Why I'm an architect that designs for social impact, not buildings | Liz Ogbu | TEDxMidAtlantic

How can we combine the hard skills of design and the soft skills of humanity? How can we be expert citizens, but also citizen experts?

A designer, social innovator, and academic, Liz is an expert on sustainable design and spatial innovation in challenged urban environments globally. From designing shelters for immigrant day laborers in the U.S. to a water and health social enterprise for low-income Kenyans, Liz has a long history of engagement in the design for social impact movement.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Hi, I'm Liz, and I'm an architect.

Whenever I tell people I'm an architect,

one of the first questions
they often ask me

is whether or not I have read
or seen "The Fountainhead."

And for those of you -

Clearly, some of you have.

For those of you who are familiar with it

and have just now silently
asked yourself this question,

let me just get that out of the way.

Yes, I have both read the book
and seen the movie.

No, I didn't really like either of them.

(Laughter) (Applause)

And yes, this probably should have been
some indication to me

that I was well on my way
to an architectural identity crisis,

which then leads into the second
question that I often get,

"What kind of buildings do you design?"

And for me, for the longest time,

this has been a hard question to answer.

Usually, I hem and haw,
and then I often say,

"Oh, I design community centers."

Partly because a lot of my work
is with communities,

so it's kind of true,

and community centers is a typology
that people can relate to.

So they're like, "Oh yeah! Great! Cool!"

And then we move on with the conversation.

But the truth of the matter is
I actually don't design community centers.

And so what I wanted
to try to do here today

is to explain to you exactly
what it is that I do.

I'm an architect
that doesn't design buildings.

The things that I design,
the things that I build

are actually opportunities for impact.

Right now, you're probably
asking yourself one of two questions

which I can safely say
that my family, friends,

and even architecture school professors
have asked themselves more than once.

The first is, "What the heck
is designing opportunities for impact?"

That's a good question.

The second is, "What kind of architect
doesn't design buildings?"

Also a good question.

By the way, that second question
is often known as,

"Wow, did she really go $75,000 into debt
at a prestigious architecture school

only to not practice architecture?"

I'm still trying to work that one out.

But let me see if I can explain to you

what it means to design
opportunities for impact.

It often means that I'm wearing
one of three hats:

that of the expert citizen,

that of the storyteller,

that of the translator.

Expert citizen is this great term

that I came across a couple of years ago
in a book called "Spatial Agency,"

and it so perfectly encapsulated
part of what I do

that I have used it religiously since.

An expert citizen, I imagine,
is many of us in this room here today.

We've been trained
in some type of expertise,

in my case as a designer.

What I love about this
is the pairing with the citizen.

The idea that we're still humans
at the end of the day.

We have emotions, we have assumptions,

we have intuition.

And the idea of expert often means

people think of it
as we're looking at things

purely in this objective way,
almost scientifically.

But I think it's important to remember
that when you combine that human element,

it's actually a really rich combination.

Many of the communities that I work with
are considered to be citizen experts.

Whether I'm working in a poor
African-American community

in San Francisco

or a low-income
Kenyan community in Nairobi,

those people know more
about what it is like

to live in their communities
than I ever will.

They know about their needs
and aspirations,

their successes and their failures.

And what I need to do
as the expert citizen

is to create space at the table for them

to be able to come
and share that knowledge.

Because oftentimes
they have not been empowered

to see that knowledge as expertise.

And so I try, as much as possible,
to issue out an invitation

in which they feel comfortable doing that.

I can best describe this
through the story of Mama Sama.

Mama Sama and many women
throughout the global South

face a problem when it comes to cooking.

The traditional technology
is actually a three-stone fire.

And it actually creates a lot of issues

including health,
from the smoke inhalation,

and environment,

from the deforestation and air pollution,

and then also safety,
when people go out to fetch wood.

Cookstoves, particularly
improved cookstoves,

is something that has been around
for over 30 years

as an effort to try and alleviate
the issues that come up with the fire.

And there has been a huge push
from many governments and NGOs

to try and rapidly increase
the adoption of the cookstoves

by the year 2020.

Last year, when I was a fellow at ido.org,
my colleagues and I were hired

by the Global Alliance
for Clean Cookstoves

to try and investigate a way

to close that gap
between the adoption of the stove

and the potential
that it could still have.

And so we spent three weeks in Tanzania,
which was one of the target countries.

We went into many homes,

talked to many citizen experts,
like Mama Sama.

And we even cooked with them.

And what we found
is that many of the women

actually were familiar
with the idea of the cookstove.

They even understood its benefits.

The problem was that when it came time

to cooking a lot of food
for their extended family,

a single cookstove was not enough.

When they wanted to cook ugali,
which is a traditional dish,

it is just as hard to cook
on a cookstove, if not harder,

than cooking on a woodfire.

And when it came to the cost of fuel,
particularly if they were using charcoal,

the cost of a month's supply of fuel

was equal to 10 times
the cost of a single stove.

In that case, the benefits
of a cookstove were not enough.

So we were sent into the field
to answer the question of

"How could we use design to increase
the adoption of the cookstove?"

But what we found was
that adoption really wasn't the problem.

Many of them owned cookstoves,

they just couldn't afford
to be able to use it often.

And if you don't use it often,

you actually can't get
the benefits from it.

So by taking the time
to listen to Mama Sama

and the other citizen experts,

and really understand their needs
and aspirations of their daily life,

what we found is that in order
to generate design solutions

that would be appropriate,

we had to actually design
from this question,

"How might we design for the cook
and not the cookstove?"

It wasn't about improving
the actual technology of the stove,

it wasn't about increasing
access to markets.

It was about designing things

that actually responded
to the women themselves.

And so we came up with a bunch
of different design solutions,

everything from implements
that could be added to the stove

to make it easier to cook

to actually creating
fuel-saving initiatives,

something the Global Alliance
had not previously looked at.

Next, I want to talk to you
about being a storyteller.

And through that, I'm going to tell
a little bit about the story of Roberto.

Roberto and his colleagues
are many things:

they are artisans, they are craftsmen,
they are tradesmen.

They're also day laborers.

They're some of the over
115,000 men and women

who look for a day’s work

for a day’s wages
in cities across the US every day.

And the vast majority of the sites
that they do it at

are informal sites,

meaning that they were
designed for other uses.

They are the street corners,
the gas stations,

the Home Depot parking lot.

And usually at those sites, they lack
even the most basic of human necessities.

There's no shelter,

there's no water, there's no toilets.

A few years ago,

I was the design director at a non-profit
called Public Architecture,

and my colleagues and I felt
that there was something

that we could do about this.

But it wasn't like a day laborer
was ever going to walk into our office

and say, "Hi, I'm Roberto,
and I'm having a problem at the corner.

I could really use your help."

So we actually, had to go
out into the streets to them.

And we treated them
both as our clients and our co-designers.

And the product of those conversations,
several years of conversations,

resulted in this -

the Day Labour Station.

This is a prototype,
a semi-permanent structure

that can be deployed
at informal hiring sites.

It's based on an idea of a kit of parts

so you can reconfigure it
to meet the needs of a given site.

In this case, what you see
is a rather large station

because it was supposed to be
a proposal for a site in Los Angeles

that was going to house over 150 workers.

But the central elements
were always the same:

a seating area and pods
that could house a bathroom,

an office for a work site coordinator,

or even a kitchen so that you could have
an income-generating food business

that could help to sustain the station.

It's flexible in use,

everything from an employment
center to a classroom

so you could teach
additional skills to the workers.

I often get asked if by building this,
was I not making it worse

for Roberto and others like him.

But the fact of the matter
is that many of these hiring sites

have been around for years if not decades.

If you think of most cities

when you go around and you're looking,
there are no giant signs saying,

"Day laborers here!"

But if you were to ask anyone,
they would be able to tell you,

"Oh, yeah. You go to that corner,
and that's where you pick them up."

The fact that there is nothing there

belies the fact that they're
actually rather permanent.

I recall Juan, who was a day laborer
that I met in Houston

when we were looking
at building one of these there,

and he said to me, "I've been coming
to this site for many years.

It is a place in which I earn my living.

It is sacred to me.

But because there is nothing here,
no one else sees that."

And so for Juan and others like him,

building this wasn't
about trying to create something

that would bring
unwanted attention to them.

It was about trying to create something

that is actually emblematic
of the permanence of their site

and that could help actually
bring dignity to them.

In terms of an architectural project,
this was actually a bit of a failure.

We launched it right before
the economic collapse,

and although I flew all around the country
at the invitation of cities

who were really interested
as this is a novel solution,

when the collapse hit,

as you're closing schools
and cutting services,

it simply was politically untenable
to spend money on illegals.

But that actually forced us to think

about what were some of the other
outcomes that came out of this.

We treated this project
not as a design exercise

but as an opportunity
to create transformation

of the way in which people
saw a particular type of space

and saw a particular type of people.

And to that end,

we tried to tell the stories of Roberto,
Juan, Gabrielle, Leobardo

and others like them.

We tried to tell the stories of them
and their American dream,

their desire to come here
for a better life for themselves

and for their families.

And we tried to tell the stories
of their sacred spaces,

the places in which they earned a living
which would support that dream.

And we took that story far and wide.

We took it to The Los Angeles Times,

the Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum,

the Venice Bienalle.

And what you see here is actually
a poster from a big international award

that we won for this project.

And on this poster are actually
quotes from emails

that I received over the years
from doing this project,

both good and, actually, a lot bad.

And the thing that we felt
really important

was that this was a catalyst
for a conversation.

No one was talking
about these sites before,

and by opening up the conversation

we were talking both
about what they are now

and what they have the potential to be.

It was also really important to tell
the story not only to the wider public

but also to the workers themselves.

One of my favorite moments
from this project

was that I had the opportunity

to present it to a convention
of day laborers -

and yes, there is such a thing.

And I only spoke
for a short period of time,

but after I did,
many people came up to me,

and I was truly touched
by how touched they were

at being able to see up there
on that big screen

something that acknowledged
that they had been seen,

that they had been heard,
and that they had been valued.

And that's the power
of being a storyteller.

As for the translator hat,
you have actually seen that

over the ten plus minutes
that I've been talking.

It's basically taking the things I hear
when I listen at the table

and the stories that I know
that I need to tell to create impact

and combining them
into something that is tangible -

a reflection of all of that.

And that allows us to move forward
on whatever the social issue is

that I'm trying to address.

And so, that is what it means
to design opportunities for impact.

It means that I'm an expert citizen

who creates space at the table
for citizen experts.

That I'm a storyteller
that tries to tell authentic stories

of the people I meet and design with.

And that I'm a translator

who tries to bring tangibility
to a vision of places and services

that speak to the needs and aspirations
of the human experience.

And so I hope that if you take
anything away today from my talk,

well, there is sort of three things.

The first is never really ask that
Fountainhead question to an architect.

We don't like it.

The other thing is that I hope

that you think about architecture
and design a little bit differently:

about what it is and what it has
the potential to impact.

And the third is that the things
that I have shown you

are about the combination
of both the hard skills of design

and the soft skills of humanity.

But those soft skills are not the domain,
the exclusive domain of design.

They can be used by all of you

in anything that you are trying to do
in your own lives and in your own crafts.

And so I hope that you move on today

trying to figure out exactly
how to do that.

Thank you.

(Applause)