s fellowship program this year. The Enterprise RoseArchitectural Fellowship is one of the few opportunities for aspiring architects to work onaffordable housing and other development projects in poor communities; the program,which lasts three years, has 12 spots. The San Francisco-based Code for America trainsand then dispatches two dozen self-proclaimed “tech geeks” to cities where they designnew ways for city leadership and citizens to be in conversation, improving theircommunities.
Despite the scarcity of opportunity, there are already vivid examples of what embeddeddesigners can do to improve and enrich people’s lives. One Enterprise Rose fellow, Theresa
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12/5/12 10:52 AMDignifying Design - NYTimes.com
Page 3 of 3http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/dignifying-design.html?ref=design&_r=0
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 7, 2012, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline:Dignifying Design.
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Hwang, served as a liaison between the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust and aprofessional design firm, Michael Maltzan Architecture, as they worked on a new housingcomplex for formerly homeless and disabled people in Los Angeles. The Star Apartments,now under construction, promise to be far more congenial and pleasant to inhabit than thesoul-killing concrete towers of traditional public housing projects. The 97,000-square-footcomplex consists of a dozen cantilevered cubes, wrapped in brilliant white stucco andintegrated with 15,000 square feet of outdoor areas, art studios, a running track and othercommunal spaces. The finished project will provide 102 housing units.
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John Cary is an architect and the founding editor of PublicInterestDesign.org. CourtneyE. Martin is the author of “Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 14, 2012
Because of a production error, the biographical note accompanying an opinion article lastSunday, about the emerging field of public-interest design, misstated the surname of oneof the writers. As the byline noted, she is Courtney E. Martin — not “CourtneyTools.”
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