Written by Lee Schneider, this article originally appeared in the Huffington Post
Why does design matter and how can it help solve the world’s biggest problems?
Design is everywhere, so ubiquitous that you might not even notice it. But if you’re left-handed and trying to use scissors or a camera made for righties, you see how design changes your world in even the smallest things. Then if you look at the big things, like housing, infrastructure, roads (traffic!), the shelters we live in and the buildings we work in – you quickly realize that design (and architecture) can make your life bad or make it good.
You can work in a florescent-tube lighted misery box and feel like you’re employed by the Soviet Ministry of Pain, or you can move about your well-ventilated office and look outside and see a tree. You can lose your home during an environmental or humanitarian crisis and live in a tent for a year or more, stripped of your privacy and dignity, or you can become empowered and whole and rebuild a home that connects you with your community. These are design decisions that become human decisions.
Architects and designers are smart. They’ve figured this out. They’ve realized that communities already know how to rebuild after a disaster and just need support, design skills, and infrastructure to create shelters that can survive the next disaster. Unfortunately, we know that ‘next’ disaster is coming. We live in a time of conflict and war, of global warming, of economic upheaval. As Cynthia Smith, curator of a design exhibit called Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, told me, “close to one billion people live in slums worldwide, and that number is expected to double by 2030.”
The time to deploy good design is now, because design can address the world’s most pressing problems. Thankfully, there is a brave band of global nomads who are at the leading edge of this movement. Would you like to meet a few?
Eric Cesal is the regional program manager of the Port-au-Prince, Haiti office of Architecture for Humanity. He started out in humanitarian design work after Hurricane Katrina, where he volunteered for Architecture for Humanity in Biloxi and New Orleans. He’s an analytical theorist and writer who is also practical – he lived in a tent for three months (in Mississippi after Katrina) and set up the AfH Haiti office right after the earthquake. He started there with three people and a couple of laptops; now there are 40 people and dozens of projects to rebuild schools, communities and infrastructure in Haiti. When you meet the founders of Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr, you see the very meaning of dedication, enthusiasm, and focus. These are people on a mission, but they do it with humor and grace.
Yves Francois, an architect building schools and other projects in Haiti, was recently named Haitian Entrepreneur of the Year. Yves was born in Haiti but spent most of his childhood in Brooklyn. After earning an architecture degree, he built a thriving architecture career in New York and then, in 2009, made the bold decision to return to Haiti to work for a safer environment for the building trade. Then the 2010 earthquake hit, and he’s been there ever since.
Anne Maguire, CEO of the Haven Partnership, has built homes in Haiti using reclaimed rubble. Anne has worked in Sudan, Pakistan and so many other hot spots around the world. When I meet people like Anne, with their cheerful brand of courage, it’s inspiring. “Design for good is design for the good of the people,” she memorably said in an interview I did with her.
Thomas Fisher, professor of architecture and Dean of the College of Design, University of Minnesota, is leading the charge to create a full-force humanitarian design curriculum at the university level.
Elizabeth Hausler, founder of Build Change, is teaching homeowners and engineers in China, Haiti and Indonesia how to retrofit, rebuild and prepare for the next disaster. She started thinking about designing for good on 9/11. “I just felt really compelled to use my engineering skills to benefit humanity,” she told me during a podcast interview.
All of these people are too modest to call themselves heroes, but their everyday acts of courage are making big changes in the world, driving a global movement that I want to chronicle in a documentary I’m making with Richard Neill called Shelter.
A few years ago, when I got divorced, I had to give up my home. I’ll never forget the painful rootlessness the lack of shelter brought upon me. Now I admire the designers who find compassion for the unsheltered and who are moved to empower people everywhere with good design. I think that if there’s a film that can chronicle this movement it will inspire more architects and designers to get involved, and it will let everybody know that if you support good design, you can support a better world.
To support the Shelter project, visit the Kickstarter campaign. To join the design-for-good movement, visit Shelter.
Photo credits: Elizabeth Hausler image courtesy Build change. All other images courtesy the Shelter movie project.
Designing for Good in Haiti
Last summer, a small crew from our Shelter production team filmed in Haiti. We had just a few days to cover the vital work of Architecture for Humanity, Yves Francois, and several students with the University of Minnesota College of design who were working on infrastructure and community development projects. The short film we made has been shown at screenings in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, and of course, has been viewed a lot on Vimeo. We started up our educational outreach program, called Shelter: connect, running workshops and connecting with students worldwide.
Now it’s time to go to the next step. We recently did a follow up interview in San Francisco with Eric Cesal, who heads up Architecture for Humanity’s Haiti office. We’re prepping to return to Haiti to complete the stories we started tracking there.
The campaign is live on Kickstarter. Have a look and find out what we’re planning to film during our return to Haiti. We’re offering some great rewards for your support.
Cynthia Smith is the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s curator of socially responsible design. Her latest exhibit is called Design with the Other 90%: Cities. For two years she traveled to 16 different cities, gathering the materials for the exhibition. In this on-location special edition of the podcast, she shows us around the exhibit. A website about the exhibit has interactive features so that you can participate. The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. Lee Schneider is the interviewer.
Image of community lifeboat by Abir Abdullah/Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha
Dr. Elizabeth Hausler is the founder of Build Change, an international non-profit enterprise that
designs earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries. The organization trains builders, homeowners, engineers, and government officials to build safer housing. The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. The interview is conducted by Lee Schneider. Follow him on Twitter.
Photograph courtesy of Build Change.
Ami Dar, founder and executive director of Idealist.org, is today’s guest on the be global podcast. Idealist was built in 1996 with $3,500 and has since become a extremely popular nonprofit resource on the web, with information provided by 70,000 organizations worldwide. Idealist has 100,000 visitors every day. Ami was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Peru and in Mexico, and now lives in New York. You can follow Idealist and also Ami on Twitter.
The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. The interviewer is Lee Schneider. You can follow him on Twitter, too.
Ken Banks is one of the recipients of the 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize for creating an open source software platform called FrontlineSMS. Ken has been called a ‘mobile anthropologist’ because he has leveraged the potential of cell phones and text messaging to disseminate information, organize aid, and reconnect communities, particularly those in crisis. FrontlineSMS has been downloaded by more than 19,000 users. 
Read Ken’s blog, use Twitter to connect with him and follow FrontlineSMS on Twitter. The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. The interviewer is Lee Schneider and you can follow him on Twitter, too.
Texting image courtesy of kiwanja.net.
Upward Bound House of Santa Monica, California recently opened its Family Shelter in Culver City, California. We covered the event in this audio slide show that features interviews with the designers who did the interiors of the rooms in the shelter and also an interview with David Snow, executive director of Upward Bound House.
Here’s our latest trailer for Shelter, the film we’re making about architects and designers using good design to shelter the homeless and survivors of natural disasters. Camera: Richard Neill. Producer: Richard Neill. Associate producer: Megan Nemeh. Audio: Kevin Brown, Vlad Gurwich. Edited by: Tal Skoot. Music: Joel Goodman. Haiti footage: Khalid Mohtaseb. Director/Writer: Lee Schneider.
In this inaugural edition of the be global podcast, Lee Schneider interviews David Cohn, founder of Spot.Us, a nonprofit that is pioneering community funded reporting. David has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times, among other publications.
While working toward his master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, David worked with Jay Rosen as the editor at the groundbreaking Newassignment.net in 2006, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web. David also worked with Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine.com to organize the first Networked Journalism Summits. Those collaborations led to Spot.Us.
What is the be global podcast?
Global collaboration is transforming the way we work and think. Making information transparent is more than just a technological task or a challenge to be met with more and better machines – it’s a very human responsibility. We’ve heard the expression ‘knowledge is power.’ Let’s consider an expansion on that: Global knowledge means power for everyone, opening the way to social change. There are visionaries who have found new ways to share knowledge and create more connection online. This is a podcast devoted to them, and also to showing you the best ways to connect online. Why will that help? We are all moving energy and information around on the web, so let’s discover the best ways to connect with each other. This will not only make us more efficient and better at what we do, but it will also generate more transparency, foster a sense of global responsibility, and offer more opportunities for equality.
company news | Written by Lee Schneider
I’m excited to let you know DocuCinema and Adventure Pictures are going to be part of the Architecture and the City Festival in San Francisco, September 1 through 30th. The Center for Architecture and Design presents the Architecture and the City festival every September in San Francisco. It’s one of the largest festivals of its kind, drawing more than 20,000 people to 45 events through the month. The theme is architecture of consequence – and I can see that it will be an entertaining examination of the significant buildings and spaces in the San Francisco area. We’re part of the team co-curating the film program, which will include a work in progress screening of Shelter and a screening of Citizen Architect, a film about Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio. The full film line-up will be announced here soon.
We’re also going to be creating a short film that will become part of the festival promotional and informational materials. It will screen during the festival, as part of the film program, and after, on social media channels. InterfaceFLOR is the sponsor of the pubic service announcement (PSA).
Richard Neill of Adventure Pictures and I are co-directing the PSA, and we’re speaking with a steller group of architectural writers, architects, designers, and community leaders who will be interviewed for the film. Video Arts in San Francisco will be doing post work on it. The music will be by Moby. Lee Schneider and Richard Neill are the team behind Shelter, which is beginning production in Haiti this month.
Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider
It was a whirlwind trip to Haiti last month. Then I got right off the plane and right into editing. We’re preparing to show two short sequences from our Haiti production days at the Architecture and the City Festival in San Francisco. I just finished the edit, and the outputs, burned a few DVDs and am taking some time to write this.
I want to take a moment to thank Tom Fisher, Trevor Miller and James Lutz at the College of Design: University of Minnesota. We are collaborating with this great team of folks on a virtual exchange program involving architecture students. The College of Design team’s collective vision made the Haiti production trip possible. More on that below …
The Haiti I saw was a mixture of destruction and hope, of stagnation and powerful forces moving the rebuilding effort. I met dedicated people working hard to change everything – not just getting the rebuilding going, but also examining how we build, how we work with communities, and how we teach all of this so that I can be used elsewhere, not just in Haiti. I’m looking forward to introducing you to some of these forces of nature in the film: Yves Francois, who left an architecture career in New York to return to Haiti, where he was born, to build schools, and Alex Duquella, dean of architecture at a university in Haiti that was completely destroyed by the earthquake. He is rebuilding it using his own designs and a palpable force of will. I met students of architecture who were articulate, motivated, and passionate about their country. We attended a planning meeting at the Haiti office of Architecture for Humanity and I was astounded at the number of projects they are managing.
Travel is full of disconnects. One day I’m in a Comfort Inn outside the Miami airport waiting for a flight, then next day I’m in a hotel in Petionville that is far nicer than the Comfort Inn.There was often a disconnect while driving along in an air conditioned vehicle, the radio playing beautiful Haitian pop music, and looking out side and seeing settlement after settlement, thousands of displaced people. And all that more than a year after the earthquake. Here’s what it looked like as we drove a road near Port au Prince called La Piste.
I’ve posted a lot of images of the trip on Flickr, and some show the (small) Haiti production team in action – a driver, me, and Michelle Marrion, who was Haiti coordinating producer and also camera operator. I think what we captured will show a powerful optimism and spirit – I look forward to posting the sequences here soon.
For now, we’re happy to be preparing to show an early cut of Shelter sequences at the Architecture and the City Festival. Richard Neill and I helped curate the film series for the festival. Every Wednesday night from now till the end of September, there will be great movies. The first night, Wednesday September 7, will feature Shelter as a work in progress and also the great film Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio. Richard and I will lead a panel discussion about designing for good to start things off. Other nights feature Malls R Us, Unfinished Spaces, Urbanized from Gary Hustwit, and a film about Rem Koolhaus.
Thanks to all who helped us make these production days a reality. The College of Design: University of Minnesota provided major funding for this production segment. Thanks to Raymond West Liden of Liden, Nestle, Soled and Associates, who provided generous funding for this production. And a big thanks to all our friends who donated to Shelter on IndieGoGo or through the San Francisco Film Society’s Fiscal Sponsorship program.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out Shelter on Facebook. Donate to the film via the San Francisco Film society and it is tax-deductible.
Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider
It’s always an amazing experience to screen a film for a live audience. I find that I learn so much from how they react to scenes and moments: a ripple of laughter here, contemplative silence there, or a simple ‘huh,’ signifying a small revelation. We screened two work-in-progress sequences from Shelter at the San Francisco Public Library this week as part of the Architecture and the City Festival. The screening provided me with a lot good feedback and a lot to think about and we continue the shape the film.
It’s equally amazing to me to watch a film come into focus as we work in production. Many months are spent preparing: pre-interviewing potential subjects, test-filming them on flip cams, mapping out schedules and strategies. Then there is a sparking moment when I meet those people in person and feel the gravity of their stories. Here are the sequences that we showed in San Francisco.
While filming in Haiti in August I saw that designing for good means that you have to design for a culture.
You have to have a dialogue with the people you want to design for, and understand how they have built in the past. This might seem obvious, but it is equally obvious that, humanitarian design fails when it is imposed on a community instead of being created in a partnership. It’s the kind of partnership that we are going to forge with our outreach program. The leading edge of that program is something we’re calling the virtual exchange. While in Haiti I filmed Haitian architecture students, asking them about their hopes and dreams for the future, how they believe would be the best way to rebuild (and build in) Haiti, and what message they might want to send to architecture students in America. We will show that footage at the College of Design: University of Minnesota in the fall – and then record statements and ideas from students there. We’ll take those statements back to Haiti on our next production trip. That’s the essence of the virtual exchange program. I’ve spoken with the deans of architecture and design at various schools, including Pratt, Parsons, and the New School for Design, and some schools here in California, and received enthusiastic support and great advice. I’ll let you now how the planning is going in future articles.
Next week we start our planning sessions for production in Japan. We’ve been invited by Architecture for Humanity fellow Nathaniel Corum to following a design/rebuild initiative near Sendai, site of the nuclear accident, and also in communities devastated by a tsunami. It promises to be a very different trip from the Haiti production section: instead of Haiti’s August heat we’ll have Japan’s November cold, and since there are few structures left standing, we’ll be camping and charging the cameras off solar arrays.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out Shelter on Facebook. Donate to the film via the San Francisco Film society and it is tax-deductible.
Arthur Coddington leads LikeMinded, a project of the Craigslist Foundation. He sees local engagement as a remedy for the frustrations that national politics can create and searches for ways everyone can be involved, whatever their community role. You may find Arthur writing about technology issues and community engagement. In his spare time, Arthur advises the photography organization Open Show. He also competes in the sport of Freestyle Frisbee and has won the world championships 13 times.
The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. The interviewer is Lee Schneider. Follow Lee on Twitter.
Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider
Hope comes designed in amazing packages. I experienced a little of that hope recently at USC, where I was giving a talk about Shelter on the theme of ‘designing for a culture’ in an architecture class. The freshmen architecture students liked the Shelter clips I played. Nobody napped during the talk. (Hey, students can be a tough crowd.) I focused on two questions: Why does design matter? And also, when you design, who is really your client? 
After filming in Haiti this summer, a conceptual driver for the film took shape.
Designing for good might begin as a lofty principle, but on the ground and in country, it’s really about designing for a culture.
As we film Shelter around the world, I am seeing how architects, engineers and designers who listen to their clients and take time to connect with the culture they’re working in – these are the people who do successful projects. Those who are willing to adopt a visionary approach to the importance of design – these are the folks who prosper.Design matters. An example? Steve Jobs. Apple. When I asked the crowd of nearly 200 who had anything made by Apple, all hands went up. Apple has not only designed for a culture, Steve Jobs also created a culture.
To show how an architect or designer’s connection with clients can lead to unexpected alliances, I screened a piece of short media about EDAR, a portable structure in use in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, and also a short film Richard Neill and I made for the Architecture and the City Festival.
My favorite part of the morning came as some students were being honored for their creativity and achievement. The video projects they created captured the exuberance and freshness you can find in an architecture class. Have a look at one of my favorites:
Many thanks to Lauren Matchison and Kara Bartelt, who invited me to speak at Architecture 114 – Architecture: Culture and Community.
Follow Lee on Twitter.
The Virtual Exchange Program got off to an energetic start yesterday at the University of Minnesota College of Design. Richard Neill and I traveled to the campus to run a workshop with architecture professor James Lutz.
What is the Virtual Exchange Program?
During this active production time for Shelter we are meeting architects and engineers all over the world who are designing for good. We also meet people everywhere who would benefit from good design. We started to think about how to bring them all together…
The Virtual Exchange Program (vXp) is an open source forum for sharing design expertise and knowledge. It fosters dialogue among architecture, design and engineering students and people in developing nations and elsewhere who would benefit from an exchange of ideas.
I’ve spoken with architecture and design deans and professors at Pratt, Parsons, USC and other schools. Uniformly, the sentiment from them is that it’s often not practical to travel design, architecture and engineering students around the world to connect with faraway people. Although travel programs can be costly, worldwide dialogue about design is necessary. (vXp) fills the need for design sharing and distribution with a new take on international study.
Since we make media for a living, we can create engaging videos that share humanitarian design projects in storytelling form.
What makes this different is that we burst beyond traditional methods of communicating design, architecture and engineering projects by using video and audio. We open an online communication channel for people needing life-saving design solutions. They are heard by the best and brightest students who are in a position to answer the call and create those designs. Media is the ‘virtual’ part of the exchange. The dialogue (vXp) creates can lead to actual people getting on actual planes. But at this stage of the project, opening the dialogue is what counts. Look at a prototype video that I just finished editing from our Haiti production.
Here’s the plan. Wherever we go to film Shelter, we find architecture and design students in developing regions of the world, or in disaster recovery areas, and ask them to voice their needs for humanitarian design. We record them and make a short video. Then, guided by architecture, design and engineering professors, we show the videos to students here and ask them to respond with viable projects – projects that resonate with the needs expressed.
Yesterday in Minnesota we piloted an early version of (vXp) in a workshop we conducted at the invitation of Thomas Fisher, professor of architecture and dean of the College of Design, and James Lutz, the professor of architecture mentioned above. Jim led a group of graduate architecture students to Haiti last March.
We split the workshop between exploring design for good projects that we’ve filmed and talking about process of making short videos to promote, explain and propagate student projects.
While on campus, I interviewed Tom Fisher, who is a big picture thinker in architecture, design and policy. I will post some clips of that interview soon, but for now, have a look at Tom’s blogs on the Huffington Post.
We’re looking forward to bringing (vXp) to other colleges and universities.
Follow Lee Schneider on Twitter. Shelter is on Facebook.
Alex Budak is cofounder of startsomegood.com, an online platform for helping social good initiatives raise funds and grow their community of supporters. Alex received an MPP (Master of Public Policy) degree from Georgetown University and a B.A. from UCLA in Geography and Political Science. A published travel writer, he’s cavorted with baby penguins in the Galapagos and visited rat temples in India. The be global podcast is produced by DocuCinema. The interviewer is Lee Schneider. Follow Lee on Twitter.
Melissa McMullan teaches sixth grade in Port Jefferson Station, New York, and is the Director of the Wings Over Haiti school. Wings Over Haiti is a non-profit whose mission is to develop mutually beneficial cultural exchanges between students around the world and the Wings Over Haiti School in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti.
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, Wings Over Haiti has built its own school and is providing free education to more than 40 students. Melissa’s story shows the power of one person to inspire others and create change. DocuCinema produces the be global podcast. Lee Schneider is the interviewer.
Juliana Rotich is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc, a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.
Juliana is a senior TED fellow and writes a blog called Afromusing.
Juliana is originally from Kenya where she spent her early life and schooling. She later moved to the US where she majored in IT and has worked in the industry for over ten years.
She collaborated with the online community and co-founded Ushahidi which is the Swahili word for testimony. Ushahidi is a web based reporting system that utilizes crowdsourced data to formulate visual map information of a crisis on a real-time basis. As a Program Director for Ushahidi she manages projects and aids in the development and testing of the Ushahidi platform.
The be global podcast is produced by
DocuCinema. The interviewer is Lee Schneider and you can follow him on Twitter as @docuguy.
A program note: Juliana is joining the podcast from Narobi, and during our recording the audio quality got a little wonky. We are providing a transcript of the interview here.
INTERVIEW WITH JULIANA ROTICH
Q: Tell me first, how and why did Ushahidi get started?
A: So, Ushahidi began as an ad hoc group of bloggers, coming together after the post-election violence in Kenya to gather information about what was going on the ground. The main impetus for this was the fact that the narrative that we saw on T.V., greatly differed from what we were witnessing with our own eyes. So the word Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “witness” or “testimony” that was sort of the beginnings of Ushahidi, the organization that it is right now.
Q: And how did it make the jump from a group of bloggers to a tech platform?
A: That began when, the four of us — myself, Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman and David Kobia, got together, and so first of all, was a prototype that we did for Kenya and then, later when we went back to our regular jobs, we realized that we could continue working together to make it easy for other people to crowdsource information and not have to start from scratch. So about, uhm, five months from the first prototype, we were able to secure funding from Humanity United and Omidyar Network and also MacArthur Foundation to create a 501 (c) 3organization that would create open source software. They continue to be key partners and supporters today.
So when you go from prototype to an open source software community, that’s sort of been the journey that Ushahidi has taken. And then a key point where we saw a lot more adoption was on 2010 when we created the cloud-based version of the software that meant people – it used to take about thirty days to get going … now, it took about work reduced to three days and then now, with crowdmap.com, we reduced the amount of time it takes to set up a deployment to three minutes.
Q: That’s really amazing.
A: Yes. So, the process – yeah, the process has been very iterative, yeah, it’s been really iterative, and it’s really a testament to what it means to do innovation in the open-source from the very beginning.
Q: What are the some of the most inventive ways that you’ve seen it used?
A: The uses are quite varied. The most common use case is crowdsourcing crisis information. The information about Syria which you can find at syriatracker.crowdmap.com, to information about Libya which we did in partnership with UNOCHA [UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], and that can be found at libyacrisismap.net. So that accounts for a lot of the deployments where a collection of maps can be seen at our Wiki at wiki.ushahidi.com. There is more information available at http://blog.ushahidi.com (just search for Syria). We have more information about the kind of deployment. It’s really quite varied because the platform has now been tried out in more than a 120 countries.
Q: Once upon a time, we would expect experts to be getting data like this and we would presumably turn to so-called experts who knew how to interpret it to tell us about that data. But crowdsourcing data is vastly different. Why should we trust the process of crowdsourcing data? Why should we believe this data?
A: That’s a very good question because I think in the last couple of years you’ve seen the explosion of social networks, right? And you’ve also seen differences in the media industry. You could also see in the last few years the global explosion of self-expression through blogs and then in 2007, continuing up to 2012, you’ve seen the explosion of micro-blogging through Twitter. And in countries like China, there are similar platforms like Weibo.
So, what that says is the information flow has changed, it’s no longer top-down with a distinct expert on media organizations telling us what is going on, citizens, and regular people listening in on events are also part of direct signals which are not coming from one beacon. The signal is coming from different sources.
And with that, it comes the issue of how do you trust that information? It introduces a verification problem. It also presents an opportunity because if you check out the project we did with Al Jazeera, where we were gathering, it’s called, Somalia Speaks. And the point of the product is to get a lead on how the conflict in Somalia has affected people. When you look at that map, you’re able to get a diverse look of all of Somalia, even the areas which are very difficult to get to. Now if information flow has changed, then we really need to look into all the different signals, and sifting through that information and trying to use technology to only analyse people’s voices to direct them, to engage them on the different issues that they care about.
Q: Why is it good to democratize information? How can transparency help? I imagine that seeing a map of power shortages in India would be useful to people and we hear a lot of talk about ‘big data’ and how corporations are using ‘big data’ to sell us things with a greater degree of accuracy. How is what you do with data differ from that approach? You’re taking people stories and funnelling them in the other direction in a way, is that right?
A: What we do is providing technology that allows you, as an individual, to reach out to others who care about the same issues that you care about and to build a community, and to make partnerships to, one, gather information about the topics you are trying to address; two, after you’ve collected the data, you are able to contextualize, you are able to get a visualization of what’s going on; third part, which is really, really difficult but possible, is closing the feedback loop after the data has been collected. Different deployments have different goals. That to completely finish the feedback loop it’s important to figure out the partnerships or who else can join the community to act upon the data that has been collected.
Q: That’s interesting. That clarifies for me the information flow and the value of getting information to flow in two directions and letting people tell their stories.
Well, thanks so much. The URL to look for is crowdmap.com and ushahidi.com. And I wanted to thank you so much for joining the beglobal podcast all the way from Nairobi.
A: Thank you.
Photo credit: Ushahidi and Juliana Rotich
Today’s guest is Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify. Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative.
Burt is also the founder of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists. He previously reported from around the world for The Associated Press over a 12-year career, heading AP’s office in Korea and founding a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. Among other assignments worldwide, he was an embedded reporter with the U.S. Marines in the Iraq war, and covered Afghanistan after Sept. 11, traveled several times to North Korea, and covered the Asian tsunami and Pakistan’s nuclear program. He talks with Lee Schneider about Storify on the be global podcast, covering topics in journalism, social media, and where they intersect. The podcast is produced by DocuCinema.
Here’s her latest article in The Huffington Post.
http://storify.com/docuguy/tabby-biddle-writes-about-empowerment-for-girls
This article, written by Lee Schneider, originally appeared in The Huffington Post.
You’ve heard about the “99%,” but there’s a “90%” you should also know about. They are the 90% of people on Earth who usually do not have access to design services, because designers mostly have focused on just 10% of the world’s population. Now that’s changing, as powerfully illustrated in an exhibit at the United Nations in New York, presented by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The exhibit shows, both in person and online, that design can and must address the world’s most critical issues.
Worldwide, close to one billion people live in slums, and that number is expected to double by 2030. When you’re facing a problem like that, your solutions better be innovative. The exhibit, called “Design with the other 90%: Cities” shows the way. The museum’s curator of responsible design, Cynthia Smith, recently showed me around. For two years she traveled to sixteen different cities, gathering the materials for the exhibition. I learned about some inspiring people she encountered, like a young architect named Mohammed Rezwan.
Rezwan grew up in the northern part of Bangladesh, where there is annual flooding that’s getting worse and worse. He decided that he didn’t want to design buildings that were going to be under water in his lifetime. As Cynthia told me, he started to work with local boat builders to modify traditional bamboo craft with solar panels, computers, video conferencing, cell phone and internet access. He’s created a fleet of 50 boats that can serve as libraries, floating schools and health clinics. All over the world, people are being pushed out of rural areas by global warming and human conflict, but Rezwan’s 50 lifeboats can help communities stay intact.
I’m particularly interested in online collaboration, and the exhibit has a functioning example in the Map Kibera project. When you look at an official map of, say, Africa, informal settlements, otherwise known as slums, can appear as blank spots because nobody has mapped them. Without a map, a slum is easier to ignore or dismiss. On the other hand, “mapping helps people document,” Cynthia told me. “They can go to the local authorities and say, look, this is what we have and this is what we need.”
Consider Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in eastern Africa. It’s about two thirds the size of New York’s Central Park, and has an estimated population of 250,000. Until it was mapped, you’d never know that this area contained more than 200 schools, from the preschool level to academies, that were created both by residents and by NGOs. The Kibera map, which is online, shows zones that are safe and those that can be dangerous. It’s built on the Ushahidi platform, which means that people can text in information to update a map and even post geo-located videos.
Here’s one more brilliant idea from the exhibition that is changing the conversation among architects and designers. It’s called “incremental housing.” Architects design and build the most expensive parts of an apartment, like the structure, the roof, bathrooms and kitchen, and then leave the rest open for residents to fill in. This flips the usual depreciation model for public housing. Usually it loses value over time, but in one example Cynthia showed me, the building framework cost $20,000 to make, residents added improvements valued at $2,000, and the end result was an apartment that appreciated in value to $50,000. “I think that good design has always incorporated the client in the conversation,” Cynthia said. “User centered design is empathetic. Until you begin to understand somebody else’s needs you can’t really come up with a solution that meets those needs.”
The “Design with the other 90%: Cities” is only open at the UN for a few more days, but lives in an online version where you can interact with its powerful ideas and contribute a few of your own to the Other 90 Network.
You can hear Cynthia Smith’s guided walk through with me on the be global podcast.
Photo credits: Bang Bua Canal by ACHR, incremental housing before and after by Elemental.
