 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's National Design Week. My name is Kimmerblatt-Odiga. I'm here to welcome the human experience and built environment panel. Before we get started, I wanted to go ahead and tell you that National Design Week was started in 2006 and it's part of a week-long celebration celebrating our National Design Award winners. And during the week, the Education Department offers free programming throughout the week. This week, this program day actually encaps our programming celebrating the work and the vision of our winners. But none of this could be possible without the support of our funders. So National Design Award programming is made possible by generous support from Targets. Additional support is provided by Adobe. Funding is also provided by Design Within Reach, Altman Foundation, Facebook, Edward and Helen Hintz, and Siegel Family Endowment. I want to welcome my colleague Matilda McQuade, who is Deputy Curatorial Director, who will introduce our National Design Award winners on the panel today. Thanks, Kim, and welcome to everyone in this wonderful exhibition space. I hope you've all had a chance to see senses or will after this conversation. But I'm thrilled to be here with four National Design Award winners. They each, I think, have their partners who aren't here. They were limited to one person on this panel, so they had to fight for it. To my left is John Costacos, and he represents Blue Dot, and he's the National Design Award winner for product design. Blue Dot was founded in 1997 with Maurice Blanks and Charlie Laser, and it's based in Minneapolis. Blue Dot designs and manufactures furniture that is useful, affordable, and brings good design to as many people as possible. Anne Spurn is the recipient of the 2018 National Design Award for Design Mind. She's an award-winning author, landscape architect, photographer, and the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And then Michael Manfredi represents Weissman-Freddy, and he and Marian Weiss, his partner, are the 2018 National Design Award winner for architecture design. Weissman-Freddy expands the territory of architecture by connecting landscape, art, infrastructure, and architecture seamlessly fusing architecture and nature. And finally, last but not least, Chad Oppenheim represents Oppenheim Architecture and Design, and they are the 2018 National Design Award winner for interior design. They were founded in 1999, and they do architecture planning and interior design firms specializing in hospitality, commercial mixed-juice, retail, and residential buildings worldwide. So that gives a little brief intro, and I think they'll get more into what they do and their ideas as we begin our discussion. And so I'm going to begin it with a question, and we're going to hopefully go in lots of different, along different paths, and we can change the topic entirely. You're free to ask questions of one another, but because the panel is about the human experience, I want to find out from you all, as people who deal with people as users, what is the creative process that you go through when you are designing something for human experience, whether it's a building, whether it's a landscape, whether it's a piece of furniture. What is the first thing you might think about, or sort of begin to research, and then what leads you into kind of design development? And anyone can answer. Ann. First. So I write books and try to reach a large general audience with my books, but I'm not an armchair theorist. I have to practice in order to generate theory and to test theory. So I am working with, in general, for the past 30 years with people in inner city communities, in poor communities, primarily African American, in West Philadelphia. And my process in working with them is a process of co-creation, of mutual learning. I learn from them, they learn from me, and together we come up with something that I wouldn't think of alone. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. Just to build on, I think, the comment that Ann made, you have to start with a certain level of humility. Much of our work is in, even if it's institutional, it's in the public realm. And Mary and I, and the folks in our office, try to start with kind of an attitude of knowing nothing, which sounds a little, in a way, contradictory. But we try to immerse ourselves with as much knowledge as we can, as quickly as we can, and hopefully at the rate of a child. And then much of the interaction early on does happen with a community, and it's amazing how sophisticated folks who seemingly are unsophisticated actually are. And I think we're always surprised that there's always some little germ of an idea or concept that happens to come in from left field, which really triggers a larger idea. To build on that, I was just talking about this morning, the idea of childhood wonder and approaching things with kind of innocence. Because we do so many different types of projects in so many different places, I find that it's interesting to be an outsider that we're able to see things with fresh eyes and engage. And like an archeologist would sort of uncover an idea of how life was lived. So this idea of, and I think we could all probably speak about that, but it's a very arduous process that we put ourselves through, perhaps not necessarily. But we feel that if we don't do through this very cathartic learning period that we might have missed something and we don't want to leave anything on the table. It's the same thing in terms of trying a lot of design ideas. Even if we have the right idea the first time, we have to try 100 others just to make sure that there's nothing better that we can think of. So it's definitely a painful but rewarding process. I might add that we're a little different in the sense that you are responding to clients' needs in a client's program. And as product designers we're a little unique in the sense that we decided to start our business along with designing. So we are kind of our own client. So the hardest thing for us sometimes is deciding what to work on. Deciding what to make and what to add to our collection. So that's sort of step one. And then from there it's really a matter of optimizing and it's fun. It's like problem solving, optimizing various constraints, whether it be function or really function. Is it easy to use? Is it easy to make? Is it sellable? Do people want it? Is it beautiful? And trying to sort of like a multi-variable equation, trying to get the most out of each of those things. And sometimes we're more successful than others. And how do you in terms of determining what we need? I mean I know with Anne I think when we were talking briefly last week you know there's a lot of observation that goes with your research. And I'm wondering for each of you if that same kind of thing happens. Are you looking at how people use design? Are you looking at other examples that you know whether they're popular or have some kind of special characteristic. Are you, how are you determining what we as consumers need? What is that based on? Sometimes we're inspired by sort of tried and true DIY pieces of design. So it's sort of this, and the best example I can think of now is bookcases that we all had maybe in our college dorm rooms that were made out of plastic milk crates and planks. You know that just stack them up and the flexibility of that and just unbelievable directness of that. So I mean that's in terms of observing, yes you see something like that out in the world that you know just works fundamentally. And that might be a jumping off point for, it has been the jumping off point for actually a few of our designs. And in terms of observation, I mean just, I know the camera plays an important part in your research too. For me photography is a way of thinking and the camera is an instrument of thought. So I'm not going click, click, click, click and I'm really using the frame to zoom in to find significance. And to understand a place, every place is in the process of becoming. So I'm not coming to look for how to reveal the invisible through photography first and then through planning and design. For example like buried rivers, you know in cities we're walking on buried rivers all the time. And those buried rivers you don't think, because you don't see them and acknowledge them you think that maybe they have nothing to do with your daily life. But in fact they're shaping the city and shaping lives. So for me it's important not only through photography but through design to reveal these invisible forces that either undermine or that support human life in cities in particular. In our case, you know architecture is kind of a funny art form in the sense that it often relies on clients and we got a little frustrated with that. So we entered a number of competitions, two of which we were fortunate enough to win but there was a social agenda to both of them. One was low cost housing here in New York and the other was to rethink schools. And even though they were projects that never went ahead, I think part of it was something we discovered which is the art of architecture, the art of design whether it's landscape planning does have a very profound effect on a larger population. And often we spend a lot of time talking to each other. But we realized that this kind of potential was empowering and it made us really excited about trying to find work either through competitions or clients, searching out clients that had a strong social and public agenda. And I think it's crucial for design to kind of find the right conversation to engage in and sometimes you have to initiate that yourself. So in terms of like your Hunter's Point project which just the phase two was just completed recently. Right. So who in terms of what was the what was the challenge there? What was or what was the agenda kind of the criteria that you had to kind of you know kind of adhere to? Yeah. That's a great question Matilda. So this is a park on the East River opposite Roosevelt Island. Actually the first phase we started design 10 years ago. So these large urban projects as Anne will attest take a long time which is both a challenge but also I think an incredible opportunity. There the parks department had very low standards. They wanted to create open space. I think that's pretty noble. But we were very interested in bringing a kind of a more resilient narrative to the project. And at the time we had this conversation earlier. It was surprising. This is 10 years ago no one talked about potential life threatening storms. And everyone would say at the parks department and at city planning a 100 year storm a 200 year storm will never hit. And halfway through or we'll nearly finish with construction phase one that Sandy came and as many of you know in this room the devastation was quite extraordinary. The park survived. There are a number of measures there that were seen as radical. So I think the idea there getting back to your question Matilda was to bring an agenda of resilience which now I think everybody should be talking about but often they don't to a project. So you always have to bring something I think whether it's creating an object creating a book something beyond the very specific narrative that you're asked to do. Well I want to go back a little bit to photography because I'm in the midst of reading your book your ebook. And so it's sort of it's sticking with me. But I'm also when I looked at some of your work Chad and how your architecture frames the landscape and you talk about sort of how that's important in framing certain views. And so we can get into the topic of nature now which everyone I know know wanted to talk about. So how does that impact what you think about nature. What is why are you framing nature in that kind of way. Glad we got to the nature subject. You know I was just at a site the other day in Telluride Colorado and I strangely enough did my thesis project at Cornell in Telluride. And as I often do when I go to a site. And in the 70s we were designing ecologically sensitive resorts and new towns. And here I was living in Philadelphia looking at the city crumble around me. And so I decided to write my first book The Granite Garden Urban Nature and Human Design to persuade people that the city is part of the natural world natural processes don't stop operating at city limits. And that if we just thought of the city as part of the natural world how differently we would design it. And so that was my first book it came out in 1984. And I think in terms of nature as processes physical chemical geological processes that sustain human life. And that interact with human social economic political and economic processes cultural processes. So for me these processes interacting together create landscape. And for me also landscape includes buildings. But so a lot of my work is aimed at not only rebuilding inner city neighborhoods where we have many in Philadelphia thousands of acres of vacant land. In ways that not only sustain human life and rebuild human communities but also improve and restore the natural environment. And through my photography and through design proposals that I described in words in my books. I aim to give people a sense of feeling as well as seeing natural processes and the interplay between natural processes and human processes and the human built world. There is this I think unfortunate bifurcation now that I hope is changing between the natural world and what is perceived as the artificial world. The fact of the matter is there isn't an acre on this earth that hasn't been touched in some capacity or another. My partner and I Marion and I were trained as architects. The first competition we won that was actually allowed us to establish a practice was a park. It was a very modest community park outside of Chicago that was often inundated when there were storms. So we realized the role of architecture and the role of landscape were unfortunately administratively divided in ways that precluded real opportunities of either social engagement or ecological engagement. And I think that kind of bifurcation is starting to shift. But for us it was never a question of saying oh is it natural or is it artificial. I think the world now is so intertwined that we have to recognize natural processes and artificial processes are completely synchronized. And that's the only way to start some of the kind of ecological challenges that we seem to be incapable of addressing. And I'm curious in terms of as you've kind of you know with with the work that you do and if kind of this interaction whether you're an architect interaction with with nature or you know has brought about sort of certain types of collaborations. As you I mean Michael your practice is architecture you don't want to marginalize any one particular profession. So how have the collaborations gone. Have you found yourselves in interesting collaborations that probably if you had not allowed yourself to expand a little bit. You wouldn't have experienced. Talk about some of those. Yeah collaborations are always fraught. But when you have a group of people who mutually respect each other and understand each other's strengths because I think the other danger is to sort of say well I'm such a generalist that I can't do anything. I think you want to assemble a team and work with folks who really have a body of knowledge. There's a handful of ecologists that we've worked with over the last 10 15 years. There's a handful of structural engineers that we've worked with civil engineers. And you try I think in a way to work with the folks that you a love staying up late at night with and and you know agonizing together about how to make a better better place. But you also realize that they bring something that you don't and it's both humbling but also inspiring. So I can think of someone like Steve Handel who's an ecologist who is always pushing us to think beyond a kind of limits of a site to see larger patterns. I think you probably know Steve or there are structural engineers who always remind us that materials do have limits. And we make models with very very thin surfaces that somehow will span 50 60 feet. But there's something very beautiful and I think actually comes back to your work. Sometimes those kinds of experts enrich our life by making a kind of a bring us closer to the material presence that we have to deal with. You know I think what's interesting is that you know people think like your name is on the door our names on the door that it's an individual working at their desk somehow. But it's there's so much collaboration and I always think that it's very much a team sport. So there's not only like the collaboration outside the office but the team that goes into I mean you're talking about the embassy how many people working on the project. There's so many people that go into working on a project and some of them are in your office and others around even today with visualization. We work with companies all over like we're working on one project right now where we have three different visualization companies like all throughout Europe who are helping us. It's just the size of this project. But you know the engineers everything has become so specialized and even on like a small project like a house we might have 15 different consultants from acoustical consultants to landscape architects to you know mechanical engineering and lighting consultant. I mean everything has become so specialized that you need to be an expert to be engaged in all this. And I think this is very interesting to me. I'm like the vortex of sound. There we go. So you know just the idea that it is so involved and so complex and you just need a team to even organize all the consultants. And it's really when you're not in the field it's kind of hard to fathom how much it takes to actually do even the simplest smallest project. And you know it's kind of daunting from our side. Just I actually want to add one thought and I know and might comment on it. Strongest voices are often often the community and they aren't engineers or ecologists but they have a body of knowledge that's always surprising. And they're the kind of hidden client that we all must we must respond to. I would say I've been enriched by admitting admitting is not the welcoming of the people I work with into my research. Because ultimately what I'm doing is design experiments on and my ultimate product is a book. But it's also a product that products that along the way I produce with people in these neighborhoods that I've been working in for 30 years. And so these folks some of my collaborators I have literally been working with for 20 or 30 years. And over time I've learned a tremendous amount from them. But I don't want to forget my research assistants because my project my 30 year action research project the West Philadelphia landscape project has been shaped by my research assistants. I we have had since 1995 we put our first website together and that was because I had a research assistant who introduced me to the web. And and he was coding HTML at that point I said I want one of those I saw his website I want one of those for the West Philadelphia landscape project. Every research assistant who comes on the job had something of themselves their own passions and interests. I try to match their passions interests and skills to some direction that because of their participation. The project can move in that direction because by myself I can't I can't I can't move it. And I've had the I just had the fortune to have some wonderful web developers working on the project over time. And that's just one example. I mean there there are various different expertise that might are at my research assistants bring to the project so I don't want to forget them. But there are discoveries I have made on the ground that I never would have made if I hadn't been collaborating with people in in the neighborhood. And I'll give you an example that's really wonderful. So I you may guess from my previous comment I'm interested in I discovered a correlation between vacant urban land in inner city neighborhoods and and buried streams. The former flood plains of buried streams that are now encased in sewers. And so I started working with this group the Mill Creek Coalition in West Philly. And this was my entree into basements to actually be able to test to to research my my theory was that as you got further down into the valley bottom you'd find more flooding in the basements. But how would I ever get to go into the basements in this low income virtually all African-American community. And so I I partnered with the Mill Creek Coalition no problem they leafleted the area we decided we were how we were going to do this pilot research study. And the president of the Mill Creek Coalition said we have to do my block it's on the buried flood plain and I said well no it's not. And she said yes it is I know it is because we have terrible flooding problems and I'm thinking well no it's not it's actually upland. But I said OK we'll we'll do your block and I was thinking myself control block right the control. Well where do you think we found the most damage from water on her block. And it wasn't from a buried river it was from problems with site drainage and roof drainage. And I discovered in the process of going on her block and talking to people that actually this is a problem that is prevalent across the city in lower income neighborhoods where. Home maintenance you know how the maintenance of the house just hasn't been there and where the original development wasn't well done in terms of site drainage. And last week I was in Philly in the same kind of situation helping somebody look at their drainage problem because they were on an upland they weren't they thought they were on the Mill Creek and they weren't. And I said well let's go take a look because this was this other project was 20 years ago I said but you know I found in the past that it's often due to site drainage. Well guess what the city had come and through a program of helping seniors low income seniors with home repair had repaired her roof. But they taken the downspout disconnected it from the sewer intake and had let the downspout come right to the corner of her foundation. And so she was getting all the water from the roof right down into her basement. So this is an example of a discovery I made only through my collaboration with the neighborhood. And what I've learned through 30 years of working in these neighborhoods in West Philly is no neighbor no community however seemingly poor financially is without resources. Every community has a wealth of resources and you just have to find them as a designer and collaborate with them and they will lead you to new insights and new realizations and to better design. Collaboration. Well you know our our blue that was we started as a collaborative really three founders are three designers and and you know from our earliest designs we we rolled a long sheet of butcher paper out over a table and and and sat there and and sketched basically and and you know drew over each each other's ideas and designed as a group. Some ideas might have started in my sketchbook or Maurice's sketchbook but by the end they were it was hard to identify sometimes whose design they were. So just for that reason we never put our individual names on any of our any of our designs from from the earliest days and we still don't even though our design team now is is bigger. There's a there's still Maurice and I kind of leading that effort but we have five other designers and they're you know coming from various fields. Some from specifically furniture design some from industrial design some from architecture. My background was a sculptor so I had no formal design training but so yeah it's been a collaboration and extends outside of the office as well. It's a collaboration with our suppliers so we might think something is makeable and discover that it's not makeable but you know sort of working through that process with with the manufacturing partners we sometimes will often hopefully come out with a better solution in the end is but it can be painful process to get there. I want to before I throw it open to the audience I wanted to just talk about one thing that Michael and and I talked about a little bit which is and you and you are beginning to get to it Michael about this about the community garden which and talked about in terms of kind of looking at something really small whether it's you know kind of piece of furniture or a community garden in your instance and how that can be kind of a model in a in a small way for something much larger for a much larger discussion. So like the community garden you talked about was probably the biggest lesson for you in terms of urban design and and I'm just curious. I want you to kind of elaborate a little bit on that and if there are other examples that you've come across in your own work where that kind of small what you thought humble kind of project really kind of opened up to something to a larger kind of conversation with you know whether it's with outside people with yourself. So I started working. Is this working. Yes. I started working with communities in West Philadelphia in 1987 working on community designing community gardens. And as you said seemingly humble task but it brought us into contact into contact with the most incredible people. Most of them senior seniors in these in these neighborhoods and one of the we were doing designs for community gardens not only is with my research assistance but also with my studios I would use a two week sketch problem short problem to design the community garden as an introduction to the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood in order to go on then and do grander visions. And this one project that my studio did in 1988 for Aspen Farms Community Garden a community garden that had been founded in 1976 a community garden of 50 gardeners already existing but they wanted and had won many prizes at the annual harvest show for Pennsylvania Horticultural Society but they wanted a meeting place. And how do you this is an urban design problem right. How do you take an existing community and insert a new use in an area where it is fully occupied. Right. The gardens divided up into 50 plots. So my students took on this project and as I would say not typical designers but as beginning designers they had the precedence in mind of a meeting place like a plaza piazza circle or a square and in the center. And of course they all but one put that right in the center either circle or square one student put a circle at the corner of street so that people could look in from the street and see it. And but one of my students actually took his design out to the gardeners two days before the final review and showed that his design to the gardeners and they said they looked at and they said well this is all very nice but actually your design is a disaster. You have totally destroyed Mrs. Williams group. Right. So it turned out that this lovely community we all thought about was actually a community of warring factions is probably too strong a word but let's say factions differences different groups some of whom didn't really speak to each other and we had idealized this community. So the students had basically all destroyed Mrs. Williams group. Mrs. Williams was the founder of one of the founders of the garden. John Widrick this student thought went home and thought OK well he'd been working with me as a research assistant on my book The Language of Landscape and he thought a little bit further about decoding a meeting place. He said well a path is also a meeting place and there's currently a main path down the center of the garden that's slightly wider. What if I just shaved off a few couple feet from each side of the main path so that a whole bunch of plots lost a little bit and then created he had gotten them to identify where the different groups were and then designed planter boxes and gateways to each of these groups off the main path so that to solve the problem of the tragedy of the commons who cares for the common space using their competitiveness to see who would have the best looking planter boxes outside their groups territory. Well in this process they all learned and I learned that communities are quite complex and as the president Hayward Ford said this garden is a town. We have everything but a penal colony. We have the garbage. We have the compost pile. We have the infrastructure. We have the paths and streets. We have the irrigation system. The water lines. So we're really like a town and this was turned out to be the perfect introduction to then scaling up and thinking about a larger neighborhood and how to design within a larger neighborhood. Hayward Ford also said we have 50 different gardeners and 50 different ways of doing things and seeing things. It's not all a bed of roses. It's 50 beds of roses. So yeah so things that may seem humble are actually can be quite extraordinary places of learning where you can take the insights and apply them to much grander scale. I'm sure you probably find that also the work you guys did. No no I think it's no well no I'm just in terms of you know you know the kinds of you know whether it's just kind of how furniture is assembled or packed or it can it can lead to kind of bigger discussions about you know how we you know how how furniture should be designed how it should be transported. I mean it's all about economics that kind of so I don't know. I mean it's it could be I think there are a lot of ways that it could be interpreted in terms of you know that kind of humble Maybe I'm sorry. Do I have your microphone chat? I mean I'm not sure this is relevant but I can tell the story of how this sort of inspiration for one of our maybe more well known designs which is called the real good chair which packs flat and in sort of an oversized pizza carton and that's really an economic you know it's an economic decision because our mission was to try and make good design more affordable. Which for us starts at the very you know with the very first sketch and works its way all through you know throughout the entire system. So we were sitting around and trying to figure out how could we how could we make a three dimensional object out of steel that could that could ship flat and be put together by a consumer and we were eating pizza and late at night and pizza boxes that you know obviously they ship flat and then they're folded together and there the edges are perforated little dashes to make the folding easy so we started thinking what if you know could we do that with steel could you perforate steel and leave little little rectangular perforations and leave little connective tissue so that they could ship flat be folded but still be stiff enough to you know hold you up and that was the beginning of experimenting with that until we got kind of the right pattern so that it would be so do both of those things and actually it started not with the chair so much it started even sooner with some little desk accessories and smaller objects which were when you make them traditionally out of many parts with fasteners and you're putting them together for us by the time we did that and price them out and then put on the retailers markup they ended up being too expensive so like is there a simpler way to do this with one material and so yeah sort of a humble pizza box yeah can I can I just build on this because I think that what you're doing is really important which to me is who gets who gets the products of design you know who benefits from design and you're reaching out your your ambition is to bring design with good good design high quality design within reach of ordinary people and I think that that's a major challenge to us as designers is how do we bring good design into the homes the communities of people who can't might not can't can't afford high design maybe or don't think they can or don't even know that they need design or that it can help them in any way and there's also I think Chad mentioned this but I think the capacity of design to remind ourselves about our bodies our bodies in space what we touch what we feel good about and particularly in this increased digitized world the kind of haptic realm is something that we really need to recover I'll just tell one short story and then we can pass it on I think speaking of the power of design and who the constituency is I had mentioned this story to Matilda and on our hunter's point project we had a number of community meetings many community meetings and presented designs and at one point we were presenting design we were talking about the the Olmsteady and landscape and then we were talking about flows and recovering lost ecologies and the multiple histories and and it was really interesting conversation you can just look out in the audience where everybody was falling asleep it was late at night and and then we started to describe the project we said well in addition to all the things we've heard we understand that you guys are really interested in a dog run which we thought was like the least important thing after these incredible concepts of democracy and socialization everybody perked up and we quickly discovered talk about kind of community engagement that it was one group one end of the room that were small dog lovers small dog owners you probably know this there was another group that were large dog owners and it was a third group that were like well we are it's not about size it's about temperament and our dogs are gentle so somehow we had through design and this is where everybody perked up and it was an epiphany we came back with a series of models and drawings to show how this dog run could help resolve these inseparable differences in the community and I'm particularly proud of the fact that everybody enters one gate big dogs small dogs sweet dogs aggressive dogs and then they all go into their own precincts which they they their own territories which they are jealous about and in a way it was humbling because if those dogs are happy their owners are happy and we're happy anybody else want to yeah go ahead John I was just thinking about the idea of the community garden and we we brought a project to fruition where Audi was actually coming to Miami to celebrate what they do for the city and they asked us if they can do an event at one of our projects and we said yes but we want you guys to actually do something for the city so we worked with the mayor of Miami and got Audi to actually donate an entire park and we had done all our work pro bono and what was fascinating was the mayor was like hey there's this piece of land that's actually the only native habitat left in the city of Miami and it was a little park that was abandoned and it's kind of strange to think like this little you know 500 by 500 feet swath of land is the last remaining piece of the native ecosystem and it was a closed park so we're able to have that raise all the money and finance the project with Audi to reinhabit this this park and we designed an incredible gateway but speaking about municipalities I was just drove by the other day and the whole park is like abandoned it was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars that we raised and the city just let it go down so one of the things that we think a lot about is the maintenance and it wasn't really a land it was a native hammock like an oak hammock and but it's fascinating like when you do build these parks and I'm sure you deal with it and someone was just talking to me about getting involved in this underlined project which is kind of like the highline but in Miami it's under the railroad elevated railroad and I was saying like they raised all this money but I'm like I hope you have a lot of money for the maintenance of these types of urban projects because it really it's almost more money goes into the maintenance of it than the actual construction maintenance needs to be part of the design I make that when I teach studio and the students are doing landscape design the idea is that the design starts with building support for the project how it gets built which is goes to your point and your points and then how it gets maintained over time that if designers don't think about maintenance particularly landscape architects were in trouble it's also true for architecture and we all think that architecture is permanent it's not it's being changed every day by people who move furniture who turn lights on and off and the kind of flux is something that is crucial and if someone doesn't love what we help them with whether it's a park or a chair then I think we really failed I think we've run out of time we have a time for maybe a couple of questions anyone have any questions in the audience now we're talking about community and we're talking about the importance of nature and educating young people I think is particularly important I'm wondering if that is lost art have we not continued that concept is it gone do you know what I'm talking about in Berkeley California it's a growing movement it's not gone at all I would say yeah she started something and it's it's going strong are you doing it in Philadelphia? yes excellent I'm interested from all of you how do you address the needs for inclusive design especially for people with disabilities into the work that you're doing with the built environment because I know especially for landscaping that can be quite challenging it's absolutely crucial and I think almost everything we touch now by law has to but I think there's a point we have to go farther we're doing a very small project a crate myrtle garden for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and it actually turns out that there's a large constituent parents who are also pushing strollers who suddenly realize getting from point A to point B has to be both doable but pleasurable and I think that's what we tend to forget when we look at legislation it's not just the letter of the law but making it a really a pleasurable experience so there isn't a distinction all right well thank you very much to all of you I really appreciate it thank you for coming