9/1/2018 Por qué el buen diseño es un bien público - CityLab

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Un residente de The Co ages at Hickory Crossing se sienta en su porche. // Skylar Fike

El buen diseño es un bien público

JOHN CARY 26 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2017

Lo siguiente es extraído de Design for Good por John Cary, con un prólogo de Melinda Gates (Island Press, $ 30).
El libro recoge 20 casos de estudio de arquitectura de interés público.

Si le preguntaras a 100 personas aleatorias o incluso a 100 diseñadores, "¿Qué es el diseño?", Obtendrías
aproximadamente tantas respuestas diferentes. En el sentido más positivo, esto explica la omnipresencia
de los diseñadores que trabajan y tocan todos los aspectos imaginables de nuestras vidas. Más allá de las
estructuras construidas, los productos en los que confiamos día tras día, los servicios que utilizamos
como miembros de la sociedad, están diseñados.
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Hace mucho tiempo que los diseñadores nos damos cuenta de cómo capturar esta realidad: el diseño es
tan generalizado y las personas tienen tantas percepciones sobre él (incluso si están en su conciencia).
Este ha sido especialmente el caso para aquellos de nosotros que estamos tratando de expandir el
alcance del diseño más allá de su base de cliente de élite tradicional. En las últimas décadas, hemos
tenido problemas con la nomenclatura: ¿cómo llamar a este campo de práctica en crecimiento que se
centra en involucrar comunidades y poblaciones completamente nuevas?

Las mujeres apilan bolsas de tierra mientras construyen una casa en las afueras de Nakuru, Kenia. La casa, para la
familia de Hellen Nyambura, era una rama del proyecto del Centro St. Jerome cercano. (Peter Dibdin)

For years, in my role as executive director of the nonprofit Public Architecture, I advocated for and
advanced the term “public interest design,” akin to the well-developed fields of public interest law and
public health. To my mind, if designers modeled their engagement after what was already working in
other professions, it had a shot at reaching scale, further and faster.

An equal number of designers have utilized the term “social impact design.” Such work directly favors
community, environmental, or humanitarian causes and the change it can create. This term is perhaps
most closely aligned with social justice. The term that has actually gained the greatest traction in recent
years is “human-centered design,” popularized by the innovation firm IDEO.

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In the dozens of interviews that I conducted for this book, there was one term used universally:
“design.” The qualifiers that were once useful may have finally outlived their usefulness.

But a lack of awareness persists about how this socially oriented practice of design has evolved and
matured. While there has been a steady uptick in media coverage, the vast majority of press focuses
almost solely on designers’ intentions. Rarely are the voices of clients and actual users presented. The
result is that we’re hearing barely half of the story and limiting our ability to fully understand the impact
of design.

At every level, design is a matrix of relationships—from clients who make decisions about projects to
designers who bring life to those clients’ visions. In between, in a health-care se ing, for example, are
users who range from doctors and nurses to patients and family visitors, among many others. Then
there are those who give physical form to the structures: construction workers, artisans, craftspeople,
and scores of others.

The entry building and services center at The Co ages at Hickory Crossing in Dallas (Skylar Fike)

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From Atlanta to Angdong, China, and from Dallas to Dhaka, some of the best of this new body of work
is not just beautifully designed and constructed but also painstakingly documented by world-class
photographers and filmmakers once reserved for only the most elite of projects. This imagery and
storytelling has been essential in elevating design for the public good to its rightful place alongside other
forms of design, again without the need for special categories or commendations.

The conventional wisdom is that design costs more and is only a luxury. Yet people from all walks of life
deserve good design. The power of design to dignify will never be fully explored until average people
have some sense that they deserve be er.

Here are three of many recent projects around the world that improve the lives of regular people
through design.

The Cottages at Hickory Crossing, Dallas

The Co ages at Hickory Crossing was built by the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation
to house 50 chronically homeless people. Designed by the architecture firm bcWORKSHOP, each 400-
square-foot home includes a kitchen with a cooktop, sink, and full refrigerator, along with a bedroom
and an accessible full bathroom. In interviews with the architects, formerly homeless people said they
saw the door itself as a symbol of dignity. Having an individual unit, as opposed to a unit in a larger
building, sounded downright luxurious to them, a true point of pride.

Gregory Philen, who had been homeless for many years, arrived at his new home in 2016 to find his
co age fully furnished, with a range of small comforts including a toothbrush and a slow cooker. “I feel
like it’s a home. I don’t even look at it like an apartment or anything like that,” said Philen. “We have
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and I now spend a lot of my time trying to help others.

“I know it’s been good for others here, too. We have classes or meetings every Tuesday or Friday. We
just go do what we call ‘coffee talk.’ Most everybody in the community comes. You don’t have to,
though. They pre y much leave us alone and let us live like it’s just a regular neighborhood.”

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Interior of a co age (Skylar Fike)

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A resident walking in the community (Skylar Fike)

WelcomeHealth, Fayetteville, Arkansas

“Our a itude is that even people who don’t have a lot of money, who are poor or not very well
educated, deserve both care and the chance to receive care in a building like this,” said Monika Fischer-
Massie, director of WelcomeHealth, a free clinic in Faye eville, Arkansas. The clinic operates out of a
single-story building that once housed a state agency and then an exercise center. Highly regarded
architect Marlon Blackwell turned it into WelcomeHealth, which became the first LEED-certified
healthcare facility in Northwest Arkansas in 2013.

“We have a lot of daylight in the facility now,” Fischer-Massie says. “When patients walk in, they get a
feeling of health because of the light and materials, which include bright surfaces and lots of wood.”
Fischer-Massie often hears visiting doctors say, “My office is not as beautiful as your office.”

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A hallway bisects the interior of WelcomeHealth, creating four waiting rooms finished in red oak. (Timothy
Hursley)

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Immediately inside the front doors are two waiting areas, with one containing the reception desk and the other the
pharmacy. (Timothy Hursley)

St. Jerome’s Centre, Nakuru, Kenya   

Thirty children live in the St. Jerome’s Centre, a children’s house on the outskirts of Nakuru, the fourth-
largest city in Kenya. Rather than the customary barrack-style sleeping wards, the center was designed
as a home, with bedrooms limited to four children each.

Security was a major consideration, and the center insisted on having no windows on the ground floor,
which made cross-ventilation of spaces and access to natural light very difficult. The Nairobi-based
design firm Orkidstudio decided to create a thick earth-bag wall wrapping around the buildings’
external facades. This type of wall has thermal qualities to compensate for limited ventilation. The walls
and rooms facing the courtyard, meanwhile, are clad in thin wooden-rod screens. In this way, light can
filter all the way downstairs to the lower bedrooms.

Coming to a community as an outsider and designing sensitively for it requires not just good intentions,
but humility. James Mitchell, Orkidstudio’s founder, recalls a project he did in Bolivia that chipped away
at the confidence he had built up working for the famous Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. “We argued
and we pulled in different directions, we got a lot of things wrong, and we had a lot of tears on the
project. But it really taught me so much; I think it was the biggest learning curve of my life. It was maybe
a bad place to be, but, in hindsight, a good place to be.”

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With security a top concern, the external facades of the buildings are mostly undifferentiated. (Odysseas
Mour ouchos)

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The wooden screens are made of pillar cores, a byproduct that is often discarded as waste. (Odysseas Mour ouchos)

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Light filters into a corridor through the screens. (Odysseas Mour ouchos)

About the Author

John Cary
FEED

John Cary is an architect, writer, speaker, and curator focused on design and philanthropy. He lives in
Oakland.

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