Curry Stone Design Collaborative Managing Director Sandhya Naidu Janardhan speaks on designing with empathy at the 2019 Fortune Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FORTUNE.COM

When Sandhya Naidu Janardhan was tasked with redesigning public housing in the Indian megacity of Mumbai, she had no existing surveys or data to draw on in order to determine what type of design would best improve the lives of the people who live there. Without data or studies to work with, the designer took a simpler approach: She decided to go and talk to the residents. Janardhan, who is the managing director of the Curry Stone Design Collaborative, needed a window into the thinking of the people who lived there. Curry Stone is dedicated to using design for social change. After countless conversations, “I thought it might be possible to make some changes,” she said.

Design thinking usually requires the designer to consider the needs of the end user first. Social impact design is similar, but goes one step further: the designer needs to empathize with people he or she is trying to help. Gaining an understanding of the people you are trying to help, however, can be time consuming, Janardhan said. Yet, without it, success would be unlikely.

During her visits, Janardhan noticed that the families kept their meager rundown apartments extremely clean. She often found herself eating on the floors with the residents and she thought nothing of it because they were spotless. Outside the apartments, however, in the grim lanes and warrens, that trash and filth had mounted. “India’s trash problem is something you see in the public domain, in public spaces,” she said.

As a pilot project, she organized some of the residents to clean up one lane. If they could succeed in one, they could then clean others. Before long, the whole neighborhood might be more livable.

When the residents finished cleaning their lane, they celebrated. But when Janardhan returned a few weeks later to expand the effort, the lane was filthy again. It wasn’t us, the residents told the designer. It was the residents on the other side of the lane. They had come from a different village and they were bad people, they said. “It was classic blame game,” Janardhan said.
Yet it also taught the designer a lesson. While she was able to put herself in the shoes of the public housing residents she worked with, she hadn’t learned enough about the community as a whole.

Others might have given up on the project. Janardhan’s view, however, is that the solution would be to expand her circle of empathy to more public housing residents. More empathy not less is the key, she believes, when designing for social impact.

For more coverage of Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference, visit fortune.com.

Photo Credit: Shayan Asgharnia

Curry Stone Foundation Director of Educational Initiatives and Social Design Insights Host Eric Cesal Named Director of the Sustainable Environmental Design (SED) major at the College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON BERKELEY.EDU

Eric J. Cesal has been appointed as the Director of the Sustainable Environmental Design (SED) major at the College of Environmental Design. In this capacity, he will advise students and in collaboration with the SED Education Committee, oversee academic affairs, curriculum, and co-curricular events and activities. Cesal is also a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture, where he teaches an undergraduate design studio and a graduate seminar on disaster and resilience.

In addition to his roles at CED, Cesal also serves as the Special Projects Director for the Curry Stone Foundation, a U.S. non-profit which seeks to support and empower community-driven social impact design. There, he also hosts Social Design Insights, a weekly podcast with the leading voices of the public interest design movement.

A designer, writer, and noted post-disaster expert, Cesal led Architecture for Humanity’s post-disaster programs from 2010 to 2014, working on post-disaster construction projects after the Haiti earthquake, the Great East Japan Tsunami, and Superstorm Sandy. He has been interviewed widely on the subjects of disaster and resilience by publications such as The New Yorker, Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Foreign Policy Magazine and Monocle.

Cesal’s formal training is as an architect, with international development, economics and foreign policy among his areas of expertise. He holds advanced degrees in Architecture and Construction Management, as well as an M.B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. He has written about the links between architecture’s chronic economic misfortunes with its failure to prioritize urgent social issues — Down Detour Road, An Architect in Search of Practice (MIT Press, 2010) — and is currently working on a new book about how foreign and economic policies of the developed nations incite and aggravate the conditions that lead to catastrophic disasters.

Photo Credit: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Colin Hunt

Curry Stone Foundation Director of Educational Initiatives and Social Design Insights Host Eric Cesal speaks with Metropolis Magazine about the Global Commission on Adaptation. 

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON METROPOLISMAG.COM

Offering big-name sway and promises of urgent action, billionaire Bill Gates, World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva, and former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are launching a Global Commission on Adaptation today, their move to address “risks associated with climate change—from floods and droughts to sea level rise and storms.”

The new independent body includes political leaders from 17 countries—but not the United States—and 28 expert “commissioners” to advise on urban development, agriculture, and disaster prevention, among other topics. In her first public comments about the Commission’s intentions, Georgieva called out the built environment as a major focus.

“As you know, buildings are the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions,” Georgieva said. “Adapting them to a low carbon footprint and at the same time putting in building codes that are resilient to hurricanes and floods, that is already happening. There is a lot of experience and it is quite scalable.”

Georgieva, Gates, and Ki-moon all stressed the need to scale up and speed up adaptation, especially in light of last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report that warned of imminent and unprecedented dangers to humans on a fast-warming planet. Just how the Commission will incentivize progress, though, won’t be explicit for a year. Their first action, they said, is to work on a “flagship report” they’ll present at a UN Climate Summit in September, 2019, with a list of recommendations. Georgieva said solutions might include altering the way the way banks, insurance companies, philanthropic organizations and governments allocate funding for future building projects, prioritizing anything that reduces climate risk.

Architects, engineers, and advocates experienced at developing safer structures—especially in the world’s poorest communities, where people are already enduring severe heat waves, storms and floods— could be called upon to advise the Commission, which currently includes Sheela Patel, Chair of Slum Dwellers International and Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami.

“It’s nice to see that the adaptation conversation is finally being had at the highest levels, because architects and planners have been having it for decades now,” says Eric Cesal, special projects director at the Curry Stone Foundation and a visiting lecturer at the University of California,Berkeley on issues of disaster and resilience.

Cesal is one of many architects and engineers who have worked in one way or another on initiatives sponsored by the World Bank, the U.N. and the Gates Foundation. EDGE, a new green building certification program led by the World Bank’s International Monetary Fund, encourages firms to reduce carbon emissions in countries where sourcing energy-efficient materials can be a challenge. Later this year, Cesal will be judging the Resilient Homes Challenge, a competition sponsored by the World Bank to encourage storm-resistant design.

Still, like many academics, Cesal looks critically at the organizations behind the new Global Commission on Adaptation when it comes to root causes of ecological crisis—investments in fossil fuels— and the unfair burden global warming has placed on poor communities.

“Any global effort at adaptation must begin with empathy,” Cesal says. “The poor are already experts at adaptation. They don’t need our help with that. They need us to stop destroying planet that they depend on to live.”

Jason Hickel, an expert on international development, says that Gates and the World Bank need to go further on mitigation (attempting to reduce the severity of climate change) in addition to adaptation efforts. He suggests they call for large-scale fossil fuel divestment, re-investment in renewable energy, and a substantial carbon tax.

“The call for adaptation only makes sense when it comes from institutions that are already mitigating as aggressively as possible—and that’s simply not true of Gates and the World Bank,” says Hickel. “We need much more from them.”

Photo Courtesy of abc.net.au

Curry Stone Foundation Director of Educational Initiatives and Social Design Insights Host Eric Cesal and Social Design Circle Honoree Esther Charlesworth included in ABC Australia’s coverage of “activist architects”.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON ABC.NET.AU

The children in Dien Ban, in Vietnam, are paying for a war before their time.

They were born with disabilities blamed on Agent Orange, the herbicide and defoliant used by American forces during the war.

“Their lives were relegated to the back rooms of the house … they had no future or hope,” says Esther Charlesworth, the founder of Architects Without Frontiers (AWF).

AWF designed a disability day care centre for the children, “the first of its kind” in South-East Asia.

“This centre has enabled them to get physiotherapy treatment, occupational health. It’s given them and their families a future and a life,” Professor Charlesworth says.

“It’s one building, but it’s affected about 3,000 people.”

She is among a growing breed of architects working in a field that’s variously dubbed “humanitarian”, “activist” or “disaster relief” architecture.

It sees architects stepping out from behind their drawing boards to redesign and rebuild in areas of need across the globe.

“I think we can, working with other disciplines, play a really essential role in rebuilding communities after social marginalisation, economic vulnerability, natural disasters and war,” says Professor Charlesworth, who also leads the Humanitarian Architecture Research Bureau (HARB) at RMIT University in Melbourne.

AWF has designed 42 projects in 10 countries, from remote Indigenous communities in Australia to an orphanage in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul.

“Given the millions of people affected by disaster and probably the thousands of lawyers, engineers, doctors and logistical workers in this space, there are actually very few architectural designers I come across,” Professor Charlesworth says.

‘A call to arms’

Eric J Cesal had worked in commercial practice and was undertaking his master’s degree when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.

It ravaged areas from central Florida to eastern Texas, with an estimated 1,245 people dying in the storm and subsequent flooding.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
AUDIO: Architects are putting their skills to use in disaster zones. (Late Night Live)
Mr Cesal travelled to the disaster zone to volunteer, and has since seen architecture on a “completely different level”.

“Hurricane Katrina was like a call to arms for me,” says Mr Cesal, the special projects director for the Curry Stone Foundation.

“I got to understand … how good architecture saves lives and bad architecture costs them.

“I never looked back — once I started doing that I never returned to commercial practice.”

Bamboo and mud

Only a few months after Hurricane Katrina, in October 2005, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck the disputed South Asian region of Kashmir.

Pakistan’s first female architect, Yasmeen Lari, “rushed to the area”.

“I didn’t know if I could do anything. I’d never done this kind of work, but once I got there I felt ‘this is something that I really want to do’,” says Ms Lari, who founded the non-profit Heritage Foundation with her husband in 1980.

More than 85,000 people are estimated to have died in the quake and about 500,000 families were affected.

Ms Lari designed a shelter with locally available materials, like bamboo and mud, which were cheap and have a low carbon footprint.

In the past, she’d worked for big corporations like Pakistan’s state oil company.

Now, with her UN-recognised NGO, she has been focusing on humanitarian relief work and conservation projects around Pakistan.

“It’s been a long journey, but it’s been very interesting and very rewarding work,” she says.

Widespread poverty in Pakistan, coupled with recurring disasters, makes humanitarian architecture vital, Ms Lari says.

“Every year we are either hit by earthquakes or floods,” she says.

“We need a holistic approach to deal with shelter, water sanitation, stoves for women — it’s really a whole package.”

No quick-fix
Mr Cesal says architects aren’t trained to work in disaster zones, so nothing can prepare them for it — except “doing it”.

He says when architects arrive in a disaster zone the first task is to find people shelter, then rebuild structures to be more resilient and sustainable.

Architects are both “a first responder and last responder”, Mr Cesal says.

“You’re there for years, or decades in some case, rebuilding these places.”

Professor Charlesworth says architects are just one part of a wider solution.

“It’s never just architecture. It’s the capacity of architects, planners, urban designers to ask questions and look towards long-term development plans, rather than quick-fix strategies,” she says.

Mr Cesal says in the past, these quick-fix strategies by the global aid community have created dependence, rather than self-determination.

“I have always favoured long-term development,” he says.

“You want these communities to be reconstituted as the sort of communities that you would want to live in.”

Ms Lari says her “humanistic barefoot social architecture” approach teaches people to build better homes by themselves, using simple techniques and local materials.

“We’re talking with people who really have nothing and seeing how you can bring them up and make them self-reliant,” she says.

Rethinking design to combat climate change

Ms Lari believes architects need to take a lead on climate change. She only works with “mud, lime and bamboo”.

“It is very interesting to change from using materials that were highly energy-consumptive like clay and concrete, and now using very sustainable green materials,” she says.

“Everywhere we have disasters we build structures … that add to global warming and carbon emissions.”

Mr Cesal agrees, and says architects need to “radically rethink” the way cities are organised in the face of climate change.

“And that may include redesigning many of the buildings, it may include redesigning the cities, it may include a managed retreat from the coastlines,” he says.

“The next evolution for architects, in terms of the way that they see the world, is to join the global conversation about the better world we all need, as opposed to fulfilling a client-service role.”

Photo credit: Shayan Asgharnia

Curry Stone Foundation Director of Educational Initiatives and Social Design Insights Host Eric Cesal featured in The Sydney Morning Herald as part of Humanitarian Design Week.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, humanitarian efforts were beset by an unexpected problem. Aluminium tent frames built for refugees were being stolen and resold. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban helped solve the problem by using a material with similar structural properties, but no resale value – paper tubes. A year later, when the Kobe earthquake struck, Ban once again showed the material’s versatility. Since then he has become humanitarian aid’s poster boy.

“The original deployment of paper tubes was quite brilliant,” says US architect and disaster relief expert Eric J. Cesal, special projects director for non-profit Curry Stone Foundation. “But there’s a lot of circumstances where tubes don’t make any sense. We have to think of disaster reconstruction more holistically. The design community is perpetually obsessed with finding some incredible universal ‘flat pack inflatable’ housing solution, because it strikes us more viscerally.”

Instead of importing paper tubes or dropping in converted shipping containers, architects could use local resources, stimulate the local economy and simultaneously limit the carbon footprint.

Talking to locals is key, says Cesal, whose experience extends from Hurricane Katrina to 10 years working with US charity Architecture for Humanity.

“When a lot of people think about disaster architecture they imagine someone flies in 45 minutes after the disaster and puts up a shelter and disappears,” says Cesal on the phone from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. “That certainly goes on, but it’s considered flawed practice. It’s talking and being willing to listen. It’s asking 10 questions for every statement you make.”

As part of Humanitarian Architecture Week, an exhibition at RMIT Design Hub – A Day in the Life of a Humanitarian Architect – profiles the reconstruction of several communities around the world in the wake of such natural disasters as hurricanes in Haiti and earthquakes in Pakistan. Humanitarian architecture, as the exhibition demonstrates, does not only deal with natural disasters. Underlying it is the dispiriting truth that the crises extend to manmade disasters, from genocide in Rwanda to social disadvantage in remote Aboriginal communities.

The exhibition includes Cesal’s contribution on a school in Haiti, alongside nine Australian architects working in the humanitarian field. Among those having a major social impact are Watson Architecture and Design, with its Kesho Leo Children’s Home in Tanzania, and Iredale Pedersen Hook (IPH) for the Fitzroy Crossing Renal Hostel.

 

IPH has collaborated with Indigenous communities for 25 years, producing work that ranges from housing to schools, a prison and a courthouse. Its renal hostel provides a home for people in remote communities who would otherwise have to relocate 250 kilometres to receive thrice-weekly dialysis.

“Due to its remoteness you’re not just talking about a medical facility, but a support facility for those who come with the patient as well,” says IPH co-director Martyn Hook.

Despite the best intentions, a “boots and all” approach is at odds with humanitarian architecture.

Curry Stone Foundation’s San Francisco Design Week discussion event “Goodnight, Resilience” featured on Modern Luxury San Francisco Magazine.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MODERNLUXUERY.COM

The Curry Stone Foundation and The Dogwood Conspiracy hosted an official San Francisco Design Week event called Goodnight, Resilience on Saturday June 9. Over 125 event attendees gathered at Impact Hub Oakland for a night of discussion surrounding the relevance and irrelevance of the word “Resilience” as it relates to the Bay Area’s vulnerabilities historically and in the future to natural disasters, policy making and paths our communities can take as activists to create a better future.

Throughout the space there were seven different historical installations that allowed guests to travel through time, remembering major milestones of the Bay Area’s development challenges, beginning with the 1906 earthquake into modern times. The special architecture and environment focused installation was curated and created by U.C. Berkeley Architecture students Loryn Faye Cook, Amy Louie and Tristan Blackmore.

Photography by: Drew Alitzer