 Speakers today will be sharing about how we might imagine and create safer spaces in our restaurants, hospitals, and communities, and how design of space can affect equity, health, and wellness. The session will be recorded and it will be available on kuperquot.org, and for podcast lovers, the session will also be released on Design Lab Pod with Pod Coom, which can be found on any podcasting platform. We love audience engagement here, so please post your questions, comments, or just introduce yourself and say hello in the question and answer and comments box, and we will address questions towards the end after the three speakers initially present during our panel. We, you're also welcome to reach out to the panelists if you like to say hello and introduce yourself. Before we get started, a special thank you to production by Rob Podlici, Eva Vorosis, and Kaila Doracy, graphics by Jennifer Tobias, and live post fashioning by AI Media. We've got a fantastic show today, so I'm going to pass it back to Ellen. Hi there, greetings from Cooper Hewitt. I'm going to talk a little bit, by way of introduction, about our exhibition Design and Healing, which is on view at Cooper Hewitt all year, so visit us in New York City or online, and we're going to talk for just a few minutes about the idea of healthy spaces, which is a big theme in our exhibition, and sort of go back in history and look at how healthcare design has influenced the way we live today continuously. So in the early 20th century, one in seven people in Europe and the US died from tuberculosis, specialized hospitals, which were called sanatoriums, were built in order to isolate these patients, but also to give them treatment by exposing them to fresh air and sunlight. It was believed that sunlight and fresh air could actually help cure the disease, which turned out not to be true, but was a widespread therapy. So sanatoriums were built, like the ones shown here on these postcards, which had sleeping porches and open air patient rooms, and some were much cruder. They just consisted of outdoor tents or even shacks that kept people exposed to air. They look very pretty in these postcards, like a nice resort that you might want to go to, but bear in mind they were very, very cold in the winter. So sanatoriums like that inspired modern architects like Alvar and Aeno Alto to design this sanatorium in Finland in 1933. And I want you to notice how extremely skinny the building is, like at the wing of an airplane, right? And it's so thin in order to maximize sunlight entering the building, but also natural cross ventilation in all the patient rooms. And the Alto's design special furniture like this chair made out of curving soft plywood, which was intended to help TB patients cough and breathe more easily. This chair has since become a design icon. You can see it in homes and offices and lobbies to this day, yet we no longer associate it with healthcare and tuberculosis. We just see it as beautiful, good, humane design. After the treatment of tuberculosis with drugs, with antibiotic drugs was proven effective in 1943, sanatoriums disappeared. However, the design principles that they brought to light, the notion of fresh air, ventilation, views of nature, those design principles affected the way we design homes and cities and offices today. Tuberculosis today is still a pandemic disease. It affects people in every country on earth. Mass design group designed this tuberculosis hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which uses outdoor patient rooms and natural ventilation to isolate patients during treatment and also to create a humane environment for them during treatment. And given the warm climate in Haiti, this is actually a very humane healthcare environment, very beautifully designed. And if you come to our exhibition, you can enjoy this beautiful humane environment. It's a breathing space designed by Sahil and Sartak from New Delhi, India, designed especially for the museum's glorious conservatory. Wealthy families installed these kind of glass rooms in their homes at the turn of the century so that they could enjoy light therapy all year round in the comfort of their homes and, in theory, ward off diseases like tuberculosis. In this space, you can also see photographs of streeteries which were built in New York City during the pandemic beginning in 2020 and these photographs were all taken by today's first guest on our program, Jennifer Tobias. So let me introduce our guest. Jennifer is a scholar and illustrator. She is co-author and illustrator of the book Extra Bold, A Feminist Inclusive Anti-Racist Non-Binary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. Jennifer participated in Open Restaurants Innovation, a series of workshops organized by AIA New York and several New York City agencies to shape design criteria for the next generation of outdoor dining structures in the city. So Jennifer is going to talk to us about the history and future evolution of streeteries in the age of the pandemic. Welcome, Jennifer Tobias. Thank you, Ellen. Let's think back to March 2020 when everything shut down for COVID. Restaurants definitely shut down and here in New York we needed a plan. The city came up with a plan literally and it looked like this. The city said you could build two options for theoretically COVID safe restaurants. One was sidewalk seating tables on the sidewalk. The other which I'm going to focus on was roadway seating and as this diagram shows you've got a parking space surrounded by planters with tables in the middle. Parking space, planters, tables. The design was refined a little bit in the next 18 months and refined a little bit more but basically it's the same thing, parking space, planters, tables. So then the city said, okay, that's the plan. Go. And New Yorkers being New Yorkers, we got to work. Like this young man here in my East Village neighborhood putting together some two by fours. And the results were just an amazing variety of structures. This one's fairly typical. You've got a parking space, planters, and tables. But there was also sort of the high end like the empire diner in Chelsea and the photograph shows a pretty tricked out structure complete with a roof, electricity, drainage, and you'll notice walls which may or may not be so good for ventilation. Regardless, by today there's 12,000 streeteries in the five boroughs. Also today the program has been made permanent. So to that end the city went back to its design and thought, what can we learn, what have we learned from that first generation and what should we build, what should we specify for the next generation of streeteries? Jennifer, I noticed that one of the things added to this plan is that big orange plastic barrier. Why is that important? That's a great question. That big orange plastic barrier is about cars really. These things are in the middle or not. They're on the roadbed and New York City is still a very traffic heavy place. So that's why those things are there. Thanks. Sure. Besides those big orange barriers, for this next generation of streeteries the city came up with seven criteria and I'm going to go through them now. First, these things need to be weatherproof. Here's an example of a sort of weatherproof streetery. It's a pre-made bubble tent and it's doing its duty in the middle of a snow storm. So I call it the snow globe. These things also need to be safe for traffic and that big orange barrier was there for a reason. Anything can happen and it often does, like this streetery which had a little incident with a car. Streeteries also need to be accessible in emergencies. So for emergency vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances, but they also need to be accessible for utilities like this dude who's trying to drill a hole in the street. Sight conditions are also important. So you think of New York as being just relentlessly flat, but there's some interesting alternative conditions like this spot that's on both a hill and a corner. So you can see someone had a pretty creative time trying to build a space for that. Economic conditions are also important. So at this spot you can get a good cheap taco, but you should also be able to enjoy a streetery. So the design should accommodate restaurants with different levels of resources. ADA compliance, really important. Here's an example of a streetery that is not doing such a good job. We've got this crumbling plywood ramp in a very narrow entrance without very much clearance. This place is a little better. It's got pretty good sidewalk access. It's set up near a curb cut. The restaurant itself has an ADA compliant ramp going up to the entrance. And then the streetery, which you can see on the right, has been built so that it's a continuous grade with the sidewalk. Finally, these things need to be clean. Now, New York City is home to Pizza Rat for a reason. And so we want to do a little better than that. So the City wants design solutions that can be and will be clean. So those are the seven criteria. And what I want to do now is talk about what happened next. The City put out a call for community participation in tandem with groups such as AIA New York and Al Fresco NYC, which is a restaurant group. And they said, okay, New York, give us your ideas. How can we build out those seven criteria for the next generation? And that's how I got a little bit more involved. That's how I ended up on the team with these guys. This is Nikita and Nick from BVN Architects. And these inventive Aussies, as the newspaper article says in the slide, they ply their talents with wood. And in particular, in the first generation of streeteries, they plied their talents into these, into this flat packed, online orderable DIY recycled plywood street, streetery in a box. What I want to do is now is conclude with some of the solutions we came up with to address those criteria and then just talk a little bit about next steps. So here's a rendering by Nick. And as you can see, our proposed solution pretty much looks the same as the original solution. Parking space, planters, tables. There's a couple other features though, so I'll just detail them. For one thing, there's a roof. Everybody likes roofs. I think they're good for weather. We're a little fuzzy though, about that enclosure part. So we sort of left that gray. You'll also, you'll notice other things like the continuous ADA threshold, mandating that the, that there'd be no grade change between the sidewalk and the entire streetery. Finally. Jennifer, will that continuous threshold be required by the city? Yes. Or is that an ideal like a want to have? Well, the, what they're, what they're saying is these things have to be, have robust ADA compliance. And so this was our solution to that. Fantastic. You know, and so even the existing one required a ramp, but as you saw in that other slide, you know, that was not always addressed very well. There are other ADA criteria, but, but gray changes is one that's quite important. So finally, the last criteria or the last thing that we threw in there was a nod to Pizza Rat. You will notice that there is a trash zone on the end of each streetery. And that is an attempt to contain New York's notorious sidewalk garbage. So this is just one of several, many actual solutions. There are many teams and there's been a robust community feedback, feedback process. And this is going to, all these ideas are going to work their way up the city system and hopefully become something concrete by this summer. In the meantime, if you're in New York, I hope that you can enjoy street areas like this one in Chinatown. And I can tell you it's delicious and user friendly. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jennifer Tobias. That was fascinating and makes me want to go get lunch also. So I appreciate that. Our next guest is Jennifer D. Roberts. She is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, UMD. Dr. Roberts is also the founder and director of the Public Health Outcomes and Effects of the Built Environment Laboratory, which has the beautiful acronym Phoebe, Phoebe Laboratory. She studies the impact of built and natural environments on the public health outcomes of marginalized communities. And I'm so delighted that she's here today to tell us about how to make more healthy and equitable neighborhoods. So welcome, Jennifer Roberts. Thank you, Ellen. Thank you so much for the introduction. So I thought that I would talk a little bit about how my work intersects with this whole idea of healthy and safe outdoor spaces. And when I think of this, I think about how we define these types of spaces, how we've defined them in the past, and how we define them today. So for example, the four images on this slide, we see two from the past and two presently. And the one from the past shows a little black boy during the Jim Crow era who's standing next to a colored drinking fountain outside area. You also see an image from the past that shows a white American family in a suburban area walking in their high suburban neighborhood with white sidewalks, manicured lawns, matured trees. And then the images of today, you see one that is a screenshot from the video which was the Christian Cooper incident, the African American birdwatcher who was in Central Park in 2020 when he was falsely accused of, quote, threatening a white woman. And then the last image of today is just it illustrates open streets. It seems like open streets became the lifeline for recovery during many cities during the pandemic. And so when I also think about these spaces, I also think about how we have designed these spaces for certain people. So have these spaces been designed for people of privilege or have they been designed for people who have been oppressed? Again, we see four images on this slide and the image that shows something of more of a representing privilege shows a sign from a sundown town. So it says, quote, white only within the city limits after darks. And sundown towns were created in the early decades of the 20th century. And they were basically just towns and municipalities that banned African Americans through other communities of color after dark. Another image depicting privilege is we see even what would be maybe phenotypically white bodies engaged in stand-up paddle boarding. That's a sport that's highly popular among a lot of young white Americans. And then the image of oppressed, we see a historical sign within a park or a green space that recognizes the location of a lynching, the lynching occurred of Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant at the time that lynching occurred in 1918 in Georgia. And then the final image that depicts an oppressed situation of someone who's occupied in an outdoor space is another screenshot from white police officer who was violently restraining a 15 year old African American girl at a pool party that was in Texas. And so given that our definition of healthy and safe outdoor spaces has changed over time and changed by the recipient of the occupier of that space, I thought it was important to reflect on those changes. And so in this image we see the famous photograph of James Brock, who was the Monson Motor Lodge Manager, and he poured acid into the pool of that motel to encourage or actually force African American swimmers out of the pool because it was declared a white only pool. But this was actually a civil protest, which was called a swimming in 1964. And so when we think about our outdoor spaces, we see that these spaces were designed or oriented, I should say, for brutality by way of lynching. So we see an image of a lynching that occurred in outdoor space in 1935 or for oppression where, for example, there were only whites, only parks. This is a famous photograph from Gordon Parks. He shows these little black children looking on the other side of a fence wanting to go into a whites only park. Or we see a 1959 photograph that shows a sign saying no white people today allowed in the zoo because it was that one day that folks of color were allowed into the zoo. And that image was in 1959 in the Memphis zoo. The spaces were also designed for supremacy. So we see the whites, we see the non-whites sitting on an Atlanta transit trolley in 1956. They were sitting in the back. We see another photo of a very kind of a peaceful protest of a young man who was decided to go to a whites only pool that was in 1958 night. His name was David Eislem. But finally, we see that even though when spaces were forced to integrate, you know, like parks and pools, as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the phenomenon of white flights, you know, coupled with expansion of suburbanization, as it's created more segregation through the development of suburban country clubs or private swimming pools for white Americans. And as a result, urban areas that had these spaces, these urban public pools or our parks were left disinvested and subsequently were closed. And so if we pivot to today and take a close look at outdoor spaces during this pandemic, we see that actually many parks and public outdoor spaces throughout the country were closed to prevent and minimize the transmission of COVID-19. And this is kind of an ironic issue considering as an outdoor space. And also considering that, you know, in the summer of 2020 Centers for Disease Control really encouraged us to go to these outdoor spaces. They said that visiting parks close to your home were a safe way to protect yourself and others from COVID-19. But we subsequently found that almost half of us don't have a park within a 10 minute walk. And then the quality of those parks are highly coordinated with neighborhood demographics. So for example, parks that serve a majority of people of color are usually half as big, nearly five times as many people per acre have to be accommodated in those parks. And so when you think about these situations, it was very easy for these parks to become overcrowded. And hence they became unsafe because people were no longer able to socially distance. And this pandemic has shown that a lot of the preexisting inequities regarding outdoor spaces and public spaces were just exacerbated. Nature has been known to be a, you know, beneficial in terms of our health and well-being and for, you know, our mental and our physical health outcomes. But we saw that there was many inequities falling along, you know, racial lines or ethnic lines or income lines in terms of access to these types of spaces. We also saw preexisting inequities regarding the privilege of these spaces. So as I had mentioned earlier, I showed the photo of Christian Cooper. But I really like this quote that I saw in an article, systemic racism doesn't start, stop at park gates. That was a quote that came from Dr. Carolyn Finney, who's a cultural geographer. And she really just kind of argued that, you know, there's just been a general lack of attention to outdoor and public spaces that welcome African Americans and other communities of color. Also, this pandemic illuminated the equities of transportation or rather kind of our man-made indoor spaces that are movable and transported within outdoor spaces. We saw public transportation plummeted about 90% at the height of the pandemic. And the remaining 10% of the writers became, it's became more difficult. But you have to think about who were those remaining 10%? They were the essential and frontline workers. And so who are they? They are often people of color, women, people who are Carlos and lower income earners often. Often we have to even look at the transit operators. Sometimes they're even overlooked who still had to function during the pandemic. They, you know, had a higher risk of COVID-19 transmission. There was some research that was done of the New York City transit workers. And they said, you know, 90% almost all of them were afraid of getting sick. You know, a quarter of them did have COVID-19 and three quarters of the transit workers in New York City knew a coworker who had died from COVID. And this is exemplified by this image of this man right here. His name is Jason Hargrove. He was a bus driver in Detroit. He was just frustrated. He posted a video saying that, you know, people are not taking seriously the risk that he has, you know, of operating. And subsequently he contracted COVID-19 and died 11 days after posting that video. And so to wrap this up, I kind of wanted to take a minute to see kind of where we're headed. You know, I was asked early in the pandemic to do an interview. And they asked me for the New York Times if I thought people would move away from cities. If I thought people would move away from transit-oriented developments and move away from denser housing. And I kind of replied that, you know, humans are adaptable. We all don't begrudgingly, but we're adaptable. And as we've done in the past, we'll be innovative and come up with new ways for designing and living for our betterment. And some of those may be thinking about, you know, rethinking density management in cities and towns and neighborhoods and thinking about how we live in these communities. We also need to de-emphasize private and single occupancy transport and open these streets, you know, permanently for pedestrians and other non-motorized modes of transport. We also then kind of need to pivot back again to focusing on infectious diseases when designing. For decades, the intersection of planning and design and public health focused less on infectious diseases. But we kind of need to repivot and put that back in the forefront. And so, Stevie Wonder is one of my favorite artists, and he had a song called Living for the City. And so I wanted to end saying that, you know, disease can shape cities. But I think that, you know, in essence, we can no longer live for our cities if we have to design our environments to be sustainable, safe, and healthy, and put public health at the forefront when we're doing these designs. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jennifer. I'm so glad you brought that history to light, but also showed how much of it is still with us and really has to be addressed. Thanks. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Jennifer Robert and Jennifer Tobias. I would like to introduce our third speaker, Andrew Ibrahim. He's an assistant professor of surgery and architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan and chief medical officer at HOK, a global designer architecture firm. He received his undergrad and medical degree both with honors from Case Western Reserve University, including a year at University College London and Bartlett School of Architecture. In addition to his health service research degree from University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholar, he completed policy training as a Crill Fellow at Princeton University and as a Doris Duke Fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Andrew's numerous publications, book chapters, international presentations focus on his research at the interface of healthcare, policy, and architecture. Welcome, Andrew. Awesome. Thank you so much, Morgan. It's great to be here. I love this series and sort of a lot of the provocations on design and health that are being raised by it. I decided to sort of extend that trend and kind of ask almost the counterintuitive question like what do healthy hospitals have in common and what does it mean to sort of think about health in a hospital? It's almost ironic to ask the question. To give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I live in three very different worlds. I'm a practicing general surgeon every Monday I'm in the OR, sometimes on Thursdays and sometimes at night when I'm on call, like last night. I'm a formerly trained health services researcher, so I think a lot about not just what does the design look like or how is it responded to, but could you measure that? Could you actually measure the impact of our design in no, in a reproducible way, its effect on people's health? And before all the idea of that, I studied architecture and I work closely with the AIA for a number of years, the Design Health Board, and then sort of the Chief Medical Officer of the Global Design Firm. So all three of them come together and I think you'll see in the next few slides, thinking about that. I think that the movement towards healthier hospitals is going to happen in like three domains. And what's interesting to me about them is a lot of them are existing ideas that have sort of gone and fits and starts and people have cultivated, but that really accelerated by COVID. And I think the first sign of a healthier hospital is that it has fewer patients. And I don't mean that in the sense just that we are in as a population healthier. And so let's be willing to go to the hospital. I mean that we can provide more care at home than we've ever been able to, so that people can get care they need without coming to the hospital. So these sketches here are some floor plan schematics that I remember doing in the early months of COVID. And we were accessing about all the different zones you could create in the hospital as a way to isolate patients. In other words, you wanted to be able to care for the patient while you were somehow somewhere else. And I think all of us either, if you weren't in this situation or caring for someone, saw visually the moment of someone being on oxygen, having a pulse oximeter and their heart rate, and that being a way to monitor. And I remember this aha moment where we just started sending patients home, realizing that if you could monitor those things while they're at home, it was sort of akin to what we were doing, putting them in a different session of the hospital than where we were. So I think that trend is only going to accelerate. Many of the conditions that we manage all the time in the hospital, we're not doing safely and routinely with patients staying home. And so I think a healthy hospital means people can get healthier without coming there. Next is sustainability and smarter tech. And I think a lot of us in the design world, sustainability has now just become so integrated, which is great. And I think COVID raised some really interesting issues to think about around air ventilation. So I think before two years ago, maybe most people hadn't thought about the air ventilation in their home or their office. But now it is almost like standard conversation. Joe Allen and I from Harvard wrote this piece in JAMA that in the first few days got seen almost 100,000 times. And all it was describing was the number of air changes per hour you should have in a room. And what's interesting about that is it actually has a long history in infectious disease control and that the higher risk area you're in, the more air circulations per hour you should have to filter the air. So this image here shows air circulation in an operating room that is very highly regulated. Air changes in operating room almost every four minutes. All the volume in that room has been turned over. And on one hand, that is actually great for infection control. And if you're a patient or a provider in that space, you're excited about it. But when you start thinking from the lens of sustainability in carbon footprint, what a shame if you're circulating that much air through that room when it's not occupied, when it's nighttime or when it's between cases. So there's been a lot of emphasis emerging now on smarter tech solutions that allow you to only optimize these ventilation and design strategies when they're needed and becoming a much bespoke solution. And healthcare unfortunately has the distinction of being some of the highest carbon footprint contributors by industry. And so just one example is there with the metal of time, enormous opportunity to sort of right size it and use it when we need it. And then the third that I think I'm most excited about is a healthy hospital is better aligned with its community and is intentionally thinking about the way the health system is designed and developing with the needs of the community and even intentionally investing in that infrastructure. So pre-COVID, I provocatively gave this talk where to a crowd of people in Ann Arbor who love their Michigan stadium, 100,000 people can sit there. And I sort of asked this provocative question what if a stadium wasn't just a venue used for sports a dozen days a year, but instead a public resource used every day for health? I did not know that a pandemic was coming, but this actually became our vaccination epicenter. Thousands of people were getting vaccinated in our stadium. And when you step back and think about it from a design perspective, stadiums are quite remarkable. How many infrastructure venues do you know that can feed thousands of people within an hour, can move thousands of people in and out of a space efficiently while adhering to other safety codes? And you sort of start to realize why do we build these massive colossal buildings and then use them so rarely? And so in our firm and a lot of our discussions we've now started to have multi stakeholders of health systems, hospitals, insurers, public officials and professional sports teams thinking about if we're going to make this multi-billion investment in the public, shouldn't it be available to the public more often? And so I'm excited about this idea that a healthy hospital is not just reflected in the hospital itself, but in the community and that the footprint of health is represented in all design. So that I'll say thank you and I'm excited that we have some time to sort of geek out between the presenters and some of our audience. Thank you, Andrew. That's fantastic. I have so many questions for all of the panelists here. I would like to invite the panelists to come back on video and we will get started with the Q&A. And I would also like to invite the speakers to engage in each other's questions. Feel free to ask each other questions too and a quick reminder to the audience to please send all your questions or comments and thoughts to the Q&A box. Please go ahead and unmute speakers also. So the first question I have is for Jennifer Tobias and it comes from Joe and the audience. How is the safety of customers being addressed in your guidelines? How is the safety of customers being addressed? Will traffic and then ventilation accessibility? I think they're being addressed somewhat. The putting things in the roadbed is sort of risky. One alternative to that is to do more what's called in New York City open streets where basically close off streets selectively to traffic and some really beautiful environments have sprung from that movement. So I think that's one way to make them inherently safer. Getting rid of the cars is a big step. That's the thing. Should it be what's the biggest danger to the customers? Probably not COVID. It's probably cars. Jennifer Roberts was saying that what we need is more buses, better transportation in order to have fewer cars. It's about making it easier for fewer cars to be there and people having other options to get around. Yeah, Jennifer Roberts, I was wondering, could you speak a little bit more to that? I'm very interested in things like e-bikes and other forms of non-car circulation as it relates to race and class. Yeah. Well, there's many different factors, but one is obviously the open streets. I'm a proponent of that to kind of de-emphasize the seal, occupancy cars, and just move them to a side. Some areas have actually opened their streets permanently. For so many reasons, it's good. People can walk, people can engage in recreation. It's great for climate change. You have less tailpipe admissions, great for sustainability. It's just many positives to that, but America is so car-centric in how we have designed. Back when we had the Federal Act to build our highways, it was basically almost completely paid for by the government. It just had all these, and it ties into their suburbanization and just kind of the proliferation of how we have designed our communities. So we're very car-centric, so you're going to have a lot of push back to have these open streets. I'm a fan of some open streets just being opened permanently, more so than open streets, sometimes a couple hours a day, because I think you get into issues with safety. I live in an area where sometimes the two lanes are going north, and then sometimes during the day those lanes will come south. I don't even like that. I mean, you got a little sign that says switch, but I don't even like that. So I think permanent open streets for some streets and then some just not, but then kind of what you were asking Jennifer in terms of other aspects of micro mobility. So like, you know, there's scooters and the bikes. There are equity issues with that because you think about where are those docking stations situated? You know, I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and so you'll see many of the docking stations in the more high-income area or high-income wards. So there's an equity with that and equity of how they're even operationalized off. You need a credit card, you know, and some people may not have a credit card. So there's many different issues that you have to kind of look at to make sure, but I think these are things that can be overcome if we just kind of think and become creative for how we can, you know, achieve this type of way we move, way we live, you know, in our spaces. Thanks so much for that answer. I have a question for Andrew and it relates to an audience question as well. So when you were sending patients home during COVID to monitor at home, how did they respond to that and how did you ensure that they were going to a safe place where they weren't going to infect their whole family or really suffer there? Great question. You know, a lot of us, and even now, but it's very prominent early on when COVID is starting to spike, people didn't want to come to the hospital, even people who needed to. And so the idea that you could somehow provide them care without them physically having to be in the hospital was very attractive. It had so many logistical barriers, huge learning curve. I think we're still learning a ton now. And it was frankly out of like necessity because we were running out of beds. It wasn't like a thoughtful innovation. It was like we don't have anywhere else to treat people. The equity issue is so challenging. And I will say, gosh, there's so many ways to think about that from who's designing the policies and who's designing the space and how much that represents the community that you're caring for. But also that it is explicitly upfront a priority in the work and holding yourself accountable to measures. So within our department at Michigan, our chair actually required us to read a number of books on structural racism and anti-racism policies and how to think of our department as having policies that are anti-racist explicitly. It's a start by no means did we get as far as we need to or should. But at least having it upfront, I think got us a lot further than we could have. So I'll actually maybe ask Dr. Roberts if she can also weigh in with her expertise about how design gets implemented equitably. Because I think that is a nice intersection between some of our work. It is. It is. I was looking at your work and Jennifer's work beforehand. And I was like, oh, I can see how they kind of brought us together. I think in terms of design, it's kind of hard when our whole system was based in with policies and practices that were just baked in racism. So it's kind of like trying to do stuff with the system that's kind of broken. But I think there are ways to at least ameliorate some of the issues. So for example, when we think about issues with access to green space or access to resources that we needed. We found that and I think someone even asked this kind of question about digital access with the digital gap that we have. Something as simple as like what if we had parks that were equipped with Wi-Fi. So I actually am working on a project. It's a planning grant to see if this one particular park can be equipped with Wi-Fi. Because a lot of people, there's two pieces of that. You know, it's the actual equipment. So, you know, that's a whole issue with like laptops and computers for the kids in the schools. But a lot of us, we can just use our phones and we can get the recent information we need. But we may not have the Wi-Fi either because we live in a red-lined area that and I can't remember that it was a term that someone had used. The basic it's almost like areas that are kind of like red-lined meaning like those are not areas that have the actual infrastructure for internet. So people may not have access or it may be an income issue. But if you could get free Wi-Fi to spaces and green spaces, that could be helpful, especially in situations where you know you have extreme events and people need to save space to get information and to meet up. But there's so many challenges that are interwoven between issues of equity. And when you add in this whole idea of the pandemic and you think of like even what we're doing right now, we're all probably at home or somewhere. And so we may or may not be essential frontline workers, but we have the luxury of being able to do this at home in our safe space or at least our office, you know. And so there's just so many things that have to be disentangled when we think about how we're going to design these safe and healthy spaces in an equitable way. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. I love the idea of Wi-Fi in parks. I would actually use that all the time if I had access to it. And we actually came across that same issue like so we in the Health Design Lab ran testing and vaccine sites and we were working in parks, parking lots, places. And we definitely found that to be the case, you know, the ability to access Wi-Fi in certain places is very challenging. And I loved what, you know, I loved what Andrew said about the aha moment that you had when we started sending people home with pulse oximeters, because I think that there were so many of those moments in health where we're like, we never were doing something and now we're doing it. And it makes so much sense, but we didn't really think of it before. So I was interested, and maybe Jennifer, DeVy, as you could start, and I'm interested really in everybody's answer, but did you have an aha moment in your line of work during the pandemic where something just became so obviously good? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is wandering around Bleak, New York City in March, in my neighborhood. And, you know, of course, nothing was going on. But then I noticed there were these guys that were sort of like sitting in this parking space, and they're kind of pointing at things. They had a couple cones, and it's like, what is this? And now, and it took me a while, it's like, oh, it's a streetery. So it's like, I hadn't thought of a parking space as being this enlivening moment. So that's the first thing that comes to mind. It's so cool because sidewalk cafes have always existed, and we've always had the capacity to shut down a street in order to create public space. But the pandemic prompted that to be done at an unprecedented scale in the US. I'm wondering, Jennifer Tobias, if there are elements of inequity in these streeteries, like are there conflicts where neighborhoods sometimes prefer for there not to be a restaurant in front of their apartment building? Or if there are people who are suggesting other uses of that space besides serving and selling food in the parking space? That's a great question. I'm so glad you brought it up. Indeed, they're huge inequities from just getting through the permitting process that language barriers, for example, could be a barrier to entry. And one of the, in terms of community choice, like you think, well, everyone wants a streetery. Well, in fact, I think a community board in Harlem said, actually, no, we don't want streeteries. We thought it over, we have some great ones, but we're just, this is our reason and we just don't. So why not? I'm not sure how that's going to play out. But people can decide that. And I think also in the community, finally, in the community engagement process, I mean, everyone's like, fewer cars, more parks, everyone wants it. And there is a parking, a car contingent. Most people at least say that they want, they want these different kinds of engagement for spaces. And one of the things I looked at, I think you showed some photographs of what I call alternative reuse. So you've got different kinds of stores popping up, theaters, music performances. So if you just kind of put some planners in the street, like all kinds of amazing things happen. So I think that could be another potential for alternative use. Thanks. Andrew, we're getting a lot of questions about, you know, both about this ventilation issue and what you might recommend to people who are building spaces to architects and even to policymakers going forward. And then also about, is this something that you think the momentum is going to slow down on? Or do you think that's going to be a long-term effort? Yeah, what a great question. I really honed in on that last one of, you know, how much of this stuff has legs and how much of it is just a ephemeral thing that we're going to forget about a year from now. So very early on in the pandemic, I think those architectural record, artificial digest, did a whole piece about how hotels were changing to checking in from your phone and kind of getting rid of the front desk check-in if you wanted. And they asked me what I thought about it. And I said, if your only goal was to do that in the time of COVID, I don't think it would last. But I think about someone who used to travel almost every week. Gosh, that'd be so much more convenient to have than it would to wait in line for 30 minutes. And so I think part of the design opportunity and challenge in this whole wake that we're in is the benefits of whatever design alternative or solution we propose need to go much further than just COVID. Although in a COVID era, it is helpful to have legs and to have additional benefits. So let me tell you, use ventilation as an example. So Joe Allen has a great book called Healthy Buildings, where he outlines much of the research around why air ventilation and good air ventilation is so beneficial beyond a COVID pandemic. And a lot of it is really impressive work around like cognitive performance and ability to concentrate based on the air circulation level in your office. And so I think some of the threads that are coming out now have such longer impact that they'll stay. The other one that strikes me about care at home or even virtual care, people have started to measure the carbon footprint reductions that are saved from people driving to the hospital for care. And when you start to identify these alternative benefits, you start to realize like, oh, there is a real policy incentive here. There is a real need that goes beyond just the pandemic. So I think that captures at least three of the five questions in that space that came up. But I think a lot of these things do have long legs because they have additional benefits beyond COVID. Yeah, that seems key. When there's a benefit that people value put beyond the pandemic, that could stick. So people want to be able to just make a doctor's appointment on their computer for a UTI. You know, why wasn't that always possible? I'm going to ask the final question, which will be for Jennifer Roberts. I'm curious what you think about street reads. You know, it's funny, I have probably I had like a knee jerk reaction when I started seeing more and more of them because I immediately thought literally about all of the tailpipe emissions that the people were, you're just right there, particularly like in areas where the cars are just idling. And so I was like, oh, but at the same time, I was like, this is really cool because, you know, particularly right after we came out of that real heighten of quarantine. And I was like, people need to get out. And, you know, you have a little heater heat there because people just we needed humans around us. So I'm I'm a proponent for them. But at the same time, I was like, I just I go back to what I was saying, I want to get rid of the cars because if we got rid of the cars, then I don't have to worry about it. But but yeah, that was probably one of my prime knee jerk reaction because it was just the cars just idling right next to while you're just inhaling those those tailpipe emissions. So I guess in a nutshell, get rid of the cars. I love that takeaway. That is a wonderful last line of our show. Thank you so much, Jennifer Tobias, Jennifer Roberts, Andrew Ibrahim for joining us today. And thank you to all of our guests for tuning in. This is a fantastic conversation on safer spaces. And this is our season two finale of Designing on the Front Line. So remember, this show will be archived on the Cooper Heel website, and it will be featured on Design Lab Pod with Bon Koo in production. Thank you to Rob Felici, Eva Rosas, Kayla Gracie, and the graphics by our wonderful speaker, Jennifer Tobias, who's been doing our graphics since the beginning, and close passion by AI media. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. It was wonderful. Nice meeting all of you. Thank you. It's so great to meet you guys. Bye-bye.