 going to be awesome. So here's for real treat. My name is Michael Walter. I'm the director of digital and emerging media here at Cooper-Dewitt and tonight is Game Changers. Game Changers is Cooper-Dewitt's program of conversations with influential and innovative thinkers and industry leaders. And I have to first thank Tim Brown, CEO of IDO, whose support and generosity makes this series possible. If you've ever been to a game changers before, you already know you're in for a treat tonight. While we're at it, the next Game Changer, if you're interested, is on June 1st and that will feature Jenny Saban. But tonight we have a special guest, Liz Ogbu. Liz Ogbu is the founder, principal, and general genius behind Studio O, where she works as a designer, an urbanist, a social innovation strategist, and many other things. I unfortunately only heard about Liz just this past November when I was attending the museum computer network conference in Minneapolis where she gave a keynote. And when I was sitting there watching her giving the keynote, I knew we had to get her here. So I'm really excited that she's here tonight. But Liz has actually a long relationship with Cooper-Dewitt. She was featured in our design for the other 90% exhibition, which was in 2007. And it was the first in our series of exhibitions on social responsibility, social impact, all those sorts of good things. And incidentally, the third in that series is coming up and will open this fall, September 30th. And that will be called by the people designing a better America. When I was watching Liz speak at MCN, she was talking about cook stoves. It was really just a fascinating topic and project. I was really intrigued by just the concept of how a cook stove is sort of this fundamental thing around the world that everyone needs in order to prepare food and how she sort of approached the problem. One of the things we talk about a lot here at Cooper-Dewitt in all of our lectures and our exhibitions and just as a staff is human-centered design. And Liz is out there actually doing human-centric design. Often her projects seem to begin and end and take place in the places where the products are deployed. She's there on the ground talking to people. And this was one of the things that I just really enjoyed learning about. You guys are in for a really great treat tonight. I'm going to keep this really short and welcome Liz Obu to the stage. Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming. And thank you to Cooper-Dewitt for making this possible. I'm really excited to be here. So when I was asked to talk, I was asked to give a little bit about the arc of my career and not just a project that I'm currently working on. It's sort of an interesting challenge to do because as I was thinking about it, I realized that over the period of time that I've been working in the design for social innovation space before it was even called design for social innovation, the whole entire industry has changed. And so in some ways, especially because I had a wonderful opportunity to be involved with two of the leading nonprofits that helped usher in that change, looking at the arc of my projects in some ways kind of talks about where the field was and where it's going to. So I'm kind of excited to talk through that and hopefully have a discussion about that afterwards. So if I think about what kind of was my first inspiration around doing this kind of work, I have to say that first, I'm the weird child of my family who drew. My parents were social scientists. And so, well, you know, we did talk about like anthropology and health at the dinner table because they wanted us to learn. I would go back and draw things. And so for me, when I settled across architecture, I was looking for a way to marry the design part with the social part that from my upbringing felt so critical to the way in which we understand the world. And I had a wonderful opportunity to go to Wellesley where I could do that as part of my major. And then I spent a year in Sub-Saharan Africa traveling fellowship. And for me, that experience was super pivotal because as I traveled to 10 countries spending time there, it became really compelled by the fact that a lot of professional designers were doing stuff for the government. They were doing stuff for sort of the middle and upper class and expats. But they weren't doing stuff for the large majority of people that I was encountering every day on the streets. And this picture is actually from a more recent visit when I was on a technical advice routine for the World Bank. But it was interesting because one of the things that we saw went to Durbin, which was on the eastern coast. And we spent a lot of time with the traders in this real, one dense pocket of informal settlements at work junction, which was provided in the last design for the other 90% exhibit. And it was really interesting because as part of the human-centered design process, we spent a lot of time talking to individuals, really trying to understand their needs and desires. And I came across a woman who was named Bickley who was actually a street trainer. She sold fruits and vegetables and talked a little bit about her life. And one of the things that she talked about was how hard it was and how little money that she got and the inability for her to be able to travel back to her problems as she was sleeping on the street, finding other foundations. But she also talked about the fact that every Friday, all the traders in her area would get together, they would sweep the streets because the city wasn't doing it, but they felt they wanted to keep the place clean. And they would also collect a little bit of fruits and vegetables from each other's stand and hook a suit and give that suit to the local AIDS clinic. And so in all the conversations that people have about the traders, there's a recent saying, well, we have to figure out how to help them, we have to figure out how to build this for them so that they're not trading on the streets. Nobody had the conversation with them about, well, what kinds of stuff are they doing? Instead of looking at this as kind of fetishized poverty, how can we get them not, you know, that off to use phrase, not a hand out, but a hand up? And so for me, this idea of design, that it's not just about helping people who have nothing, but it's about helping people be able to thrive within their lives. It's really, I think, described the arc of what I look to do in the projects. And in this case, you know, one of the comments that she said to me was, you know, we are not animals, we want to quality space. She wanted some space that would actually allow her to be able to live a better life and build upon the things that she was already doing. So that kind of sets the stage for a little bit of the things that I find when I'm out in the world doing the projects. And now I kind of want to take you through a couple of them so you can see what that actually plays out in terms of actual design projects. So the first project I'm going to share is actually the one that was profiled in the first design for the other 90% exhibit, the daily restation. It's a project that I did when I was at public architecture, which is a small nonprofit based in San Francisco, whose mission is to use design, particularly architecture, to try and create positive social impact. And this was a project that we worked on for a number of years at public architecture. The idea was that we had one really long program called 1% where we recruited architecture firms to do service working with local nonprofits in their community. And then they had another side of the organization that actually did projects. And a fair number of our projects actually weren't commission based, meaning that somebody came up to us and said, we want you to do this for us. It was us out being out in the world, looking at the different problems we could see and actually interacting with people on the ground to understand, well, what could we do to improve the situation? And so in this case, one of the challenges that we came across was daily work. So daily burrs are folks who look for a day's work for a day's wages. There are over 100,000 men and women who look for daily work every day in the US. The vast majority of the sites, roughly about 75% are informal. So there's street corners, home depot parking lots, gas stations, et cetera. And at those sites, there's no access to water, to toilets, or to shelter, more often. And so we felt that this was an issue of basic human dignity. It was something that we could do to make a change. So we spent actually many years going out to street corners across the country and talking to daily burrs and trying to understand was there something that we could do to help improve the situation. And one of the things we found is that at the time we were working on this project, so it started about 2005, 2006, is that there are actual worker centers at the time. There was probably about 60 to 70 in the country. But the vast majority of them were like construction office trailers or church basements. There were spaces that had been designed for other uses that were being repurposed to accommodate this. And they were basically asking for the daily labor system to fit itself within the building. And we wanted to find a way of how do we understand how the daily labor system operates and design something that can best accommodate that. So we spent a lot of time talking to the workers. And one of the things that we found is, first and foremost, it was really important to have visual transaction with each employer. So, daily laborers are actually highly organized. But what they find is that they want to be able to see every employment transaction. So we designed a system where the idea is that we'd always have that maximum visual access. They also found that when we went to a lot of sites that the daily laborers, even if their system of organization was that it was going to be first come, first served, and or that everybody was doing a free for all, but there was some level of organization and they really actually liked having space to be able to meet. And then finally, when we went and observed the sites, we found that the peak hiring period was often between 6 to 9 a.m., but a lot of the workers stayed around for the majority of the day, partly because they were hoping to get somebody who might be coming a little bit late to hire somebody. But also, this was sort of their community. It was a place to hang out. And we also found at the same time, we were hearing that about 50% of the people who were hiring the daily laborers were homeowners and they were often asking, hey, I want somebody who speaks English. And so actually getting some sort of skills was important to getting them to be more affordable. And so one of the other things we decided to do was also create something that could be flexible and have to be turned into a classroom. And then based on all the things we heard, we started looking at this idea of why don't we create a kit of parts that could be easily deployable knowing that at the different sites the needs were going to change in different ways. And so this is an example of a prototype that we were proposing for a site in LA that actually was going to accommodate almost 200 people. And so you can see that the system actually mended itself a little bit. So the other sort of interesting thing about this project is that for market-texture terms, I just kind of talked about all the pieces that we were looking at which really came from the interviews. But then there's this whole other part about the daily versus them itself having to do with the fact that the majority of daily laborers are actually immigrants. And in particular, there's no firm figures that the last time a study was conducted, which was probably about 10 years ago, estimates were about 60 to 67% of the workers are undocumented immigrants. And so that was actually also an issue in understanding how this thing needed to work the way it could do. And so for us it was really interesting of taking on this challenge of what did it need to operate in this space. And this idea that daily labor work is actually not new. It's been around for centuries and in earlier times in this country it was actually the dock workers. And it was always immigrants. People would come first time. This was the way that they began to venture into the normative workforce. And so the fact that this time we associated with undocumented and Latino immigrants is just a product of where we are in the time. But this idea of using this as an entry point to being able to have a normative job and also for many of them a lot of the stuff we've heard in our interviews represented things that we say are like core American values. They came here for a better life for themselves and your children. And so for us we realized we couldn't just put out a piece of architecture and say hey great we've solved a problem. But in order to get this thing to take hold we actually also had to address this other messaging and cultural social element of the project. So with a lot of the proposals that we did we actually looked for what are ways that this is not just about shelter for the workers but it's actually an active community building. One of the things that so we were you know the peak of this project was kind of around 2007 2008 and that was the last time that there was an immigration bill before someone's recent go around. In Congress one of the things that we heard is that a lot of the groups felt that the failure of the legislation previously wasn't so much that it was a bad legislation but it was when you looked out into the streets and who was protesting it you saw see from and frankly if you're a politician you're thinking who's going to come and vote for the election time it wasn't the people you saw protesting. And so they wanted to look for ways of how could we integrate immigrants into the community so that the next time that the legislation came up it wasn't so much that you're seeing the sea of brown faces but you're seeing the sea also middle class white voters who were compelled because now it's no longer those people who I feel bad for but it's my daughter's best friend's family. So we started to look for what are ways that we could propose community building as part of the project. So in this case it was a proposal to do a community garden that could be jointly tended by the area residents because it's a nearby housing development and the day laborers. There's a point to sort of say that the day laborer station itself was a steward for the site and through that you kind of change up the relationship and the narrative associated with the workers. So as I already said we had the pleasure of being able to show this project at the last design for the 90% exhibit. We built a full-scale section of the project. It was first time I had a lot of experience wrapping billboard vinyl on panels. I do not recommend that as a way to go. But you know it was really it was great and through that we actually got a lot of attention for the project and I spent many months crisscrossing around the country and even going to Canada because it was actually an issue that was facing a lot of communities and a lot of people were really frustrated. They tried to deal with it through legal grounds. We usually got tossed out of court. You know you had Home Depot being angry about what was happening and yelling at cities. Cities were angry at Home Depot. Communities were angry at everybody and so people were just looking for a new solution. And so we had a lot of great interesting conversations both with city officials and immigrant rights groups. But we launched this project right about the time of the recession and so what's really interesting is that we got a lot of feedback from people about the project and so this is actually a poster that we created for the Wholesome Awards. This was an international competition that we wanted for the project and in it there are actually texts from emails that I had received as part of this project and coming from California and a lot of people are very sunny and up. You know great you're doing something for the day laborers. That's amazing. And then you know I presented this in Texas and I was on the local news and that was the first next day I got my first hate mail and one of the groups we were dealing with was like well now you really know you're doing something. If somebody's sending you a hate mail that's awesome. But you know it was kind of calling because it would be stuff like build it and we will burn it down with those nasty Mexicans. But I think the thing that was important to us was actually I was really excited to get that hate mail not as a badge of courage but just because I think if we're not stirring up conversations then we're not doing what we're supposed to do. And in this particular case if you think about what we normally call success in architecture this was a bit of a failure because we had tried to launch it right about the time of the recession even though we got a lot of interest when the schools were being closed and the other services cut it was really hard proposition for a lot of cities to say that they're going to spend a hundred thousand dollars on something that they felt and that would be seen in the community is mostly supporting undocumented immigrants. And so it ended up not getting built at all but for me it was a super interesting project to see. We found that with the groups that we were working with on the immigration rights side this was the first time that they started talking about spaces as connected to the dignity of the workers and the population that they were dealing with. And I think that was a real important shift within architecture circles and starting to see that I mean still today even though I haven't touched this project in six years I'm still seeing it written up in different places because until he speaks to people as an inspirational model of what design can do. And for me it was also really interesting to see that we were trying always to get the big station that that was what we were going for. And I think what I came to understand is that when you are tackling these big problems actually approaching it from a more tactical standpoint where you're kind of doing a little bit at a time and building off of small successes is an important way to think about making that overall big change and that's something that eventually comes through in a lot of the different projects that I do now. But it kind of all started there. So after public architecture I ended up going to work for IDO.org. So IDO.org is this historic non-profit of IDO, the global design innovation company. And for me it was a really interesting experience because I did not touch a building for most of that year. And the sort of first to learn about design and think of design in broader terms. So design systems, design of social enterprises, design of programs. But what are the many languages of design and how can you use that in order to create impact? And following the year-long fellowship that I did at IDO.org I then went on to develop a studio. One of the first projects I had was with Jack Rodden maternity which is a maternal health social enterprise at space in Nairobi. And I actually collaborated with another woman, Rika Shiori Clark who had been a co-fella with me and founded her own studio after she left. And so together we spent a couple weeks in Nairobi doing field work and the challenge that they had really asked us to take on was their role model was how do they revamp maternal health care within Kenya. Knowing all the issues that come up and how can they create a better standard of care but do it from a patient-centered way. And so they were really a remarkable process because it seemed a good marriage to the things that they were doing. And in particular the challenge that they wanted us to address is that they felt like they had set up this new clinic and this new model to actually treat patients in a different way and increase the quality of both care and outcomes. But they were finding that while they were getting a lot of people in the door to see them while the time they were pregnant that the women were actually going elsewhere to deliver their babies and this was really problematic for them because their business model was structured on the fact that they would get paid when they delivered the baby at the clinic. And so for them they were really challenged to how could they be sustainable. And so when we talked to them they had reams of quantitative data showing this was what was happening but in all the numbers there wasn't anything to tell them exactly why it was happening. What was it that the women weren't finding within the clinic that Jack Rodney needed to change to be able to set up a situation where they would deliver their babies there. It was also not just about business thing but also in part of the reason why they set up had to deal with the standard of care in the other hospitals they wanted to figure out how to make sure that the women were getting the full standard of care throughout the entire pregnancy cycle which includes birth. So we spent time in the clinic talking to the nurses and the way in which nurses had been set up was a way to be much friendlier to the patients really kind of understanding what their needs and what they were going through and really being a relational setup with the patients to be able to get them to trust them. And so after talking to the nurses we then said well let's go and talk to the patients. And we went out and we found patients who had been there and had their babies there were thinking about it or we also found people who hadn't used them. And I think part of the reason why we were hired was because of the fact that we were architects as well everybody had that background and so Jack Rodney actually thought well maybe some of the issue has to do with the clinics themselves maybe they're not working and that's why the patients aren't coming back. And so when we went in we spent a lot of time trying to understand well what was the process of decision making how did you you know what did you do when you got pregnant what where did you plan for your birth and not just trying to figure out specifically around the healthcare itself but their entire lives because it was really important for us to understand how they situated that decision making and if you focus just on the problem itself you often don't get the full scope of content that you need to be able to make an effective decision. So we spent a lot of time hanging out with mothers and very cute babies and then we also because it's important to understand the entire ecosystem we also spent time visiting other clinics because we wanted to understand how they worked and not just clinics that were competitors like other private clinics we also went to the public hospitals and we also went to high-end private clinics so this is one of the ones that came up often and people were like well if I had money I'd go to such a size and so we wanted to understand well what do they have there that made it seem so special and then we also found we needed to talk to the husbands so it was really interesting because Jack around this assumption was that maybe part of the challenge was had to do with the husbands because they are the ones who provide the money for the women to be able to use in the clinic and so when we went and we talked to the husbands and it was really fascinating because most of them said yeah that's a woman's thing I don't deal with that I either trust my wife to make that decision or what we found is actually they were going to their mothers as proxies for them because their mother's a woman so therefore she would know what the right decision to be but nowhere in the discussions with Jack around that had they looked at the idea of the mother-in-law perhaps being one of those influencers that they needed to talk to and so the idea that well it's great that you're organizing education programs and outreach programs for the husbands but you might want to also consider doing that for their mothers as well was something that couldn't have come through the spreadsheets that they had where they were serving where people were going but did come through the actual act of sitting in people's homes and interviewing them and then we also decided to shadow the nurses who were doing different things outside of the clinic and so this woman Carol had was part of a pilot program that would go in and do post part of the visit so in this I think the best way to describe us is to fly on the wall I mean every now and then we had to hold the baby but for the best part we were just observing what the interaction was and actually there are elements from this visit that became a cornerstone of one of the things that we proposed to Jacaranda and then the other part of the process that I think is always super important is that it's not just about watching people in action or interviewing people but sometimes there's also an element of immersing yourself and putting yourself in the shoes of the target user groups and so in this case we realized that for two weeks we've been having conversations with the nurses about like well tell us what you do in a visit because it was really for privacy reasons we couldn't go in to visit in the clinic and so finally we said all right you know what we're going to do a little roleplay I'm going to be the pregnant woman and Marika is going to be the expectant father and we're like take us from beginning to end of all the things that you do and so it's really fascinating because you know if they had given us a script the difference between reading that script and hearing the tone that they were using when they were talking to us their ability to read different social cues we sort of found a lot of things that were actually wrong with the system that we would never have been able to know if we hadn't actually gone to the roleplay and from a space consideration there are lots of little things that although the room was designed to be pleasant and calming there were a lot of things that we found were actually wrong and then you know for me one of the biggest illustrations is this table was really hard for me to get on top of I am a tall woman and I'm certainly not pregnant so the fact that it was complicated for me to get on the table sort of spoke to well what is a pregnant woman doing getting off this and so there were lots of things about as much as they had tried to design the most comfortable experience ever there were a lot of things about the experience that actually didn't work well and we found that those were all easy points to be able to fix but it's something we've never ever been able to know finally came up with potential ideas we suggested in the kind of five areas that seemed issue or opportunity areas that they could engage in from customer care to birth experience loyalty financial decision making and family involvement and so with each area we sort of set up a set of insights and then we also told them here are some potential ideas that you could actually move forward with so I'm just going to quickly show two of the ones that we came up with so going back to that visit with Carol what we found is that in her the way that she interacted with people was actually really great for building a sense of trust and it was also about the fact that she was literally going into their homes and building a connection and that she was the one point person for these women who had just given birth the way that the hospital generally works is that you get whatever nurses and duties so it's not like what we have here in the states where you generally have the doctor that you go to and so we found that ability to just build a relationship with one person who kind of knew you and also she was coming to you at your most vulnerable point and just given the had given birth to a baby and particularly for first time mothers this was a really scary moment that that built a sense of trust that if they were to say I'll come back to Jacaranda it was largely because of Carol so we actually were trying to figure out how could we set up for them to be able to actually create these lasting relationships not as a a one-off or part of a small program but actually is the same thing because if women weren't giving birth at Jacaranda then they never got to the point where they could connect with Carol and so given that giving birth was a point at which a lot of these women were being lost we were actually starting to propose what are ways that you could start building that relationship with these women earlier so one of the concepts we came up with was this idea of my personal nurse we're actually saying we know for efficiencies it worked to take whatever a nurse was on duty but we actually think if you want to try and save this business model it's about building out this relationship and actually assigning people based on that nurse and the nurse has a cohort of patients that are just hers and then with everything we tried to give a set of next steps or low-hanging fruit that you could be able to start to pilot the ideas another thing that we found is that proximity was a barrier so Nairobi traffic is pretty heinous if you've never been and a lot of women were afraid that especially first-time mothers we found were afraid that if they had to sit in traffic it would actually harm their baby if they were already in labor and so they would end up going to whatever hospital was the closest one and so we actually started to talk what are ways that you can introduce some sort of transportation system that would enable these women to feel a little bit more comforted almost the equivalent of a shuttle ambulance and then again similar to the last one we offered here quick ways to be able to prototype the ideas so what's really interesting is I think they were super excited about a lot of the stuff that we came up with and we tried to scaffold it so there were these low-hanging fruit but one of the things that we found is that when we came back and did a kind of check-in a couple months later that as interesting as the ideas were and as much as the next steps broke it down for them that it was because everybody has their regular day jobs it was really hard for them to then expand to be able to take on these additional special projects and so over time some of the things that we had proposed are starting to see end and they're actually working with Harvard right now to do a more quantitative study around patient choice that will then spin off into another human-centered design project probably in 2017 so it's infiltrated but I think one of the things I would say that I see is a challenge right now in the space is that you know for them the money they used to pay for us is probably the biggest outlay that they have put out for any sort of consultants and so how to help these organizations be able to sustain the really innovative ideas that are brought up through this process is something that I think you know a lot of us who are operating in this space are really trying to figure out how to do so the next project that I'm going to talk about is one that I'm actually working on right now in San Francisco Hunter's Point for those of you who are not familiar with it so San Francisco the downtown San Francisco is up here and Hunter's Point is this area here which is on the southeast served waterfront and it's kind of historically been an industrial area in San Francisco so the naval shipyard was here the old football stadium was here there's also the largest sewage treatment or not the largest but one of the top 10 sewage treatment plants in the country may our residential neighborhood is here that shipyard also built and deconstructed the clear ships and then you have my site which is right over here and it's a former power plant site so it's a lot of environmental and justice stuff as well it's also been historically a neighborhood of immigrants but particularly since World War II when a lot of African Americans came to work in the shipyard there's been a strongly African American neighborhood and has had one of the highest populations of African Americans in San Francisco and it has also been a pretty strongly low income neighborhood so the majority but a significant percentage of the city's public housing is actually located in this neighborhood so the power plant existed for over almost a hundred years and in the late 90s the community came together and led by a group of mothers in the public housing that's immediate on the hill immediately backwards came together and lobbied PG&E to close down the plant PG&E finally signed an agreement with the city and the community to do so in the late in 1998 and the power plant shut down in 2006 and torn down 2008 and then a process of remediation began now per the agreement with the community the land was for the majority of the site mediated to residential standards but then much of it was capped with concrete now a lot of this had to do with the fact that PG&E was like a hold on to land for about five to ten years to deal with things like paper streets and various crisscross ownership with the port and the capping of the land was not for anything bad it was just so that the clean soil that they just spent millions of dollars putting on would not blow away in this intervening period and it's also because a lot of their sites where there aren't doing this kind of stuff are not located next to residential neighborhood and so there's not necessarily in order practices to do anything different within the company but they also very quickly realized that they could not leave so I should say the entire site is about 40 acres and concrete part is probably between 20 to 30 acres so the idea of having 20 to 30 acres of concrete for 10 years was sort of untenable in this community and folks at PG&E very quickly realized that and so they put out an RP to design firms to propose interim use activations that could be done on site then part of the trio of firms that won that commission and so one of the things that we propose is instead of looking at this as some of the other pop up tactical urbanism projects that have been done around the country where you put cool retail in shipping containers on site we wanted to look for ways how do we create something that is more community based especially because we realized that given the location of this there was not going to be a strong retail base and any of the retail that you put on there would likely flop as is so looking for ways that something could tie into the community especially because the community had fought so hard for this piece of land so you know if you're thinking about how we normally understand a community or an area you know we did our requisite assessment of the community in terms of looking at issues of health issues of open space food access et cetera but we realized that while we could get a list of needs from this it didn't necessarily mean that's what should be put on the site so we actually backed up the process and went and spent time interviewing some of the people who had been involved in the closure of the plan and said well you know what would you like to see here and it was really interesting you know we sit in their homes and the idea was it was going to be an hour long interview and most people it would end up going for like three hours and because they just wanted to talk the story was so important to them but in those three hours they still couldn't tell us what they wanted to see a lot of people had spent a long time trying to fight for the plan to close down and trying to fight for the land to be cleaned they've never gotten to the point of thinking oh what could we do next with it and so we realized that we also needed to start to figure out ways to help them visualize it and in particular they've never been able to step foot on it while it was a power plant site it was you know off limits so to get them to the site to be able to start to talk about it and we also realized that you know this community is one of those that's been over plans there's been any number of big developments that were supposed to happen and never left off paper for a variety of reasons and so when we were saying oh we're building this and it's going to come up in the next couple of years for you everyone was kind of like yeah right we'll believe it when we see it so we realized that we needed to start to think about a way to start to build trust with this community and so one of the things that we did get from the interviews is this palpable sense of impending loss so this area is kind of around zero for gentrification in san francisco you can't and you probably have heard the stories that the rapid rising prices is you can't buy anywhere else in the city you can generally find a good deal at hunter's point and some of the developments that have been on paper are now starting to take off and they're mostly going to be from middle and upper income people and so people are feeling like the old community is being forced out and what we heard over and over again was this idea that stories would be lost and nobody would know how amazing this neighborhood was so we realized that one of the things that we could play into was how to show that we had heard that and we were responding to it so we reached out to Storyport who actually has a permanent booth of san francisco and turned out that only a handful of stories from this neighborhood had been recorded in the five years of that booth had been open and so we said well if we build a booth on our site would you come and do recordings there and I think I thought we were batched crazy because we were like what okay sure that sounds fine whatever you want let us know when you're ready to go and yeah we'll come and do our recordings so we did get a shipping container but we tried to think of how we could do it a little bit differently we actually hired some local youth to help us with the conversion of the site especially because one of the other things we had heard in those conversations is you know people of different concentrities all said well whatever you do on site do something for the youth they are the future of the neighborhoods and they're the ones who are most in danger of being lost and so as we brought them to the site we also used that as an opportunity to interview and interact with them and so this is kind of what it looked like in December 2013 when we finally opened up and I should add that like all the money that went into building this was us hijacking our community engagement budget which typically you're supposed to be using to have community meetings and so we sort of well this was more appropriate for that the inside of the vehicle looks like this and we wanted to create it to be sort of like your family's living room so that when you are coming to tell your stories it's a place that you feel quite comfortable and the window actually looks out over the old power plant site and the idea when we recruited people to come and tell stories we reached out to some of those who were involved in the closure of the plant and we did say come say what you want here we just said here's a space for you to be able to tell your story talk about whatever you want bring a partner and also every story that's here because it's a story for recording it's going to be archived in the library at congress so no story is going to be lost and you're also going to get a CD of that story and so what we heard over and over again from people who came was you listened to us and so we had people who had grown up in the neighborhood these two women were adorable they actually brought their fathers had worked in the shipyard so they actually also brought all of these amazing old photos and one of their fathers was a poet so we ended up talking to them and for us it was actually a really great engagement opportunity as well while they were waiting to go to the booths or coming out of the booths we were actually talking to them and getting additional information this woman actually is part of our PGME project team and she grew up in the neighborhood so she brought in her brother and I left this picture because it shows one of the insensible things here was a box of Kleenex now when you hear the three-minute clip on NPR you get a little weepy that you don't want anyone to know that you've got weepy well imagine 40 minutes that I rarely stand when I'm coming out of the booths who's not like like but happy at the same time and so the stories that came out of the booths were super super powerful and then at times people didn't come in with their partners and so I had to hop in and do the stories as well and I think it was a really helpful thing to break down that we're not these remote designers but we're actually super connected to this place and to this project and we want to be there to hear your stories as well and in a very weird way it turned out that this woman knew my mother so we actually had a lot to talk about so I'm going to show you a quick video that we made at the the making of the booth and all the audio in the video is actually from the story core of recordings and having photographers videographers it's actually been super important for this project because I think one of the things that sometimes happens in communities like this is everybody sort of assumes well you're out there and you're talking to somebody but it goes into a black box and they feel like they never know what's going on and so we wanted to try and be as transparent as we could with everything that was happening this is a time for us to talk and for us to be here today looking out on the outpost of the beginning of hunter's point it's future this is where the future is and it will be a success story what we do is not in vain I'm proud to serve this community I want to see the change but I also want to see our culture preserved here and our family is preserved here to look out and see just the space and the water comes up to the land and this makes me think of how important it is to preserve our beauty I don't want to waste time wishing that I did something or said something to wake up today and be alive and tell you I love you this is a time for us to talk and for us to be here today looking out on the outpost but in the beginning of hunter's point it's future this is where the future is and it will be a success story once we had that and like I said we didn't tell anyone what to say but you can imagine in a lot of stuff that was said in there were actually things that we needed to know and wanted to know to be able to figure out what to design and so we took that video and we also paid a sound editor again out of our communication budget to edit other clips and so then we helped listening parties on site which were essentially giant barbecues catered by one of the people that I interviewed who kept on talking smack about how good his barbecue was so it was like you gotta bring your game it was really good actually but we would hold these parties where we'd play the video and then we'd also play some of the recordings and so what's fascinating is from the time that we were in people's living rooms and they were kind of unable to tell us what are the types of stuff that they want to see to fast forward now where they're hearing people reminisce about these things about the neighborhood and think about what's important to them that we then would start getting a super generative space and because it also set up this sort of dynamic where it wasn't so much us as designers preaching to them or trying to elicit in this very unidirectional way it created a space where it was more like a conversation and so out of that we got some really rich suggestions some of which we could look to how could we put that on site quickly as an event others how could are long term things but we could start to strategize about what are ways we could test whether or not that could work and then some we actually really wouldn't be able to try as a long term but at least we started to get a sense more of what people were interested in seeing we started to also try to figure out what are other ways that we could engage the groups and get their input so we've tried to do a lot of stuff with we regularly hire youth for programming and then we also run youth workshops and so this is Chika who's been like a stalwart of working for us and then we also tried to talk to young kids like I think in a lot of these projects even if they're intended for little kids we don't really have a good way of talking to little kids most of the time so we've worked with summer school programs for the last two years in the neighborhood bringing them to site of working having artists go in and work with them and so one of the things we do when we bring them to site is say hey you got to be an architect for a day draw what you would like to see here and we have a couple hundred cards now and it you know it could be very easy to leave it at I have a lot of cute pictures of kids that I could show you but that wouldn't necessarily change PG&E's mind about what they would could see on site so out of these cards we've actually run different types of analysis and we can say that 21% of those cards actually say that they want recreation spaces or when we looked at a lot of the cards that had to do with the outdoors it wasn't just about access to the outdoors but they really wanted things that they could interact with and so now we've been able to plug that into our design of the shoreline but to this day also my favorite card is still the kid who suggested a dinosaur park I can't do that but we can try to type other things we can do so once we go on site we realize that actually it was a great opportunity to continue doing this programming and that the programming in a sense would become our community meetings so rather than having a meeting in some hall and saying come see us there we felt that if we're going to make you come somewhere come a place where you can start to visualize the possibilities of what can happen here but also come some place that would start to give you some sort of benefit in exchange for your time so and some of the things we've done have been completely from suggestion so we've done a petting zoo which was up on there I'm still trying to figure out how to do a skate park but one of the crazier things we've tried is a circus which when we first proposed it to the client I think they were about to have a heart attack either you want to do what and then on the day of when they rigged up this little setup I thought they were all going to faint but we had 650 people come the first time we did that which is a crowd unheard of in this community and it wasn't just people from the neighborhood it's people from surrounding neighborhoods and so for those of you don't know San Francisco Baby Hunters Point is viewed as as a very dangerous neighborhood to go into so the fact that white yuppie mom from neighboring Percharm Hill was willing to come and bring her kids into this space was actually a great sign for us that being able to change the dynamic but then also for the community they had a sense of pride of you're coming to our neighborhood for something and so when we did this again this past year we had 1300 people and we're about to attempt it again and I don't know how many people I can't but the richness of these groups I think has been really interesting for us and in addition to the big events which all the events we do we always partner with different groups we've also started to have smaller service events that relate to things that could ultimately be a part of the community hub that we're developing and put on site so this is a partnership with the local department of public health health was one of the big things the community said they wanted job training something that's come up a lot we partnered with a group called Young Community Developers I'm working right now to try and find someone to do tech training on site so we had about 82 hours of programming last year and we're hoping to expand that again this year so the final project I'm going to talk through is Dick and Rick and it's an offshoot of a collective that I'm part of called the equity collective we came together about two years ago a group of seven women in the community engagement science space and we were really compelled by challenges that we saw in this space we saw the rising popularity of the work but we felt that there was a lack of criticality within it and we wanted to find ways to be able to push that we did a series of articles about equity in particular last spring on impact design hub and then we realized from those articles people would come and say oh that's amazing and then they it was sort of the same people that we knew who weren't doing good work and so we felt maybe there was some other way to get the point home and so we teamed up with COMP, the center for pedagogy who Christine Gaspar is part of the collective is the ED for and Pinksy who's a New York based illustrator to create Dick and Rick which is we call a visual primary social impact design so once upon a time the land of community engaged design was a guy named Dick and a guy named Rick and they both really were committed to this idea of how could they help low income neighborhoods and they were both also designers Dick found neighborhood he wanted to help through searching on the internet and hearing about a community that didn't have enough parks Rick came across it by looking on the sign and finding a community meeting to talk about parks and said he wanted to see if he could get help them when it came time to actually doing their research in the community Dick went around with his camera and didn't talk to anyone but took lots of great pictures Rick actually went and sat in the community meeting didn't try to speak he just sat back and wanted to hear what was going on and what all the issues were when it came time for Dick to present to the community he had all of these great plans and ideas mind you he still hadn't talked to a community member at that point but invited them in to hear what his plans were for the park Rick sat in a community meeting some sort as well but rather than presenting he kind of sat and continued to try and understand what it was that there were needs and one of the things he saw is that not everybody was in the same place in terms of what they wanted when Dick decided to get feedback on his plan it was more asking whether or not he wanted the swings to be blue or red on the other hand when Rick was engaging in the community it was about really trying to have a setup where everybody would be able to give their input and as he did that he began to see that again there were all of these complexities in terms of what people wanted and needed and part of his job became trying to help mediate with all of that when it came to who was going to work on the projects within Dick's office it was done as a provano project and there wasn't necessarily you know times are tight they were really doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and so they weren't going to be able to really pay everybody they really shouldn't have to fuck up and try and make this happen but with Rick he sort of understood that because they were getting this time from the community he wanted to also be able to value it and value it not just saying thank you for coming but actually figure out ways that he could stretch budget to be able to pay for some of the youth leaders to participate so the parks are complete and Dick's park actually got into magazine which is great but unfortunately there's not really anyone using it Rick also had a beautiful park and unlike Dick actually got a lot of different usage and so Dick was left with his magazine trying to understand why no one was in the park and Rick was finding that not only within this the park was being used but they were actually really interested in trying other projects and so some of the youth came up to him and asked can you help us figure out how to build a farmer's market stand so it's kind of tongue-in-cheek way to describe it and the idea is that Dick is completely well-intentioned but there's a difference between being well-intentioned and actually acting out on the thing that you're doing and the sort of more immersive process that Rick does I think is kind of where we want to push people in terms of their criticality and so we jump around that one of the secret subtitles or not so secret subtitles of this is how not to be a dick and and I think the important thing is also to be able to say like we have all been dicks I have been dicks kind of too and my job is to learn how not to be a dick and how to be more like Rick more often and so we wanted to use it also a little bit of humor to sort of give people way to kind of talk about their actions in the space and in particular how do we start to move from a point where we're talking about social good which I think is where dick is to more social justice how are we actually trying to create equity with the projects that we're doing so that is about to release out in the next month we'll be putting it online and there's also a limited print run and then I just very quickly went to run in through like here a couple of tools that as I feel like where my practice has been shifted to is how to really stay more on the social justice side of the line and so I just wanted to share a couple of tools that I found that's been super helpful for that so first is this idea of systems thinking which you know as an architect I think a lot of the stuff that I do the idea of how do we create the best building or the best space possible and I think we also talk about how do you create the best community possible and even though my tool might be as an architect there are all of these other things that go into planning into how to create the best community and so part of my work is either bringing people to the table or taking time to find out about all of these other issues that it really contributes to creating that best community the other thing that I think is I found to be super important this is this idea of specificity or sort of say people not categories and so I've shown this a lot at recent lectures and I sort of struck by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and you know why is it rising now because this clearly is not the first time that African men and women are being murdered moral unfortunately the last time but what is it about this time that has caused us to kind of coalesce and I think the really interesting thing is that in this day and age we know the names of a lot of these people who are having we've heard of Eric Garner we've heard of Michael Brown we've heard of Amadou Diallo and there's something about knowing that name and not having a category that is super important and so I think when we talk about the work that we do how can we be really specific and not talk about communities in this big general grand tent of communities but who is it that we're really trying to effect by the things that we're doing and how are we crying to create these places where they can come together but understanding even within this crowd there's a different set of interests that I need to be able to understand third tool is this idea of co-power and so I pulled this from a book called Spatial Agency that came out a couple of years ago and I think it's a really powerful framing of understanding how we do work in these communities we can come in and treat this level of expertise so as experts citizens many of us in this room I think are that where we have some sort of expertise but we're also being we're also in our humanity I think expertise is often set up as this very rational objective thing and the fact of the matter is we never lose assumptions we always have assumptions so it's better to acknowledge it than ignore it and have it rear its head somewhere we also think people connect more with people and so the more you can be human in these environments the better those solutions are and then on the other hand you have the citizen experts who are these people who you're dealing with who will know more about what it is like to live and work in this community than you ever will regardless of how many hours you spent there and but they've been really empowered to think of that as expertise so how do you not just empower them in terms of equipping them but how do you co-power them so that it actually feels like equal expertise that's coming together to create these projects and then the final tool is this idea of empathy and in particular I'm really interested in this idea of how are we acknowledging the pain and resilience so not just looking at someone as a human being but actually looking at feelings which I know is kind of a scary idea but that in acknowledging what needs to be repaired it's actually a really super important act that a lot of people value and then becomes part of the seeds of understanding what you need to do so if we go back to the daily bearer project when we talk to a lot of these the mostly men there was a deep, deep sense of pain because they felt that they had come here for something better and that they were forced to work in these environments to be abused in various ways and that nobody had ever seen them and so one of the most powerful things of the work that I was doing in my interactions with them was just seeing how much it meant to them to have someone sit with them in their pain and then also show that they valued them and they wanted to acknowledge their existence and it helped them be more visible so these are kind of the tools and I will just pass on to you and thank you I've been a huge fan of yours for gosh 2007 that's when I first 2006 was the best one we were introduced and then to hear kind of the trajectory of everything and to get caught up in what happened with the day laborer station and then to kind of hear these four points the equity cooperative collective collective collective I'm writing about cooperatives so just a boy just a real pleasure to hear you tonight and really hear what you've been working on and then and I was going to ask you why you studied architecture but now I know it's kind of like you were brought up by social scientists and like wow to have that manifest in the old environment kind of that sensitivity is really really incredible I have so many questions and I know a lot of people out there have a lot of questions too so the first one I loved how you began where you said because you started so early you were one of the right at the beginning of all of this what it was like and you know you've kind of seen where this area of design has gone you've lived it you've been a part of it and shaped it to some extent and so that was really quite interesting to see the four points the systems thinking co-power specificity empathy I've never seen him combine quite like that we all know about you know kind of human centered and so there's a real clarity with this approach I think the way you talked about it so I'm curious you think it's reflective of the time that we're living in because design it seems like design is going in this direction at least this next generation of designers that I think you're probably one of the people out there in the front forefront of this where people are thinking more holistically where we're more connected globally for any number of reasons people are working locally this is these are kind of the points of the essay I'm writing right now people are more cooperative sharing power so do you think I know this this reflects really from my perspective good practice but why have it seems like only now have we been moving in this direction from from your perspective because you have this way you know kind of perv you I think they're at the beginning now kind of here I think that there's a couple of things I think there's always been a pretty a long history of some element of community based design but I think when I first started coming through it we were sort of the forgotten children or the black sheep of the family and oh you guys go and you do that there and then you know right around 2000 2001 we'd be sorry to have architecture for humanity and public architecture come up at least within the architecture space it suddenly started to provide a vehicle to have that conversation reach the mainstream and I think also looking at groups like idea.org who have helped to be extreme that as well but I think that where we are facing is that the bar keeps on going up right and so for a while the bar of social good I think was the high bar that we were trying to achieve and now I think in light of everything else that we were seeing out there that doesn't seem like it is critical enough you know we can't stop there and I think that we are always a product of our time and so the time is reflecting this everybody across all sorts of different angles is really being forced to do some sort of critical assessment it's not just within design but the question for us as designers is well how are we engaging that environment and I think it's good for movements to continue to be forced to continue to move forward and evolve when an analogy that I've been using lately to sort of describe that is if you think of the sustainability movement and we had lead which if you go back to 2000 when we need for started coming it was like only the super left-wing firms in California that were doing that like it wasn't the thing that everybody did and then gradually it cracked and somebody who was one of the founders described it to me is think of the bell curve and so lead for a long time is on the leading edge and then eventually it moved over to the center where everybody does and if you don't have a lead building you're crazy and living building challenge became the new thing and so the idea is you got to keep on pushing forward and so I think there's some of us who are like banging the social justice drum and pushing for this criticality but I'm happy to look back and sort of see well at the top of the bell curve you have a lot of people looking at this idea that there should be some imperative of social good the fact that we've increased the number of dicks out there and we created it that so that we could be able to laugh every time we said it but the fact that there are like many more dicks out there than there used to be even five years ago I think is a good sign and I think it's important then that those of us who are operating as ricks continue to push the bar and what it means to be rich well that's a great segue thank you because I wanted to talk to you about the equity collective not the cooperative and the conversation that you've started online with this design for equity initiative and so you can everybody can go online and read these wonderful assays if you haven't read them designforequity.org correct that's where it is in what you hope to achieve in the next years as you move forward I thought that your exploration of terms and definition for very powerful taking these kind of words that designers often use but then might really exploring them but I noted that it was an all-women collective which I loved and I was fascinated and was this intentional and if so why kind of and kind of not so the original conversation that triggered the equity collective is that all of us are part of a program called the design futures form which was started we're about to hit our fourth year as a group that created a consortium of universities to come together and do a summer program because we were finding that a lot of schools were really interested in having social impact curriculum or I should say a lot of students were interested in there being more social impact design curriculum but not a lot of schools could offer it and so this was a way to do a week-long master class taught by who's who within the space and what we found the first year is that the audience of students was largely white and so the imperative the next year to the school was that that's not allowed to happen again and so the next year we actually got a far better representation that it got us talking about well what you know beyond all the things that we can talk about and what to do with our projects and what skills to give people how do we talk about the diversity of this space because it's a little problematic if most of the communities were engaging our communities of color and most of the people who are going into the communities are not and so we certainly with super foundation was super interested in us having that conversation and so the next year when we met up we had a separate sort of cohort training afterwards for people who were interested in it and we brought in Race Forward to do a diversity training with us and that that was kind of from that was where we got the whole oh actually diversity is the wrong goal to be shooting for that actually that's really just talking about whether or not you have all the right pieces in the room but not talking about the quality of that or that you're inspired to something that's about improving outcomes and not just saying you got people at the door and so with that we felt okay there's a lot more work to do on this to really treat it critically and so then we had a opt-in process for whoever wanted to continue working on it and so we ended up being seven women so that's how we got to be the all women and you know they're definitely our friends on the side who are the male persuasion who I think we want to be able to expand right now or kind of trying to understand what it is that we've created so we've done the writing we've done Dick and Rick which we're about to release and then just recently in order to an issue that came up as we were presenting Dick and Rick is a conversation about white privilege and trying to really understand what that was because that's also there playing a role in all the things that we're coming up with so we actually worked with a trainer a facilitator around that in January kind of pulled our money together to do that so that we could be able to understand how so everything that we've done we've done we've tried to study and understand before we go to the point where we're like writing articles or creating Dick and Rick so it's been part of like the birth period for us as well so right now like white privilege is the next fun topic that we are taking on I look forward to however you manifest that out to help us that are deal with that and understand it in our within our design profession I think it's critical really important so I think there's probably people that want to ask questions because we're we only have this room until eight o'clock I think so do you mind if we oh of course can I have a question um I would just hi I was curious if you could talk I know um I would who are you and where are you from hi Jack I'm Vanessa I say that I work at that in architects that I'm also on the board for AI New York and I've heard Liz speak before but one of the questions or I have for you is related to funding the projects and if you could talk about sort of the funding strategies that you've been using and if you're if you're you know working with city governments or like how are you funding these projects that's a good question so I operate my firm as a consultancy so generally the clients are coming to the table with the funding how they're getting the funding often is very different so some are getting it from foundations some are raising it from their their own pockets some so I just did a brief assessment trip for a small neighborhood group in St. Paul of Minnesota that basically they brought in Dr. Mindy Fulav back in early February she was like okay you need a designer now to come and look at it and recommended me and so I gave them my proposals of what it would be to do a two-day trip and assessment and they're like we'll get back to you and within two weeks you basically fundraise from the state department of transportation and from another local one that had a lot of money to contribute for a gathering that they were doing later in May and so basically the setup was I had to speak for a little bit to the gathering and with that they were able to bring me to the table and so I'm trying to work with organizations if they don't have a ready source of funding but other times it's also about you know you can see with some of these projects they're like like particularly the PG&E project that has a really long time cycle and so it's perennially an interesting challenge because there's nothing within there this project is so radically different for them that we're you know a little bit of Robin Peter Paypal type thing of like remediation dollars are paying for this work and then the disposition dollars will pay for their work and so there's a little bit of that as well and you know I talked about the first couple of things coming out of our community engagement budget which they were going to have to do anyway and then you know there's also like these smaller partnerships that happen for a short period of time so right now I'm working on a project in Charlottesville and the setup that we did for that was we just created a six-month contract and then now in the course of me doing that consulting work for them I probably had help them write about five different grant applications that could pay for me to continue working on the project after the six months is done so generally I do find that clients are able to come up with something at least in the beginning and then that kind of scaffolds that if there is a need for additional things beyond whatever our short contract is that like I can also bring to the table the content writing for being able to get grants My name is Mouslet I'm an industrial designer and I'm also running my studio here in New York but I also happened to be Turkish from Istanbul and almost four years ago one of the municipalities in Turkey happened to have a space that they didn't know what to do with and they were looking at turning into a ballroom more like a married space so we convinced them to turn that space into a design at L.A. where designers would come and work with municipalities with the locals and either do need training on the ground or the municipality would give them briefs so that they could work on it and one of the biggest barriers that we have there is not on the design research side so it's not explaining what design is on that user research base but more in the public policy and the municipality level so that municipality do really understand design as an agent of change but in terms of growing that we find that as a big barrier so I was wondering if you could give an example or talk about what you think was useful and overcome with that barrier that is useful and people not thinking of me as just a designer but that I could be somehow a partner in change not on the user level but more in the municipality not on the collaboration level together with you yeah well so I think that the idea behind the process when I mentioned that the conversations that I'm having are not just with the groups that represent the quote unquote community it's folks on the ground but it's with all folks who participate in that ecosystem that one of the things so my clients do range from like small local groups to big multinational corporations and the conversations that I'm having with at all levels is always a little bit of what do you need to be able to succeed because a lot of times the projects that I'm engaging in are the first time that anyone in that company has tried anything like that and there is a huge risk curve that you have to be able to overcome they're usually like the leading creative lights but they've got behind them a whole bunch of people who are not ready to jump into this line of thinking and so I try to spend a lot of time with them we're building a relationship with them where I understand well what are their needs and desires as well what motivated them to even engage in this kind of project and then also trying to understand well what's the system that you're working with and I'll even you know straight up ask what do you need to be able to have a win because you want to be able to support their ability to do stuff and understanding how that the structure that they're usually negotiating is super important for trying to figure out whether or not what you can create would actually be able to get anywhere so for instance with PG&E what's interesting is that what resonates with some of the folks who are more traditional of like we're an energy company type of thing is when we talk about this as a site management strategy so if you were to have this vacant piece of land for this period of time you wouldn't be able to control what would happen to it you wouldn't have a community that feels some sense of stewardship over it you'd actually potentially be spending more money trying to keep that site secure than something where you actually have community members participating in the stewardship for it and so when we talk about it in the language of site management we're like oh yeah I get what you're trying to say so it's also figuring out how to be a translator of understanding you're we're still talking about the same thing I just figured out the language that we need to hear to be able to understand what that thing is Yeah, I just recently relocated in the area from the middle left I was just wondering you had touched on for the day labor project anything you had touched on going to other communities and cities around North America to look for research have you seen if any of those communities looked into that problem in their business or tackled that problem and if so have you seen any themes in the communities That's a great question you've been asked that one before I haven't because right around the time so we sort of continue to keep the conversation going up until about 2010 and in that period of time you were still knee-deep in the recession and you know for the ones that we kept in touch with we were still seeing that all the same pressures that kept on from being able to invest in it in the first place were still consistently there right about the time that we closed that shop on the project so it would be an interesting exercise to see now that the economy has risen again if anybody has picked up that mantle I don't know Hello my name is Winston I'm a design intern and I wanted to ask because one of the things that I find that simple about social responsible design you can't be very specific about it because sometimes it's architecture and sometimes it's poster design and sometimes it's journalism and sometimes it's cooking or something like that so for all these people sort of surging into this industry what advice do you usually get them in terms of skill sets to be essentially to be ricks and not to be dicks and to keep sort of pushing this in a positive direction so I think the kind of four tools that I laid out at the end is sort of what I would say or I think there's more but I think those are a good start in terms of a platform and then I think I often also get people asking well so what degree should I get or where should I go to school to be able to practice this and I actually think the more important thing is get a degree in something you're really good in and that you're passionate about but also have a good understanding of the world and how all of these other things plug in so none of my projects as you saw there was always a list of like a large team or collaborators none of my projects are ever done alone and you know I'm good at a lot of things but there are a lot of things I'm not good at and what I am good at is sort of being able to identify what are the skill sets we need to have at the table and so I think one of the things that often leads to a dick like situation is when people feel like they're going to be the savior that they're going to come in and as a designer they're going to fix everything and I think the more that we can be open to seeing who needs to be at the table and creating a you know one thing I would say that wasn't up there in the Ford tools was this idea of collaboration and like being able to work with others and being able to synthesize your ideas with others and I think that's hugely important to getting at when I showed the system diagram and showed how there were all of those other pieces I'm really good at the kind of architecture piece but I'm going to go to somebody else who can help me figure out about the health and well-being if somebody else who's dealing with economic development and just understanding how to be at the table with all of those people I think is also another important element to create more ricks but you also I think you that Hunt's point was so incredible it was such a wonderful example that you showed because what you did is like you named you you built trust right that's like huge you built something right away to show that there was some you know there was something behind what you were saying I mean it was such a beautiful and then you listened to somebody said in quotes you listened to us and then you were transparent I mean just like one right after the other yeah she's really good at helping me all the things I forgot to say yeah and I think you know the other thing and this is an interesting thing for me right now because there's particularly for my projects that are not US based that the most that can be sort of afforded and especially because I'm not moving over there are these shorter engagements so one of the things that I've noticed has been super interesting with Hunter's Point and also Charlottesville where I'm working on a new project now is just the longevity of like keep on coming back and it's not necessarily like I'm coming back to hit big milestones and just coming back to do the work so you know one of the folks at PGMe jokes with me that like within three or four months of us starting to do the project because I was around a lot that if she showed up for a meeting and I wasn't there people in the community would go up to her and be like where's Liz and you know same thing down in Charlottesville I like was coming in and out for this thing and you know I was giving hugs to everybody and figuring out well what how's your hip feeling today and it was just because I kept on making appearances and getting to know the people and so I think it builds that sense of trust where they you know especially because with so much of this work it's really hard when I first go about a project to be able to say I know exactly what I'm going to give you at the end and so there's a lot of trust that even my clients have to have with me of like we're going for some journey and hopefully we'll get to some place good at the end of it but I'm trusting you in your process and so I think it's not not only with the clients but it's also with the community that they're having faith that they're believing that I am their best interest in heart and somehow we'll get to a point at the end where there's something that we can all be proud of I think we're almost there but can I have one last question I'm looking for we have one more person maybe we should like hi I'm Sarah I'm a designer too curious to know how Liz you partner with community-based organizations because when we're working in the social justice space there's so many people that have already been doing this work that we're doing for decades so when you're working in communities and trying to figure out who's already sort of a key advocate stakeholder in there how do you partner with them how do you find them how do you work with them great question as well so a lot of it ends up being that when we do so there's a couple of things one in that initial survey of folks that we're talking to always there's a spectrum of community-based organizations that are on that list because as you said they have really good insight about that community and what works and what doesn't work and it's really helpful to take that so they're kind of covered in that first brush but then when we get to the point particularly with you know some of these place-based projects that I'm doing now where we're trying to do some level of activation or programming connected to building towards whatever the long-term project is I always set it up that we're doing that stuff as partnerships and so in Hunter's point you know we may seed a couple of the programs that we feel aren't covered by partners but every other program that's on the list which is the vast majority of them there's some sort of community partner that's in there because we recognize they do that thing better than we can and really you know we've talked about that project as our role here is to figure out how to build the capacity of the organizations to be able to do more and so it's been really interesting because in our working with them sometimes we find okay here are the limits of what you could do so why don't we bring XYZ to the table to help you maximize that and that can only be done through these conversations we're sitting at like monthly meetings that are conveners of local base organizations and so Allegra Madsen who's the project manager that we just hired to kind of do day-to-day programming on the site is at that meeting every month and I'm kind of popping into it quarterly to try and understand what's going on with different groups and how we can partner with them differently and so I think for these things to be sustainable as designers we're even if I'm doing a project for a couple of years we're going to come in and eventually we are going to leave and so the idea is what are we leaving and to make sure that what we're leaving is not just a creating project but actually a full-on sustainable structure that allows the things that you have found to keep on going it really is based on looking for those groups and trying to figure out what is the capacity gap and so part of what you're designing is not just a visible thing but also all the other programming and other pieces that help plug that capacity gap I think that's the word the end thank you so much