The shoe designed by sisters Jessica and Natalie Byle
IF THE SHOE FITS, SOMEONE DESIGNED IT
by Charles Honey
Northview Public Schools, MI — A roomful of art students had a problem to solve: How to design a shoe for a working woman that would be stable, stylish and not too expensive.
“I’m willing to sacrifice some comfort for some cuteness,” Lindsey Tilley told the class of about 20 Northview High School students who peppered her with questions about her preferences.
Designing an ideal shoe for Tilley, a career exploration coordinator at Kent ISD, was their task for a new class called Creative Problem Solving. Developed by art teachers Tricia Erickson and Tanya Lockwood, it employs a blend of artistic and academic disciplines to help students think creatively to meet 21st century workplace challenges.
On this day, they were helped in their task by Christopher Bruce, a school programs coordinator for the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Bruce walked them through a process called “design thinking,” a problem-solving approach that has been employed by the likes of Samsung, Sony and Steelcase. Such weighty allies did not, however, ease the task of designing a comfy-yet-stylish work shoe for Lindsey Tilley, who was previously a NVHS English teacher.
Chad Colton came up with an elaborate sketch of what he called a Nike dress shoe, “comfortable but not super-cushioned,” colored purple and blue. Tilley said she liked the idea, but that the purple-and-blue thing probably wouldn’t go over well in the office.
But she warmed up to a shoe designed by sisters Jessica and Natalie Byle. It featured decorative touches culled from Tilley’s mythology literature class such as lightning bolts from Zeus and a sword symbolizing Athena. Tilley said she would definitely buy the “Zeus Athena Thunderbolt Shoes.”
-Source: IDEO
Blending Art and Academics
The teachers said they designed the class to help students grasp other subjects, such as social studies and math, while honing their creative skills for the workplace. “This class isn’t how to be creative using paint,” Lockwood said. “It’s more about a systematic way of thinking.
“When they go into the corporate world, they’re going to be needed as a valuable creative thinker, not just somebody that can perform a single task,” she added. “This will help them figure out ways to improve their way of thinking and problem-solving.”
She and Erickson combine art and academics in novel ways. “We have allowed the students to open up and realize, this is not just for art, it is for every class,” Lockwood said.
They also want to awaken the joy of creativity their students may have felt as children. “We’re teaching kids how to play again, and not feel that failure is going to affect them in the long run,” Erickson said. “It’s just play, fail, play again.”
Permission to fail is a key concept of design thinking, a model developed by IDEO, an international consulting firm that helps corporations design innovative products. Northview High School has a Steelcase “node” chair that was designed in collaboration with IDEO and placed in the school as a test piece. Equipped with casters that allow students to move with attached desks, the chairs encourage easy collaboration.
Failure is Not to be Feared
In a presentation he designed for educators, Bruce from the art museum showed students how design thinking works. He broke it down into a circle of elements: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution. A former art teacher at Rockford High School, he said he wants students to understand that “design is everywhere.”
“Everything we do is in some way reflective of design,” Bruce said. “We are the designers of our lives. Every choice we make somehow is reflected in that end design,” from what clothes students wear to how they make their resumes.
Key concepts are empathy for others and how to view failure in a highly competitive society. Bruce urged students to not fear failure but to embrace it as a source of discovery.
Christopher Bruce of the Grand Rapids Art Museum discusses the elements of design thinking
“In design thinking, failure is essential,” he told the class. “We fail early often, we fail often and we fail forward. We learn more from our failures than any successes we will ever have.”
Students seemed to take that message to heart – including the two who designed Lindsey Tilley’s shoes.
“It’s ok to fail, because you can always learn from it,” said Natalie Byle, a freshman. Added her sister Jessica, a senior, “Never be afraid to try new things, because they can always work out and be better.”
When a city runs out of space, why not start building communities in neglected places?
As London struggles to build affordable new housing for a quickly growing population, one designer has a suggestion: New communities could sprout up on rooftops and in place of old parking garages, with architecture inspired by centuries-old local design.
"The project began out of a frustration with housing design in the U.K. at the moment," says designer James Christian, whose concept is on display now at London's Design Museum. "A lot of new housing in London doesn't really have character, and the sort of rigid formality of urban design jarred with my interest in community and shared space."
The designs take inspiration from two unique communities from London's past: the old London Bridge, which was filled with housing and shops until the 18th century, and slums called rookeries. Though both were overcrowded, dirty, and dangerous, they also created a sense of community by forcing people together.
"People were living together out of necessity, out of the fact that they had no other real option, but the courts and the houses that surrounded them had these interesting self-organized social structures," Christian says. "I was interested in trying to capture some of this closeness."
In one of his designs, five or six houses would be built around a courtyard in place of an old parking garage. Neighbors would work together, as a co-op, to plan out the shared space.
"It's a way to intensify some public space," says Christian. "Right now, you have a lot of sort of bleak landscape areas with no real function. By making smaller, more intimate spaces, these places might be somewhere people actually want to be."
In another design, rooftops on mid-rise apartment buildings would be topped with small communities that offer housing and shared workspaces that could also be used by neighbors in the apartment building below. "There's a real reason for sharing, and and I hope that's a way of adding community to existing urban areas," Christian explains.
He hopes to see similar designs eventually built to help tackle London's housing crisis. "It's conceptual, but the ideas embodied in the project are very real, and should be at least experimented with," he says. "It's a way of adding a lot of dense housing to existing areas while not only trying to minimize disruption, but improving the quality of the environment and the sociability of those areas at the same time."
This is the second in a two-part series about the design and construction of 1 World Trade Center. Read the first part here.--Eds
Forget about the starchitects--Daniel Libeskind and David Childs--who dueled incessantly over 1 World Trade Center’s formal qualities and its poetic language. The architect who finally got the damned thing built is someone you’ve probably never heard of: Nicole Dosso, a technical director at the New York office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. From the end of 2006 until the tower’s completion, probably by year’s end, Dosso has been, as she puts it, “the single senior technical coordinator representing SOM on the day-to-day execution of the job.” In other words, North America’s tallest tower--which could easily have been the world’s tallest--is being built by a woman.
That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? Think back to last year when a group of Harvard students petitioned the Pritzker Prize jury to retroactively include architect Denise Scott Brown in the 1991 Pritzker that had been awarded to her professional partner and husband, Robert Venturi. That effort was unsuccessful. Shortly thereafter, the AIA gave its Gold Medal to a woman for the first time ever. The recipient was California architect Julia Morgan, best known for the Hearst Castle. Very nice, except she’d been dead for over 50 years. In the wake of these events, lots of people made arguments that women in architecture should win more prizes. My thought on this was: fuck medals. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler to have a world’s tallest building designed by a woman? The current record for a woman is the 82-story Aqua, a residential tower/hotel in Chicago, designed by Jeanne Gang.
It could have happened at Ground Zero. As originally conceived by Libeskind back in 2002, 1 WTC’s blatantly patriotic 1,776-foot-tall height would have been enough to break records. But because it went up so slowly, 1 WTC missed its moment. It is now merely number four, 1,000 feet shorter than the reigning Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completed in 2010, and marketed as “the tallest building in the western hemisphere.” (Note that it wouldn’t even hold the hemispheric record without counting the antenna as building height. The roof of the tower is at 1,335 feet, making it shorter than the Willis Tower and the Trump International Hotel and Tower, both in Chicago.)
Dosso, you understand, is not the kind of architect you’ll find spouting metaphors. She is not likely to get up on stage and compare a superstructure to a child releasing a dove, as Santiago Calatrava did when he presented the design for his WTC Transit Hub. She does not wear severe glasses or talk iterations. The day I met her at SOM’s offices on Wall Street, the 40-year-old Dosso, who runs marathons in her spare time, was effortlessly chic--more Paris than New York--in a brightly patterned Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, steeply pitched white patent leather heels, and a string of silvery pearls.
With a degree in architecture from Syracuse University, Dosso joined SOM in 1998. “I started my career here as a junior architect and I got thrown into the construction administration side of the project at a very, very young age.” The daughter of a contractor, she has spent much of her career on construction sites, making sure buildings are built as the architects specify. “I knew from my very first project that that was the side of architecture I was most fascinated with. I really enjoy the craft, working with fabrication, really understanding materials.”
Dosso had worked on a number of projects for SOM prior to September 11, including a major rehab of the 1950s office tower by Emery Roth & Sons at 2 Broadway. But within months of September 11, she was assigned to the team working on 7 World Trade Center (where Fast Company is headquartered, incidentally). The original 7 WTC collapsed late in the day on September 11 and had to be rebuilt immediately because it housed an important Con Edison power substation. Because it sits north of Vesey Street from the World Trade Center proper, the 52-story replacement was designed and built without interference from the various stakeholders who were still tussling over exactly what to do south of Vesey. SOM designed 7 WTC as an homage to Lever House, with unusually clear low-iron glass and a slender form. It was completed in 2006.
Dosso describes the experience of building 7 WTC as the best of her working life: “That building holds a very precious place in my professional career. The people I met during that project… Everybody was so mindful. Everybody’s heart was in the right place. “ She remembers the construction of 7 WTC as “bringing about a positive energy in a midst of despair.”
She insists that her next project, the construction of 1 WTC was “equally inspiring,” but the story she tells is one of daunting complexity. “My responsibility was representing SOM. There was a design, the one David Childs and SOM created. My responsibility was to insure that [the design] took place.” Easier said than done.
By Dosso’s account there were two issues that made her task unusually labyrinthine: the weirdly amorphous nature of the client or clients and the fact that the spot where the building was being erected was not a normal construction site. Generally, a construction project comes with a “clear owner and clear division of responsibility,” Dosso explains. “There’s always a point of contact. If something’s not getting solved, or a consultant’s not correcting their issues, there’s typically a person in charge. They’re your client.
“At 1 WTC,” she continues, “there were so many people. There was the Port Authority. Within the Port Authority, you’re dealing with multiple entities. On top of that, when I started on the project, the Silversteinswere our clients. At some point it transitioned to the Port Authority. The Port Authority created 1 WTC, which was an entity basically to represent them. But that was another layer. And then Durst came into it.”
The sometimes scrambled lines of responsibility were small potatoes compared to the condition of the site itself: “The below grade portion of the project is 500,000 square feet,” Dosso points out. “Below ground we neighbored the [9/11] Memorial. We neighbored the fan plants [which vent the train tracks that run beneath the tower]. There were the trains. [PATH trains to New Jersey and subways.] We had retail included within our space. We had the Transportation Hub concourse, which we neighbored, that was a whole other group of architects and engineers. If you start to get caught up in all of that, you can become completely overwhelmed.”
And then there were the leftovers: “A decision was made very early on to leave these slabs, remnants of the existing WTC site. So when we designed the new 1 WTC tower, we basically had to cantilever and design around existing conditions. There was also the existing slurry wall. To reinforce that wall we had to build a liner wall in front of it, a 30-inch concrete wall to help stabilize it . . . and to reinforce it.”
All told, it took about three years for 1 WTC to rise from the excavation to ground level. From there, the next challenge was to build the hardened lobby with 30-inch-thick cast concrete walls and additional blast walls set inside the lobby’s north and south entryways. Once the contractors got beyond 50 feet of lobby and 130 feet of mechanical space--holding the tower’s vital systems--the construction process got much simpler, Dosso says, just “typical office floors.” From 186 feet to 1,335 feet was cake. Then came the 420-foot-tall, 720-ton spire that stands atop the building presented. It was delivered in pieces by barge from Quebec and the final section was dramatically hoisted by crane in May of last year.
Oddly, Dosso, when asked what she loves about 1 WTC, a building with fabulous views from almost every floor, a building she knows intimately from top to bottom, enthuses about the escalator ride to the basement: “The view from the 1 WTC coming down to the B2 lobby--coming down that escalator, you’ll approach the [Calatrava-designed] Transportation Hub concourse, and that’s spectacular."
Dosso takes great pride in 1 World Trade Center. She tells me a story about attending a special event at the 9/11 Memorial Museum before it opened in May, pausing on the Memorial plaza on her way out and gazing up at 1 WTC from that angle for the first time: “I had to stop in my tracks for a second. I was very moved.”
"Did you look at it and think, 'That’s my building'?" I asked.
Dosso laughs and replies, “No.”
While Dosso doesn’t claim ownership of the project as a whole--the way a design architect, the person generally credited for how a building looks, might–-she enjoys talking about the craftwork that went into it, about going to the quarry in Carrara, Italy, to get the lobby’s Larissa marble cut to specification or running steel componentsthrough the fabrication equipment repeatedly to get just the right finish. This attention to detail is what makes her a great technical director, but technical directors don’t win Pritzkers or Gold Medals. Architectural prizes are predicated on the romantic notion that buildings are works of art by lone visionaries. Anyone who knows the first thing about architecture understands that today’s buildings are always collaborative efforts.
Dosso has largely moved on to Manhattan West, a cluster of towers over the Westside railyards (just east of Hudson Yards). Building over the tracks isn’t easy, but there’s only one client, “so the responsibilities are very clear. “
Given her understated approach, her quiet competence, it seems unlikely that Dosso will soon be acknowledged as architect of a world’s tallest building, or even the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. But it’s exciting to realize that there are women, like Dosso, whose names you rarely hear, who know more about how to grow a supertall tower from sub-basement to spire than the famous guys who collect the prizes.
[Images (unless otherwise noted): courtesy of Durst/ Cushman Wakefield]
The work of a unique gathering in New York last winter, aimed at helping media and communities find better ways to face climate risk, was captured in this four-and-a-half-minute video report by program organizer AdaptNY.
Pipe cleaners, putty and plastic toys are not the usual newsroom paraphenalia. But on this particular day, in one ad-hoc news space, they were scattered across every table top.
The reason? To inspire small teams of journalists and others taking part in an innovative experiment: Could the precepts of human-centered design help tackle one of the most challenging stories of our era?
Whether communities will be able to manage the growing risks of extreme weather and climate change is increasingly in the sights of news media and policy makers, with governments at all levels around the world trying to tackle the concern.
This week’s U.N. Climate Summit in New York has climate adaptation on the table. President Obama for the past year has focused one of his main climate initiatives on the resilience front.
And many cities and communities around the country, like New York, New Orleans and Chicago, are working to put adaptation strategies into place to prepare for climate change impacts that are almost certainly to come.
But the NY workshop’s attendees looked at the problem through a unique lens, that of of design thinking, an increasingly widespread approach to developing products focused around making the end user central, then brainstorming and prototyping projects constantly tested against that end user’s needs.
That meant they didn’t just listen to various experts outline the climate risks faced by cities like New York, such as the flooding that paralyzed the metropolis in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in the fall of 2012.
It meant the participants grappled with finding solutions to the problem themselves, confronting their own challenge: How might they and their media outlets inspire their communities to become more climate resilient?
DESIGN THINKING YIELDS CREATIVE CLIMATE SOLUTIONS
Workshop participant creates a “persona,” or a constituent profile, for a climate change project.
Journalists and community media, climate specialists, community activists and product design experts organized into teams, their imaginations sparked by those creative playthings and a room full of easel pads, sticky notes, scissors and markers.
Workshop teams were guided by facilitators, and applied design thinking’s well-known methods, starting with an exploration of the problems of climate risk and resilience.
They constructed detailed personas, or profiles, of those who would benefit from their solutions. Hundreds of ideas were rapidly brainstormed, then refined by cross-team feedback, before taking shape as working prototypes.
And their solutions were highly creative ones: Home makover TV shows, public mural projects, K-12 curricula, online calculators and street fairs. (For more on their solutions and on the workshop in general, visit the comprehensive coverage on AdaptNY.org.)
The workshop and its results later drew the attention of media outlets, such as WNET’s public affairs TV show Metrofocus, which last June devoted a nine-minute segment to the workshop and to one of its organizers, AdaptNY, the climate news experiment I launched in the wake of Sandy.
And now, the workshop will be replicated for the 1,700 attendees at ONA, where Trevor Knoblich, the association’s digital director, said the climate change-design thinking workshop was one of only about 10% of the hundreds of proposals accepted for the program, and in fact was one of the first two sessions immediately agreed upon by conference organizers and an external community of journalists.
A WORKING TEMPLATE FOR YOUR NEWSROOM AND COMMUNITY?
The author, Adam Glenn of AdaptNY, at a design-thinking climate change workshop at and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York in February 2014.
This Thursday afternoon’s Chicago workshop, “Climate Change and Design Thinking: A Targeted Approach to a Complex Issue,” will echo the first workshop’s emphasis. That is, we want to give journalists hands-on experience using human-centered design to better engage their communities, and to brainstorm and prototype potential information products and services around this complicated issue.
The hope is also that participants will leave with a step-by-step guide and set of best practices for running their own workshops.
But we’re also going to be testing the limits of the design-thinking/climate resilience challenge — the Chicago workshop clocks in at just three hours long, as opposed to the NY program’s eight full hours.
To help manage the tight time frame for the ONA program, we’ve developed extensive briefing materials (PDF). That way we can give participants a leg up in delving into the problems of climate risk and resilience, exploring the profiles of individuals who are affected by the problem, then brainstorming creative solutions.
Added fellow workshop facilitator Reggie Murphy, principal consultant of research & strategy atElectronic Ink, “Design thinking is about people. It works because it puts the people first, not assumptions and misperceptions. We’re all impacted by climate change; it’s a shared problem. It enables us to better understand the problems and what people need so we can create more impactful solutions.”
Ultimately, as we explore the positive results yielded by these workshops, we hope they may serve as templates for communities of all sizes, a step-by-step guide for media and citizens to take a targeted approach to this complex issue, and engage together in grappling with preparations for climate risk. If the storm is coming, we’re going to have to build our metaphorical shelters together, and design thinking about climate resilience may just help us do that.
Teams of journalists and community members used some unusual props to encourage out-of-the-box thinking about climate resilience at an AdaptNY workshop last winter.