Katie Swenson, the Vice President of national design initiatives at Enterprise Community Partners, will host the next webinar for the NEA’s Social Impact Design webinar series. This panel discussion, titled Social Impact Design NOW: Women in Design: We Are Not Missing, will ask women in the field of social impact design – How can we leverage networks to cultivate a culture of creativity for women in social impact design? Who is doing the work, and how are they doing it? 

Enterprise is based in Columbia, MD, and is widely known for affordable housing and is also the organizer of the prestigious Rose Architectural Fellowship which partners early-career architectural designers with local community development organizations, where they facilitate an inclusive approach to development to create green, sustainable, and affordable communities. 

Register for the webinar this Wednesday at 3:00pm. Read Katie Swenson’s blog post to learn about the webinar.

Van Alen Institute

The Van Alen Institute ran a survey to get feedback on improving design competitions. It is interesting to see that 4 out of the 10 propositions for improvement have to do with public interest design and the value of design.

1. Show the value of good design. Designers  want more compensation for the time and resources put into a competition entry. Van Alen calls for recognition of the labor and money spent annually on design competitions, as a means of monitoring “how much value design creates.” The institute recommends the mandatory disclosure of time and associated costs of every competition entry.

5. Go beyond beautiful objects. Cultural institutions considering or organizing competitions should do so with the intent of addressing “a pressing cultural, ecological, or social issue.” 

8. Make it public. The statement that “[e]veryone knows that public engagement, when structured well, helps produce better design” may be bold, yet it is illogical to produce proposals without consultation with the people who will ultimately interact with them.

9. Give young designers what they want. Student and and emerging designers are more likely to desire interdisciplinary collaboration, public engagement, and design for “underserved communities”, survey results found.

See the rest at ArchDaily.

Photo of Thomas Fisher from publicinterestdesign.org

Thomas Fisher writes about four emerging fields that Architects should expand their practice into to stay competitive.

“We should take a more expansive view of architectural practice. The four fields [on the next page], which have emerged in response to the pressing needs of our current age, represent inventive combinations of existing disciplines. These fields are among the most visible examples of the entrepreneurial revolution happening in our midst.”

Geodesign which uses programs like GIS to understand the effects of buildings on the natural environment. Service Design which plans and organizes processes to improve the interaction between service provider and customers. Experience Design which organizes processes with focus on user behavior and having a positive experience. Public Interest Design which emphasizes the creation or redesign of products, environments, and systems, with a clear human-centered approach.

Read the entire article in Architect magazine. *Listen to Thomas Fisher speak about “Redefining Practice“.