Originally published on core77

With a new year, it’s time to clear out the digital clutter and make way for some new lines for inspiration. First on the list: Architecture in Development. After nurturing a passionate online community for a number of years, the founders of the site hope that Architecture in Development (AiD) can do more than just share information about sustainable development and architecture. The members behind the site are now developing workshops and launching pilot cases as a way of gathering and challenging like-minded people in a real world environment to develop new solutions for specific challenges. Core77 spoke with founding members Changfang Luo and Rob Breed about the newest phase for AiD.

What is Architecture In Development?

Rob Breed and Changfang Luo: Architecture In Development (AiD) is a global platform that aims to bring together the demand and supply in the practice of community design that emphasizes people rather than icons. AiD exists to support this new generation of architects by means of an online platform for knowledge and network resources, offline workshops and events to connect and, in the future, pilot cases to incubate real projects.

What is the backstory for why you founded Architecture In Development?

After we finished studying architecture, we started working in architecture studios. During that time we noticed the growing distance between our profession and the people using the spaces. In media, architecture was glamorized into a fashion industry with seductive images to capture attention (mainly from peer architects). And we noticed that in the world of architecture little attention was spent on the people and their relationship with architecture; everyone was busy with ‘the final selling image’ rather than the contexts, the culture and the tradition that give shape to architecture. There is hardly a voice from the people who participated in the process of making architecture; there is hardly any critique or evaluation on architecture after it’s inhabited.

We were confronting these ideas while the architecture industry was devastated by the recession. Most of our friends and colleagues lost their jobs and the future was looking bleak. We asked ourselves: How can we help our colleagues think and act differently in our daily practice?When we look beyond the glamorized architecture that impacts only the top 1%, we see many new dimensions of architecture—it’s fascinating to find out what architecture can do and what impact it can have on the needs and urgencies of various societies and communities.

We decided that we wanted to collect examples from around the world: plans and projects that are realized with or by the people, a bottom-up architecture you can say, carefully using local resources, materials and techniques with regards to local tradition, economy, culture, climate and environment.

With this idea in mind, we designed and built our online platform with the goal to crowdsource case studies and articles that reveal the relationship between people, their buildings and their contexts.

Looking at what is going on around the globe within the field of architecture, what would you say is the biggest problem right now?

The biggest problem we see, is a conflicting situation for architects (including ourselves) who have to find the balance between ‘doing good’ and ‘earning money.’ This conflict is nothing new—the renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti is often quoted as saying that architects ‘must choose between fortune and virtue.’

During a boom, the majority of architects choose to work for affluent clients; in a time of recession, such as now, there is an increasing amount of architects that choose to improve the life of underprivileged people and communities. Now comes the question and the problem: How can we help others and at the same time sustain ourselves? For the younger generation, the question is often: Shall I just get a whatever job (to earn a living) or shall I volunteer in NGOs?

To tackle this problem, we believe that we have to build up a network of resources, including financial, knowledge and human capital. This will involve various public, private and civic society stakeholders—besides designers and experts—such as the municipality, companies, NGOs and so on. The next step is to make these resources available and accessible for people who believe in a more socially relevant architecture.

Do you have any suggestions on how this can be done, and who would be suitable to take on the responsibility for creating such a network?

There is no easy answer for this question, because this is exactly our challenge! We, as AiD, would like to take this responsibility to create a network of ‘curious’ people who dare to question the status quo of architecture, and to craft an environment that is not only beautiful but also sustainable for generations to come.

It seems that the Internet and social media have already made our world more connected than ever. In our field, there are people who would like to share their available resources, such as skills, information, capital, workforce and materials, but can’t find each other in existing networks. This means that we need to reallocate the available resources and organize them into a system where supply and demand, of next generation architecture, can easily find each other.

In reality, our website already attracts the young generation of architects who are seeking a bridge to their future practice. Right now we are designing our future workshops, events and website upgrade to engage companies and various organizations who are willing to offer their complementary resources to these architects-to-be. This is not an easy step, but it is quite exciting for us to dream about the future, when we are moving away from our computers to places where we will roll up our sleeves to work within communities…

Tell us a bit more about the workshops you are planning and what you want the participants gain from them.

Nowadays there’s a proliferation of discussions, debates and calls for papers for new ways of design and planning practice. Many events are curated only for top-down players (planners, mayors, experts) within their own network. Eventually. many ideas are generated but were not put into practice. To move forward from Thinking to Doing, we need to connect various groups of people, who have shared and conflicting interests in community practice, such as the communities (users), NGOs, companies, experts and the local municipality besides the design and planning experts. We believe that this is an essential step before people are able to collaborate on real world challenges and, most importantly, to kick off real actions.

We are now working on ideas of our future workshops, with the goal to engage an active network step by step, towards project realization (a pilot case). To give you some ideas: Our first workshop in 2015 will be hosted at a start-up event venue, Crossboat at de Ceuvel—in an emerging Amsterdam neighborhood of entrepreneurs who refurbish reclaimed houseboats into homes and studios. We are thinking about kicking off with a documentary about an architect who collaborates with communities to ‘occupy’ and ‘re-use’ vacant sites and buildings, turning them into vibrant community hubs. These temporary projects weren’t recognized by the municipality and thus, demolished. The challenge for the participants is to imagine a scenario where the communities could stay and thrive and turn their temporary actions into a long-term solution. In this scenario, who do you need as partners and collaborators?

Designers and planners are trained to produce images that can sell a property. But to make sure that this final image will work as a sustainable solution for all the stakeholders it is important to innovate the process—by connecting the right people and developing a communication strategy so people with different interests can collaborate and achieve a shared solution…

What would you say is the success criteria for Architecture In Development when it comes to these workshops?

It’s about bringing people together in an attractive location, to create a relaxed, home-y atmosphere so people from all disciplines can productively discuss and work on solutions for a shared commitment. I think we have all the ingredients to make it work.

When I first started writing for this wonderful blog, the one you are on right now, I started off by writing about co-creative processes in relation to education and learning spaces. One of the offices that contacted me in relation to these articles was STL architects, a Spanish architecture studio based in Chicago. I arranged a Skype call with the two directors of the office, Luis Collado and Jose Luis de la Fuente, and we ended up talking for over an hour as shared our previous projects, work methods, processes and personal experiences.

In this interview you will be able to read about their way of working, the strategies when entering a project and their latest project, developing a 20-year master plan expansion for Wilbur Wright College in Chicago, which started working on in the beginning ofJjune this year.

Background Info

The Wilbur Wright College is one of seven Chicago City Colleges, designed by Bertrand Goldberg architect studio back in 1986, all of which are currently undergoing a major remodeling. At the moment, the college hosts students from the age of 18 and up. It is divided into three different programs:
– Credit programs
– Continuing education
– Adult education
Course offerings range from African American Studies to Zoology.

The goal for the central authority of the Chicago City Colleges is to create a 20-year master-plan expansion, while the end goal with the expansion plan for STL is to “create spaces that promote learning.”

A 20-year master-plan expansion

STL’s mission is to create a 20-year master plan expansion for Wright College, which includes taking the university through a major transformation from the inside of the organization to the outdoor lawns. One of these changes is transforming Wright College from being one of seven city colleges—which allow the students the possibility of studying almost anything between heaven and earth—to focusing on IT, making it the IT hub of the Chicago universities.

In order to be able to handle this big change, STL had to dig their teeth into more than just the exterior and interior of the building—they had to study the existing structure of the organization to get a true understanding of how to create, and be a part of, a lasting change.

Based on previous experience, STL had prepared themselves for a rather stubborn, and difficult-to-please client, similar to the ones they had encountered in the past. But to their great surprise, that wasn’t the case this time around. The client, which in this case consists of administrators, stakeholders, students and the central authority of City Colleges, completely broke this perception by giving STL loads of encouragement and support.

The STL Process

STL has throughout the years developed their way of working. As with so many architect studios and designers it is divided into:
1) Discovery
2) Analysis
3) Design

These three phases often overlap, and vary in length depending on the span of the project at hand.

The discovery phase consists of getting an overall view of the facilities, patterns of students, teachers and the surrounding community, as well as the organization structure, and this is where they are right now.

The work on the Wright College started in June, as soon as spring term came to a close, leaving the architects without the possibility to work with one section of the client group. This made things a bit harder when it came to figuring out the students patterns in how they use the spaces inside and outside of the walls. On the other hand, having the college campus all to themselves gave STL a chance to study the building itself more closely, letting them create their own view on the school and its possibilities and problem areas

Discovery

They started of the Discovery Phase by conducting 17 interviews, of about two hours each, with people from various parts of the organization and with students. These interviews, in combination with their own research of the space, have formed the basis for the rest of the research. One of the most important parts of the Discovery Phase is to collect as much relevant data as possible without judging or making conclusions. First you learn, learn, learn from the information collected, later you digest it and start asking the crucial questions such as What, Why, When and How?

It’s when you first step away from the information and look at it without judging and concluding that you can establish a true connection with it. This, in turn, will form the basis for the development of the project.

After going throughout the information gathered in the interviews, STL developed a survey with the sole purpose of understanding how students and teachers viewed the building, how they interacted with it and how they interacted with others using the facilities. These questions were very focused in order to get focused answers in turn, making it easier to turn them into statistics and other sort of information making it easier to identify problem areas and trends and create user profiles.

Some of the problems they identified during this section of the process were:
– A nonexistent organizational chart
– The lack of a social infrastructure
– The absence of informal social environments
– A nonexistent Wright College culture [physical and virtual]

These problems all have to be addressed in their own ways to create one coherent solution

Breaking down the hierarchy

As mentioned earlier, the survey is designed so that the respondent can’t give long in-depth answers, but rather short, focused answers making it easier to get a more coherent overview over the project. The questions are more about the ‘What?’ than the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ By asking ‘What?’ STL want to get a greater understanding of the building, organization and campus as a machine, of the relationship between the users and the machine and the relationship between the the community at large and the machine.

In order to be able to make a true transformation of the space, STL had to work both from the bottom up, and the work their way down from the top pyramid. This could only be done by breaking down the hierarchy and subsequently developing a completely new organizational chart based on STL’s research.

Creating a Wright College culture

Creating a new culture anywhere is a tricky task. There are so many pieces that have to fall into place to make it happen, and when the space itself doesn’t lend itself to social interaction, the change is even harder to generate.

The college was designed in such a way that it is hard to find your way around, where many of the spaces look exactly the same, which ultimately stifles human connectivity and togetherness. The space feels suitable only for passing through, rather than congregating and socializing. STL set out to solve this problem by asking how the users access the campus and learning spaces, where they feel comfortable, where they naturally gather and which spaces they find inviting.

Once STL can work through this problem, they can create the sort of spaces that they hop to create and establish the sort of culture that promotes learning and strong relations between users.

The future of learning spaces according to STL

Education has been developing way, way faster then the spaces where it takes place. It has gone from being a one-way street, where knowledge was simply transferred from teachers to students, to being multidirectional. In other words, the teacher’s role has changed and is more focused on guiding and facilitating students through the avalanche of information that is to be found across various media.

STL sees learning as an experience taking place in a theater, where the faculty and students are the actors and STL is the designer of the theatre itself. The learning experience is a part of a social infrastructure for which they are designing the stage. They see the spaces becoming more dynamic in their form, creating an environment that invites students to share and interact with one another in a more open and versatile atmosphere.

They predict that the structure of learning in school and doing homework at home, might be flipped on its head, such that more and more of the learning is done at home, while the school is the space where students go to help and talk with teachers and their peers as to solve the problems they encountered at home. Learning becoming home-learning and homework becomes school-work.

The spaces should invite students to learn from one another creating a collaborative experience, while the teachers curate the process of exploration and foster the relationships created between students, at the same time as they guide the students through their exploration of individual abilities.

As for how the spaces themselves will look, only time can tell. Only when the education sector is ready for the next step of creating new spaces in collaboration with innovative architects that STL will get to explore and showcase their vision in this domain.

Founded by Ian Hall, Arkitrek works to the create socially and environmentally sustainable buildings in Malaysia. I have been following them for several years now, just looking for a reason to contact them other than to just say “Hi! I like what you do. Keep up the good work,” and now I have one, so here we go.

Core77: Can you give us a short outline to what Arkitrek is about?

Ian Hall: We are architects and we’re motivated use design to solve environmental problems. Problems, like resource consumption, pollution and energy use. To solve these problems usually involves working with people, so we are highly socially minded in the way that we work, but I’m a nature lover foremost and love of wild places and nature is what inspires me

What lead you to start Arkitrek?

Haha. Long story…

One thing led to another. I always knew that I did not want to follow a ‘conventional’ architecture career. After completing my Part III and getting solid commercial experience, I decided to look for alternatives and I joined an expedition with Raleigh International to Borneo. They asked me to lead a team of young volunteers to do a feasibility study for a jungle research station in Borneo. That was a dream job. I swapped designing shiny urban hotels and started work on primitive huts in the jungle. I joke that ‘the people I worked with were primitive too': gap year students mostly. The Raleigh ethos is empowering young people by giving them responsibility for delivering project work in challenging places. After some initial resistance, I embraced this philosophy.

After my Raleigh expedition in 2004, I volunteered to work for The Sabah Foundation, Raleigh’s local partner in Sabah, Borneo. The Sabah Foundation manages three rainforest conservation areas and I went on to volunteer for them as an architect, designing jungle camps, staff quarters and research facilities on and off for two years.

I funded this with contract work in London. Six months in London would fund four months in Sabah. During this time, I met the people who would become my first paying clients in Sabah. That’s how Arkitrek started.

The name, Arkitrek, was coined by my mate Andy Lo. Andy is a Londoner whose parents are from Sabah. We worked together in London and he came out to visit his family in Sabah and then joined me for a month long design and trekking stint in Sabah’s Maliau Basin Conservation Area.

I worked in the most awesome and wild and beautiful places.

What was the main foundation when you started Arkitrek?

During that time with Sabah Foundation I was very concerned with two questions:
1. Should we build anything here? [in this wild and beautiful place]
2. If we do build, what kind of building is appropriate?

A little later, when I was no longer supported by high paying London contract work a third question came into play…
3. How can I keep saying yes to designing small buildings in beautiful places for worthy clients, who can’t pay professional fees?

I think that my ‘ground pillars’ are those three questions.

And what were your answers to these questions?

Hahaha… I’m still figuring it out, but I can try to tell you roughly where I am at with the answers.

1. Should we build anything here? We ask ourselves this question with every project. In particular we ask “Is this a ‘worthy’ client/project?” or “What problem is the client themselves trying to solve?”

For example, if the client says, “I want to develop a small and spectacular part of a national park so that it is accessible to local people, so that those local people can see what treasures we have and that in the future those local people might fight to protect those treasures,” then I would say “Yes, that is a problem worth solving and a building is appropriate.”

2. If we do build, what kind of building is appropriate? This is probably the question that will take the longest to figure out…. I know that it has a lot to do with materials. Knowing how all of your building materials are produced and where they come from and who benefits down the supply chain. That’s why I love using locally produced woven bamboo for cladding panels. Using local timber is more complicated [to figure out whether you’re doing good or harm] and using steel and concrete is another even tougher question…

This question is also about energy and waste. I’ve got much more into shit than most architects should, I believe. Maybe because I like toilet humor—just ask any of my long-suffering colleagues and interns!

It’s also about design, particularly passive design and its about procurement—who builds the building and what is the architects’ relationship with them? This question is about looking good. As a student I rebelled against the ‘magazine’ aesthetic: how the prime objective of any architect seemed to be to design something that would appear in a glossy architecture magazine. Now I can see that the so-called ‘money shot’ photo of a building can help to advertise the dreams of the client and attract people to join them to help with whatever problem they are trying to solve. How the building itself is the tangible tip of an iceberg of people and skills and endeavors.

3. How can I keep saying yes to designing small buildings in beautiful places for worthy clients, who can’t pay professional fees? The answer to this question comes from my Raleigh experience. Empower young people by giving them the responsibility to deliver those projects.

The first two questions truly address whether it’s even justifiable to build in some of the spaces that you are working in. What steps you take to ensure that the project you are working on has a minimal impact on the area, while honoring its surroundings?

To ‘honor the space,’ the positioning of the building on the site is the key. You have to ask if it is appropriate on this site to have an ‘object building’, or if you should make the site the object?’

In other words, does the building dominate the site or is it an unobtrusive and pretty wallflower? The next step would be to work out what connection, physical and visual does the building need to the landscape? Finally, apply passive design principles.

Do you work with the local communities? If so, how?

I will answer two angles to this question: ‘how do we engage with local communities and how do we sustain community projects financially?’

Yes, we work with lots of local communities. It’s not easy. During my Raleigh time, in addition to the rainforest research station project, I also designed and built a community kindergarten [my first community design/build project].

We have five community projects on site at various stages now. Three are under a tourism operator, one under a corporate CSR programme and one purely under Arkitrek. None of them pay any professional fee and all of them involve students. The one under the CSR program is our recently completed Tagal Hut which was done by an Arkitrek design/build program engaging students from Malaysia, UK, Italy and India. In this case, we partnered with a very professional CSR manager for a large company. The building is only a key stage in a long programme of rural development, in this case community management of freshwater fish stocks for local consumption and sale plus domestic tourism (visitors paying to feed the fish). The key to working with communities is to either have a very credible community organisation, a good NGO/CSR partner or [be prepared for the long haul] to take on the NGO role ourself [more on the latter later].

We have also adapted and developed protocols for working with communities. I consider these as our terms of appointment, but these type of terms are not taught at architecture school. The terms are based on: clear expression of need, FPIC (free prior and informed consent) for how we will work.

When working with the community what sort of processes and methods do you use?

Again, we’re still learning but this is roughly where we are at: We have to ask, does the community really need a building or are they just looking for the next hand-out? In most cases, the community is receiving free design services and the building cost itself may be funded by outside sources. It’s easy for them to say, ‘Yes we want it’ simply because they’re not paying. It comes back to that question ‘What problem is the client [community] trying to solve?’ can a building help? With the Tagal Hut, the problem was how to take care of natural resources (fish, and by extension the river) and create lasting benefits for the community. In this case we had a credible CSR partner who was taking care of developing the human resources in the long term, so yes, a building was necessary, appropriate and potentially very beneficial.

Next we have to agree some terms. We may work for free but there may be things that we want to get out of it. Similarly the community may not pay cash but they may pay in-kind.
We run most community projects as an educational design/build program. Our students pay for Arkitrek to set up and facilitate the project and we want them to get a positive learning experience out of it. The community must help us deliver this in exchange for a design and a building.

The community may not pay cash [for design and construction] but they can provide [reciprocal] services free-of charge. If the building is to be community-owned and will help generate benefits for the community in the long term, then it is reasonable to ask them to contribute say, skilled labor and homestays and catering (for our students).

We agree to all of this in an MOU before starting. This is essential because the community [and us and our partners!] invariably try to change the terms as we go along.

The biggest challenge we have is dealing with payment for skilled labor. The Tagal Hut we agreed that nobody in the community was receiving cash for labor and we maintained a hard line on this. This project was one of our most successful in terms of community engagement and community pride and ownership of the finished building. On another project, we were inconsistent with who got paid and who did not and we failed to explain our inconsistencies. Consequently we got very little engagement.

What would you say are the most important key elements for a project to succeed?

– There has to be a clear need for a building and it has to be clear how the community will benefit from that building (and the design and construction process).
– There has to be clear and fair terms of engagement and these have to be strictly adhered to.
– The community must be continually informed (about design, materials, labour decisions etc) and give their consent.
– There must be transparency, particularly about money.

Arkitrek works a lot with natural materials, but what is your approach to sustainability when it comes to re-use of other materials than wood?

Honestly, we’ve not dealt with this question significantly but where we have I look at the re-use of materials from two points of view: re-using materials in their original shape/form and using new materials made from recycled raw material.

For an architect, I would argue that the most significant way of using materials in their original shape/form is to adapt an existing building, or where the whole building cannot be reused, at least reuse the foundation or significant elements. To do this successfully requires design, so that’s why architects can really make a difference. On the recently completed Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, we reused all existing foundations. The structural engineer did not want to because of risk of differential movement. We asked whether we could design for differential movement? They said yes and we did. We also reclaimed and reused much of the steelwork for bear cages. The contractor told us that it would be cheaper/easier to use virgin steel. We asked why, he said due to extra labor of working with reclaimed bits and pieces. We decided to design every bit that that could be done with reclaimed steel so that it could be costed. The extra cost was tiny, proportional to the contract, the client agreed and so we did it.

Individual architects, I believe, have less control over new materials from waste because this is dependent on suppliers being able to develop new, potentially market-disruptive products. For example, we could try to influence the adoption of ‘green concrete’ that uses binders derived from industrial waste, but this will be a long and difficult battle due to the lobbying power of the Malaysian cement industry. This type of battle needs to be fought from the top down. We are grassroots, working from the bottom up. What individual architects can do, though, with a supportive client, is look for opportunities to build a demonstration project so that the top-down fighters have some evidence that what they are fighting for is practical.

If you would mention one project that has influenced you a bit extra, which one would that be, and why?

Above, I mentioned that there is one community project where Arkitrek has taken on an NGO role. This is the Bio-cultural Heritage Centre in Ulu Papar. On one hand, this project has been a disaster, but on the other hand, it has been an education from which fantastic things are coming.

It was a disaster because I did not tightly control our student design/build team. Consequently they designed and started building a building that was much bigger than they could finish in the duration of their program. Arkitrek was left holding the baby, with no more income coming from the student parents!

The other disaster was the community engagement that I mentioned above. Due to our inconsistency in payments to the community, we did not get the support from the community that we needed to get the building finished in a timely manner.

Of course no one is going to abandon a baby so we continued to plough in resources to try to get the building finished (on design/builds we not only do the design but the construction management too). Six months after the student design/build team had gone home, the building was still nowhere near finished. It would be melodramatic to say that this project might bankrupt the company, but it felt like that a times.

The final disaster was that the NGO that introduced us to the community stopped their program of training community bio-cultural researchers. We knew this would happen but we did not plan for it. The NGO left some highly skilled and motivated community members but they did not leave a credible community organization or body with whom we could work.

The fantastic thing that happened was three intern architects: Filzah, Tom and Nadhira, who rose to the challenge. They managed to get the building practically complete but more significantly, they wrote and tested a workshop program, christened Build.ca.tion, that would both create sustainable income for the build and provide on-going skills training and income for a fledgling community committee. Filzah and Nadhira are now negotiating with corporate and government sponsors and recruiting participants for Build.ca.tion programmes.

In building the Bio-cultural Heritage Centre, Arkitrek has become the NGO. We have turned the design and construction process itself, into the means of funding the building. We have retrospectively justified the raison d’etre of the building and will work with this community for at least another year, if not longer. If you ask me now whether this building was necessary at the start, I would say no. But it is now.

If you got to ask someone who’s been working in the same area of architecture as yourself, what would that question be?

What prevented you from giving up?

And lastly, let us in on some Do’s and Don’ts for people who are interested in working with these sort of projects

Do let your passion motivate you
Do surround yourself with good people
Do have a supportive partner

Don’t compromise your values
Don’t sell yourself short

The young Danish designer Mikkel Mikkelsen first caught my attention when I saw a series of experiments he had created with wood, aluminium and acrylic/plexi. A dining table with the same honesty as the original experiment captures the lessons learned.

Ever since I first saw the experiment, I’ve enjoyed following his progress as a designer, and a few months ago, one of his latest endeavors caught my attention once again. This time around, it was due to a duck. I know it sounds a bit odd, but this small little character with a metal beak is a remarkable duck, it’s a duck you fall in love in a heartbeat, and it’s a part of a grander book project created by Aviendo Fairytale. Seeing how far Mikkel has come since the first time i saw his design, how true he has been towards himself, his design and the people he come into contact with, I figured it was about time you all got a proper introduction to his work.

Core77: How did you get into the field of design?

Mikkel Mikkelsen: Before I started in the school of architecture, I was working in construction while I was doing business school. I was working in building high-end private homes in a company where my dad was a constructing architect. So the interest for architecture started there I guess—my dad also had his own studio before this, so drawing houses has always been in my life. It was like it was meant to be.

I think after architecture school, I was looking for a way to keep working on mikkelmikkel because I was, and am not very interested in a 9-to-5 job in one of the big companies. I tried this a couple of times but I always end up feeling stuck behind a computer and very detached from the projects. I think it has something to do with the scale of the projects in the big companies. I have always preferred the smaller scale that relates more directly to the basic needs of human beings.

To me, the interaction with clients are what drives the projects. A new project is always kind of a journey where you get up close and personal with the people you work for, which I find very interesting. Half of the journey is identifying and understanding the needs and challenges in a project before solving them.

When studying architecture, what was your main drive?

It is a bit hard to say—overall I think I have always had a desire to create things. When I think back I have been building things since I was little. But I see myself as kind of a hybrid. On one side I am the pragmatic builder who is very rational and functional, but on the other hand I have a strong sense of conceptual and artistic thinking. My architecture is often grounded in “softer” humanistic and cultural aspects.

It took some time when studying to find my place—I learned the hard way, that I belong in the smaller scale of architecture. I think it also has something to do with, that I can relate better to the scale and the functions around me. I use my own life as a laboratory for my work. If I have a problem or a desire, chances are that others are feeling the same way.

When you encounter and identify a problem in your own life, how do you go about solving them?

To me it is very important why you do what you do. If there is not a good reason to do something, I will not do it. I use this way of thinking all of the time when I am working. It is a way for me to make sure that everything is there for a reason and that I am aware and can communicate why this is. That is the pragmatic side talking—I am very aware that being a human being is not always something you can make sense of and I try to follow my gut feeling as well. Even though something is right in theory, it might not feel right.

Have you figured out an overall structure for your way of working?

When I get an idea, I will often run with it. My problem is that the speed of ideas and the time it takes to develop them is very different. To begin with, I write them down or make a quick sketch. Then I will leave it to see if it sticks or if it will just fade away. If it sticks, I will make out why this is a good idea and once this is clear—if it is clear—I will start experimenting in 2D and pretty quick small models. I do a lot of thinking before doing anything. I have to select which ideas I spend my time on. This is something that takes time. An idea needs time to sink in and see if it can stand up to the test of time.

You mentioned working with the humanistic aspects, how does your work reflect this?

To me it is about trying to understand things. I need to understand a problem or need in order to solve it in a better way. Of course, it is difficult to talk about projects in a general way especially because I work in such different scales. All projects have their own “life” and framing; this is why it is so important for me to understand the “core” of the project. Human needs and desires are very much the driving force in my projects. Designing houses for clients are a 1:1 translation of the client’s desires. You can say I translate the dream of a lifestyle into a physical frame.

My bigger architectural projects, which are more conceptual, often start with the people who are going to inhabit them—I would never design something just based on form.

How do you get your head around the “core” problems and needs of the client?

It depends on the project. For example I spetd a month in Rio working with a youth favela organization to try and understand the situation and the culture of these people. This allowed me to infiltrate and observe the situation without being “colored” with historical events. My job is to observe and listen and then figure out what it actually means. Often people can not tell you directly what they want because they do not know or they are not able to articulate things, so it is important that you ask the right questions. And once you find the problems, you can start to solve them in a efficient way. I strive to solve things in a “less is more” way. I say this because I like the Idea of giving the most for the least. Prestige architecture does not interest me; quality in life does!

What sort of problems did you encounter in the favela?

The favela in itself has of course problems like every other place. However I was more focused on the positive qualities of the favelas. There is a complex social system based on interaction and support. The sense of community in these places are incredible. However the real problem is the relationship between the established city and the favela. They simply do not know how to interact, which causes mutual hate. There are a long line of historical events which has made it very difficult for the parties to communicate. Because they do not understand each other they keep on clashing. It is a very complex situation, which could be the subject of an interview in itself

So you located a problem, how did you go about finding a solution to bring to the table?

The Rio favela situation is so complex that it is hard to sum up in a few lines.

What did you end up with after spending time in the favela?

I was working a lot with mapping qualities in both the favela and the city. My project was about implementing a new way of interacting. I proposed a way of building where cooperation and respect for differences were a key element. I designed a school that would act as a “stage” for favela culture and make this accessible for the public. But it was just as much a manual for a respectful collaboration. A new way for the city to make interventions instead of the rather brutal way it is done now, which creates more tension. This is a good example of my humanistic approach followed by a very concrete design. I am not afraid to give form to my empirical work.

Back to the present—what are you working on right now?

Right now I am actually working in both fields of my studio. I am designing a renovation of a house in the countryside and another project which is a garage/atelier addition to a house. Additionally, I am working on a lighting/lamp design for Frama in Copenhagen. And I am finishing up a series of tables that I developed myself. Furthermore, I have just been hired to do a workshop in Den Skandinaviske Design Hoejskole. So small scale architecture, design and teaching. Oh, and The Duckling (Aviendo)—we are starting another one soon.

It was the duckling that caught my eye a while back. What brought you to do that project?

I was exhibiting a chair while I was studying. The couple that has Aviendo stopped and we had a talk. They like my work and now two years later it is out. Although I must say I had never imagined how much effort that project took. It is one of the hardest projects I have done. However I have learned so much doing it in so many ways.

What would you say has been the most important learning experience that you take with you from this project?

Everything other than the design aspect. The designing was a challenge but something I have done a lot of times. Everything surrounding the design work was a great experience. All of the work you do not see in the finished product. We were a large design team that had to work together and coordinate. The strategic aspects in selling your ideas and how to present them. Also the business aspect for industrial products. I have learned a lot in this project.

Before finishing this interview, would you like to give a few guiding Do’s and Don’ts to designers and youngsters considering venturing into the field of design?

– Be true to yourself, there are many ways you can use a creative education.
– We do not all have to follow the same path.
– Be realistic about the markets you venture into and study them before doing so.
– Competition is hard and something you have to take seriously.
– Be very clear on what you do and why you do it.

For more information about Mikkelsen’s various projects, follow him on Instagram or go to his website mikkelmikkel.com

Open Air Neighborhood (OAN) started off as a collaboration between KaosPilot Theis Reibke and architect Louise Heeboell, back in 2011. At first, the idea was simply to develop “Building Playgrounds” through co-creative processes with the users, as a way to develop the city itself. They applied for and received grants from both the EU and RealDania, and started working on the project. After meeting Ellen O’Gara at a conference in 2012, the project has since been a collaboration between Heeboell and O’Gara.

The main focus for OAN has always been on creating a strong connection with the users by making them a vital part of the processes. Here they share some insights into what made them decide to work together, what brought them onto the path of co-creative processes and what they have learned throughout the various projects

Core77: Let’s start off with a little bit of history about each of you.

Ellen O’Gara: Architecture seemed like an interesting thing to study because it combined books and creativity. I liked that combination and I still do. While I studied I really liked that everyone could participate in a discussion on architecture because it is something that is relevant for all. And in some ways we are all experts.

Louise Heeboell: I was both creative and good at math and physics. Good at drawing. I thought I was going to be an engineer. But I figured that the mix of engineering and being creative was being an architect. Besides from that, I had no clue, what being an architect was about. I’m happy about my choice now. Years before Open Air Neighborhood, I worked as a ‘normal’ architect. But I found that there was a conflict in the way architects work and the way the city develops. I had been looking for a way to work differently, open and with the users as a central part of the development—and still be an architect.

Louise, why was this so important to you?

Because I found that the urban space that was built as a direct result of the architects drawings had no life. (And I’d been drawing some myself, so I felt bad about it!) I was interested in finding out what created the places in the city that are filled with life and where people liked to stay.

Ellen, what brought you onto the path of co-creative processes?

Ellen: I studied at the school of architecture in Copenhagen. At the beginning of every year we went abroad for two weeks to do field work. In Sarajevo, Porto, Lisbon, … Here we were free to find something that interested us. I would walk around and talk to people. Ask them what was important to them. This would always lead to something interesting. A topic would emerge, a need, a potential. I would gather all the information I could, measurements, conversations… the rest of the year, I and all the other students would develop each our project. I find this way of working very interesting. Looking at the needs and the resources and developing a program from that. It results in some very interesting synergies and very relevant programs. It is bottom-up development.

Of course you can’t always just wander around and hope to run into something interesting when a developer wants something built but it is an approach I find very valuable. So what I mean to say is that my education has very directly led me to what I am working on today.

So, when did you two start collaborating?

Ellen: We met at a conference in august of 2012 hosted by the city. We each presented projects we had worked on for the previous months. It was clear that we had the same interests and some of the same ambitions for urban planning. The conference was about a project called Skab din By. Very interesting and experimental project by the municipality.

Louise: After that, we had a coffee and I think I asked if Ellen wanted to take part in the talk, that Open Air Neighborhood was going to give at the Think Space conference in September that year.

Ellen: Yes, and from then we started building OAN together. By January, we were working full time. Doing projects for the city and housing organizations.

During the Think Space conference you each presented a project. What were these projects about?

Ellen & Louise: We presented several projects where you could see that we had some common ideas for how to develop differently, our approach to urban planning and the process by which the city is and should be made. These ideas were about including the users in developing their own urban spaces. We were both very interested in processes where the citizens take a more central part of the development, and we both had experienced first hand that this kind of process can have some good social benefits.

What were your first projects working together in OAN?

Ellen & Louise: I think it was Gribskov Boerneby, wasn’t it? And the second part of SolvangCenteret. Gribskov was a workshop we did. It lasted a few hours and was interesting. Solvangcentret was a project that lasted about a week. It was the second phase of a project Louise did the summer before we met. Solvangcenteret was building the furniture for an abandoned mall in a social housing area together with the local kids. It was about engaging the locals in developing physical and social ‘things’ together as a whole.

Ellen: During the summer, we have renewed the courtyard of the mall, also together with the citizens. The idea for the second phase was to finish the things that had not been finished. But when we spoke with people there, we realized that that plan was not relevant anymore. So we had a talk about what else could be done. Some of the adults already hosted a weekly dinner that they thought could be more public. So the plan became to build tables, benches and a food cart so it would be easier to host the weekly dinner in the shopping center. We ended the week by doing the dinner. Some of the locals made food, kids decorated the court and we used the furniture.

After we left, the project the locals took initiative to contact the owner of the shopping center and asked for permission to use a kitchen for the dinners. This shows that the people who took part were in some ways empowered to act. To take matters into their own hands. This has been a central focus in our work

Louise: The interesting thing about that project was also that it hasn’t been troubled by vandalism, even though that area is usually has this problem. So we found that including the youth really helps to prevent vandalism. The housing association has starting including the youth as a normal part of their practice for preventing vandalism now.

Throughout the time you have been working with OAN, what have you learned about developing processes?

Ellen & Louise: There is a lot of wasted effort. The system is built to be fair and I guess it is but it is also so highly regulated that the regulations sometimes prevents good initiatives. That is quite unfortunate. Luckily the city of Copenhagen is testing new ways of developing. We’ve been following some of the projects. They have some brave attempts of doing things differently. Skab din By was an attempt from the city to test ideas.

Co-creative processes look different from project to project, but they normally have a basic overall structure. Can you tell us a bit about OAN’s basic process design?

Ellen & Louise: We’ve developed a process tool that we call Demokratisk Byudvikling—a method toolkit. This tool is based on our experience from the projects we have done during the last two years. It consists of two models: the DNA model and the 4D model. The DNA model is a tool to get an overview of the project’s ingredients and potential. This is the initial step where we determine who will be involved and what knowledge needs to be developed, and then a potential process. It’s a circular process.

Then we use the 4D model: Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver. It’s different from projects to project which ‘D’ we start with, and how many loops we take. It’s an iterative process in which we make use of the method prototyping. I think this is probably the thing that a lot of people associate us with. It is a method where you move quickly from idea to physical product. We’ve used it a lot when testing ideas. It is good to build an idea in 1:1. It forces you to be very specific and when it is there other people can see and use it. Thereby they will be able to give a more qualified response. It is also fun and a method that can be quite attractive to people who couldn’t care less about a citizen meeting. Speaking in big terms you could say that cities are prototypes. They are always being rebuilt and learn new things that can make them better.

When looking back at your various projects, which one would you say is the most successful one in terms of learning experience for OAN?

Ellen: I really like Vinterbyen. It is a project that includes a bit of everything. It started with us wondering why nobody focuses on urban life in winter time. There is so much focus on urban life during summer and by far most of the architectural renderings are of summer days. But once it gets cold and dark we hurry indoors. This lack of attention on cities during winter led us to developed the concept of Vinterbyen. We’ve gotten so much positive feedback on the project and everyone we talk to completely understands the idea. We’ve done a series of projects under the name of Vinterbyen and I like the whole process behind developing them. We saw a need; researched it; collaborated with a diverse group of partners on developing ideas; tested the ideas; and derived knowledge from them. This knowledge has been shared through lectures and articles. Each project under Vinterbyen leads to the next project. Developing the business plan is also very interesting.

Louise: I think both the Hørgården Nærgenbrugsstation and the Citylife on parking places are interesting in that manner. I think the Citylife on parking places (also called the ITS, or Intelligent Traffic Systems) has some of it all—figuring out the DNA and the creative process of the discovering, dreaming, designing and delivering. We learned a lot though the process—the interviews, the testing, more interviews. I hope it leads to a whole new way of managing parking places in Copenhagen. I also think that working with strategic planning in relation to our work has been interesting. E.g. in the work we did with the strategy of opening up the Hørgården social housing area. And Nærheden, planning a new city.

All good things come to an end, and you have decided to go in different directions. What lead to this decision?

Ellen & Louise: It seems like a good time to move on. We recently finished our process tool and with that, we feel that we tied a knot on something we wanted to explore together. That being done, we both have new directions we want to explore…

What will be you next step?

Louise: I’m starting a new company called IntraCity. I’ll work with ideas and strategies in the urban space, moving rapidly from idea to action. I teamed up with my boyfriend, actually. He’s also an architect, and a master builder. Throughout the work with Open Air Neighborhood, I’ve been very interested in the work with both strategy and innovation, and the combination in relation to the urban space. That will be my path. Working with prototyping has been so good and interesting. That will still be a central part of my work.

Ellen: My company is Platant. It is a continuation of the work that I have done in OAN but with a greater focus on a few things. I am interested in exploring how to measure the social sustainability of all these interesting projects that are going on in the public realm. And how this can lead to new ways of public/private collaborations.

Can you give me your personal Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to working with co-creative projects?

Don’t
– Don’t work with assholes! (No don’t write that.) But seriously that is a very important lesson.
– Don’t get into those development projects that want to seem like they want to listen to people, when the actually don’t. When you open up the process to people, you have to do it for real. All the way.

Do:
– Follow your instinct about people.
– Test it. You’ll get surprised. And learn so much. And you’ll find that the project suddenly jumps miles ahead. Even though it was only a prototype.
– Collaborate with people, companies and organizations who inspire you
– Share ideas
– Prototype again and again
– Document your findings
– Understand ‘idea’ as a verb!
– Be respectful to everyone. Respect their position and what they bring to the project. And be open and friendly. (It sounds very simple, but is very important)

When I look at schools, I walk into schools, when I interact with schools, I feel like they belong to a different universe. As soon as I set my foot in a school, it feels like I’ve stepped out of the real world and into a something alien and unnatural.

Most people call it an institution, in the same way that we call a hospital or a prison “an institution.”

Institution—this says it all. A public or private place for the care or confinement of inmates, especially mental patients or other disabled or handicapped persons.

Throughout history, it seems like we’ve been dead set on designing educations and education facilities as to make the students feel locked-in, both body as well as soul.

It doesn’t sound very inviting or inspiring, it normally doesn’t look very inviting or inspring, and still we want students of all ages to spend a lot of time in these place, we want them to want to learn, to get inspired, to grow as human beings and to become the next generation when building our society. Yet hardly anything about the ordinary education facilities can be called inspiring, or showcase which direction we want our society to go.

For many years, one of of the questions roaming around in my mind on a daily basis has been, ‘How can we create an good education that builds the sort of minds we want and need in our society, when we don’t even seem to know which sort of society we want?’ Which leads to: How can we go about re-arranging our education over and over and over again, without seemingly taking into account that education and society are undeniably intertwined?

This leads back to what I wrote in the very beginning: How come we have been designing institutions that separates, and in some cases, alienates, rather than intertwines education and education facilities with society? And how can we integrate education in such a way that it becomes a more natural, and less alien, base pillar of the society we want to create?

Is it just me, or is this something that we need to start a serious discussion about that crosses national, social and occupational borders…?

Following her first article on her experiences as an architect/designer working with kids, Moa Dickmark offers her insights into the future of pedagogy and learning environments, an issue that raises various questions around the world. Here, she shares her vision for learning spaces in the future, how to go about developing them, and why she believes that students and teachers should have a say and be a part of the development and implementation process.

What do I believe will be the future for education and education facilities?

Einstein, who said something to the effect of “If you can’t explain the problem simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” would not be happy with my answer.

The question seems so simple, but the answer, as most of you probably have noticed, is oh-so complex.

More and more, we see that newly designed schools around the globe is that the majority of architects rely on the teachers and the school administrators’ feedback regarding their work environment as the basis of their designs. Like most of you, I agree that this is an important part of developing a more multi-faceted school then what we have seen in the past.

And it is without a doubt important, as an architect, to listen to and truly understand the needs of the people who use the school spaces on a day to day basis. It is also vital that the architects read between the lines and interpret what the users can’t put into words themselves. We are fluent in the language of space, but we have to remember that not everyone is. This is also important when it comes to developing an environment that not only works better than the ones they had before, but becomes a way to develop and challenge existing ways of teaching and learning.

One thing I have noticed when studying various projects and architecture studios around the globe is that very few of them consult the students on a serious level. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good projects where they are doing just this (and i will write about them, i can promise you that), but they are few and far between.

There are many reasons for this: the students (kids, tweens, teens) ideas can seem unserious, far fetched and unrealistic. They can also be hard to comprehend, and hard to implement into the design because of a lack of understanding of why the students are asking for whatever they are asking for. And then there is of course the problems that all kids have with adults: that the adults believe that they know best and know what the kids truly need.

Once more we have to keep in mind that not everyone speaks the language of space, but most people, no matter what age, have an opinion about it, and kids are no different. It can be hard for anyone to understand and pinpoint why they think, work, concentrate or come up with better ideas in one area of a learning space, and not in others.

There are various ways to get around this little hurdle—by guiding them through various small workshops where they explore and question everything from existing spaces at the school and the surrounding areas, as well as where they hang out after school and in their homes.

In the beginning, you (as an architect, designer or teacher seeking more insight to the students minds) will probably find it rather tricky—I know I did. But in this way, both you and the students will get a greater understanding of which areas are best suited for which sort of work, what areas work best for them and why, which areas do not work and why, and how you together can develop the areas that don’t work so that the students start using them.

The Almighty Designer…

During my time studying architecture at university and based on what I’ve heard from fellow architecture students in other countries, our mentors continue to talk about the importance of a good process, and that we are supposed to study our clients and users as thoroughly as we possibly can. Unfortunately, at least for me, it is not a part of the curriculum to learn how to develop our own design and work process, how to collaborate with non-architects, how to set a timetable for a project or how to develop and conduct a workshop.

This often results in students who believe they have the infallible taste when it comes to design, and that this means that their opinions are worth more than those who are actually going to use the building.

Janitors, Students and Teachers Are Also Experts

As an architect, it can be extremely hard to let go of your role (and view of yourself) as the expert when it comes to design, and I’m not saying that you should do so completely. But—and this is a big BUT—it is important to remember that everyone who uses the space is an expert in her/his own right, and that their expertise is not to be taken lightly. The teachers’ expertise, the janitors’ expertise, the 12-year-old students’ expertise, and the librarians’ expertise all must be taken into consideration in order to arrive at the optimal end result when designing or redesigning space.

Unfortunately, many architects see the client/users as a disruptive element, along with budgets that are too tight, annoying regulations and other parameters that messes up their design.

If you instead choose to see it as an opportunity to work together on developing and designing a solution that measures up to as many requirements as possible, the entire process will develop in another, more enjoyable, direction. A common goal of a good collaboration, where everyone involved is on the same level and is respected for their respective expertise, leads to a more interesting and more sustainable project.

It will probably cost a bit extra on the spreadsheets and take a bit longer, but considering the life cycle of a building, one to two months of extra research and development does not really matter, especially not if the results exceeds the ordinary.

Asking for What They Know

When my colleague Heidi Lyng and I first started working closely with schools to develop design processes with students and teachers, we were just starting our final year of our master from Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark.

For the major part of our first semester, we were out working with students in various elementary schools located in Aarhus, and a school with for tweens with concentration and learning disabilities in Vejle. During this time we developed various co-creative design processes in order to get a hold of the information we needed as to be able to understand the students needs. We also developed different methods with regard to the age of the students, energy levels etc.

One of the many things we learned from our first semester at uni is that when asked the question of what sort of spaces they want and need in a new school, the teachers, students and school leaders answer by asking for what they already know or what they think we as architects want to hear without considering whether the spaces actually work. This is the reason why we use co-creative design processes—to open up for a mutual understanding and dig deeper into what is truly needed and what is just for show.

Another thing we learned (and keep reminding ourselves of) is that “small kids have small pockets.” For us, this means that we always have to keep in mind who we are developing the co-creative design processes for when it comes to both age and size…

The Ultimate Learning Environment

I have thought long and hard about what is needed as to create the ultimate learning environment, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t exist. The only thing we can do is to create as much of an advantageous basis for space to develop as possible. We can do this by developing a space that works in collaboration with the educators, by hiring teachers who burn for what they do, and to create spaces where students and teachers work together as a team to create a good atmosphere where learning is something that students genuinely want to do.

The school, in terms of both architecture and pedagogy, must take in consideration that people are different and they have different needs to feel good and comfortable, and ultimately fulfil their potential. Only after you have specified the needs and wishes of various individuals can you design a space that even comes close to what can be called “the ultimate learning environment,” and this takes time, close collaboration between the various users and partners and the architects and engineers.

One of the things that I personally find to be important throughout the process is to design a solution that not only supports current pedagogy, but also challenges teachers and students to develop it further, and hopefully meets their future needs proactively. This is difficult, of course, since we can’t possibly know what the future will bring, but what we can do is study and develop spaces that work in the present so we can stop designing and developing spaces that don’t.

So let’s collaborate and co-create more, let’s take one another seriously when doing so, and let’s develop ways of working where we truly understand what the other one is saying, and not just brush opinions under the rug because they aren’t expressed in a language we can understand.

Let me start off by saying that this is solemnly based on personal experiences and opinions! Sure, there’s some facts to back it up seeing that we have done our research, but the sources are long forgotten. Not because they weren’t relevant, but i’ve mixed them up in my mental blender…

To the point: Working with kids has many sides. It can be hard, it can be challenging, you have to plan the day down to the minute, and make sure that you can rearrange your plans depending on the day play out, but most of all it’s good fun, inspiring and amazingly awesome to be let into their world.

As an architect by training, I have worked with my lovely colleague Heidi Lyng to develop various methods when working together with kids, teachers and leaders on developing educational spaces using co-creative design processes. We’ve been doing this for over two years now, and have been working on everything between concrete projects such as developing more active playgrounds to more fluffy projects such as developing a common vision for a gymnasium. We see everyone involved—from the 7-year-old student to the 62-year-old principal—as experts in their field. No one is as good at being a 7-year-old girl as a 7-year- old girl…

As I’ve already written, working with kids have many facets—it can be hard, it can be tricky, it can be hilarious, it can be oh-so-many things, but most of all it’s fun, it is inspiring and it is vital if you want to reach the optimal result with the project.

First, the Good

No matter what their age, kids have an insight into, and a view of, how it is to be a kid of their own age that no one, no matter how good you are at putting yourself into the shoes of others, can do to the same extent. Figuring out why a certain space works, and why another one doesn’t is something only the kids you work with can tell you. It’s their field of expertise. They know, instinctively, where they prefer to work, where they get inspired and where they feel safe etc. What we, the architects, do is help them define and understand theses spaces by playing games and asking questions.

The Bad

Let’s start with the obvious: Kids have an extremely short concentration span! But here is where it’s up to you to make sure to arrange the day in such a way that you can keep them interested. If one method doesn’t work, tweak it until it does or try another approach. If you notice that the concentration is on an all-time low, take a break, ask them to run around the building a few times and see who can do it the fastest, take them out onto the playground and play a game, get some fresh air. But whatever you do, do NOT continue as if nothing is wrong. There’s always something you can do, even if it’s just to let them go crazy for 5-10 minutes…!

Another thing we have noticed is that our school is built up in such a way that the kids pretty early seem to lose their natural sense of imagination. By first grade, they are already taught that there are some things that are right, and some that are wrong. The more right you are, the more golden stars you will get. Unfortunately this means that their ability to wander through the door into a wonderful world of imaginary friends and create fairytale spaces is fading at a young age.

Thankfully this is not the case with all kids—some manage to keep the door open longer than others.

We find that starting off a process by telling the kids that we aren’t looking for right or wrong answers when we are there—we don’t care if they draw perfectly, if they spell correctly or build a perfect house. Whatever they do is good. Our job is to make sure that we create an environment where the doors of imagination can re-open and stay open.

And if it helps, let them know that what is called imagination and fantasy now is called creativity or creative thinking later on, and is something older kids study at university!

Now for the Awesome

Kids have this amazing ability to come up with cool and crazy ideas when you give them the possibility. You get to see completely new sides of them when you work with them through co-creative design processes. Their way of solving problems, the curiosity to try out things they’ve never tried in school, new methods of learning, working in teams, helping out their peers, and doing things that—at the beginning of the day—they thought they would never be able to do.

To see how they automatically switch roles in a group when they notice that someone else is a better leader on the new task then they were on the last one; how they develop their language and new ways of thinking; how their view on others and themselves changes. How they get grander visions for their future, and get excited about the idea of becoming a designer, a construction worker, a photographer, a teacher, a journalist or whatever else they find interesting.

To see how they encounter problems within the group and figure out a way to solve it within the group without crying, blaming and dragging in the teacher. Or how they go from being shy to standing in front of a crowd, explaining what they have come up with, and why it’s so good.

Taking the kids seriously and acknowledging that they are experts within (and outside of) the process is always a must for projects that have anything to do with them. If you give kids more responsibility and tell them out loud that you expect certain things from them—such as accountability for their own actions and achieving a goal as a group—they will do their utmost to not fail the group, yourself or themselves. It’s inspiring to be a part of their development, and it’s awesome to see the results they produce throughout the workshops.

Einstein said something along the lines of, “Don’t judge a fish on it’s ability to climb a tree.” So don’t judge a kid on his/her ability to be, say, a lawyer, and don’t judge a lawyer on his/her ability to be a kid. While the kid still has the possibility of becoming a lawyer, the lawyer’s ability to be a kid vanished a long time ago. Judge them on being experts on being exactly what they are at the moment.

When I write about projects and people that I find interesting, I often wonder “Why the heck don’t more people know about these projects/people?” You can say that I see it as my duty to spread the word, to inform people about the things going on out there, and make sure that you don’t miss out on all the awesomeness that is to be found in various places, and within people… which is a long way of introducing Communitere.

The Beginning

When disaster hit Haiti back in 2010, Sam Bloch was working on a custom-made lighting system for a weekend cabin up in the mountains. He had finished work for the day and was sitting in a bar, drinking a well-deserved beer, when he saw the news about the earthquake. Right then and there (because it sounds more dramatic that way), he decided that he needed to be there. He packed his big backpack with as few private things as possible and filled the rest up with tools. About a week later, he was standing in the middle of the disaster area with the feeling that he had made the right choice and was in the exact place that he needed to be. And although that moment marked the beginning of Communitere, Sam had already been working in disaster relief for about six years.

The name itself, Communitere—which I first thought was French—stands for Communities United In Response, Relief & Renewal.

What works, and what doesn’t

With quite a few years within the field, Sam had gathered a fair share of insight into what worked and what didn’t work. One of the problems he had identified was the lack of innovation within the global aid industry. Where there’s no margin to fail, there’s no margin for innovation, at the same time as it’s easy to argue that this lack of innovation is failure in itself.

This lack of innovation is the problem that Communitere took to heart and decided to make into its main focus. By creating Resource Centers, spaces that also know as “Spaces of Safe Failure,” they have established big workshops where the locals inhabitants can learn how to build their own homes; use the tools provided in the workshops; use the space to work on new ideas; and collaborae with visitors on prototypes and projects to solve a specific problem.

As Bloch says, “You can’t empower people, the only thing you can do is give them the tools to empower themselves.”

“Focus on solving the problems that others are not”

It’s one thing to think that you know what the people you want to help want, but actually knowing what they want may be a whole ‘nother thing. There’s also a difference between knowing what they want and what they truly need. Needs can be tricky in the sense that sometimes what you need the most is something that you didn’t even know existed—a problem that might be so ingrained in your day-to-day life to that you don’t even see it as a problem, but rather you take it for granted.

One of the problems you encounter in the world of aid is oftentimes many organizations focusing on solving the same problem without communicating with one another what they are up to, at what time, where, and so on and so forth. This results in redundant efforts, resources going to waste, as well as other areas being neglected when it comes to support, products or medicine.

Another problem that you often encounter is that some organizations inject themselves and their projects into a community without involving the locals, and without finding out if the project they want to build is truly wanted and needed. Not only does this mean that energy and resources may go to waste, but also that these organizations may lose credibility with the locals, both in the present and in the future.

Before starting a new project, organizations should ask themselves:
– Who wants this, is it the organisation or is it the locals?
– Do the locals really need this, or is there something else that is more important?
– Is there any other organization working on solving this problem?

It’s important to work closely with the local inhabitants both when it comes to locating the needs and creating a priority list. Another perk with this way of working is that it creates ownership and has a bigger chance to make a lasting positive impact on the local community.

The lack of communication between the various organizations and the problems that this engenders are frustrating for everyone involved and everyone affected by it—an enormous amount of medicine, building materials and other resources end up going to waste. This is why Sam and his crew created a kind of a “Take one / leave one” market in Haiti, where various organizations could come and leave the things they had in abundance, (and would have discarded otherwise), and pick up other things that they may need, left behind by other organizations.

Resource Centers – Tools to empower

As mentioned earlier, Communitere builds Resource Centers as a way for locals community to build itself up from the inside. Everyone is welcome to become a part of this space, and it is built up in such a way that it is self-sustainable. The first 20 (or so) locals to sign up will be allowed to use it for free; beyond these founding members, there is a sliding scale: Local inhabitants get to use it for a very low fee, the local government pays one fee, various organizations pay another, and so on and so forth.

The Resource Centers are seen as a melting pot where International Innovators can get culturally appropriate feedback on their ideas and prototypes before implementation, while local innovators can receive input and feedback from people around the globe. It’s neutral ground, a space for creating, teaching, collaborating, growing, learning and failing.

One of the ideas that has developed over the years and now is coming to life is a project called Maker to Maker. The idea behind this project is to connect individuals using the Resource Center with engineers, architects, mechanics and others who can help develop a project around the globe.

Building made from upcycled styrofoam bricks

Innovation generated from problems

Other than creating physical and interactive spaces for growth and development, Communitere works on problems and needs that haven’t been addressed by other organisations or businesses.

As in so many other countries, waste is a major problem. In some areas of Haiti, there is so much waste floating in the water that, in some areas, people can walk on top of the waste as to get to the other side of the river, using it as a floating bridge. Styrofoam is among the materials that cannot be easily recycled, so an American scientist helped them develop a process to turn it into bricks from which they build homes. The factory for these styrofoam bricks is located on top of one of the building on the grounds of Communitere Haiti.

Show your support

Last but not least, let’s talk about what is on the agenda for Communitere in the near future. In January, the plan is to start building a Community Center, specifically focusing on youth in the area. On this project, Communitere will be working with a rather well-known organization (read: World renowned).

Right now Communitere is running an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for their the Resource Center and the Maker to Maker initiative in the Philippines. Check out the video and show your support for “Communitere: Make It Happen in the Philippines.”