For the past ten years, evidence has been collecting in publications and exhibits that a new field of practice is emerging. It uses design as a tool to serve the public, including those who cannot afford design services. And it’s becoming clear that we now have a movement, not just a collection of well-documented projects and well-meaning people. This is a new field of practice. The name that best describes it as a profession is public interest design. While many other catchy and descriptive names have been used such as community design, social impact, humanitarian, and pro bono, only public interest design bears the systemic permanence of a profession.
As this term enters the public discourse, will it be used by anybody to mean anything? Or, are there professional standards that need to be defined and understood – especially by the public – if this quickly emerging field is to make the valuable contribution that it can?
We don’t have to look very far into the past to see why clarity and definition are essential. Just ten years ago, “green design” could be falsely applied to anything; therefore it became almost meaningless. The term only acquired meaning when professional performance standards were defined.
Here it’s useful to look at other emerging professions and the steps necessary when these professions passed through similar moments of creation.
Doctor injecting a patient with placebo as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, photo via wikipedia originally sourced from the US National Archives.
Take public interest health, for example. In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service started a study of rural low-income men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who had syphilis. The 600 men involved thought they were receiving free health care, but in reality they were just being monitored like lab rats. When penicillin was discovered as a cure in 1947, the study continued for another 25 years without ever treating the men as patients, allowing many to die awful deaths and infect family members. Those conducting the study considered it to be in the public’s interest; and the last director went to his grave never acknowledging that ethical mistakes were made.
Michael Kimmelman seems to have entered his new post as the architectural critic at The New York Times with the same wonderment-flecked eyes you can spot on first-year students climbing Rudolph Hall’s steps each fall. As a musician, trained art historian, and cultural journalist embarking on an architectural education, his position is not so far removed from the mixed bag of students he addressed at the Yale School of Architecture recently. (He was speaking to the first professional degree students from backgrounds as diverse as biochemistry and anthropology.) Like the students whose very diversity is that which makes them valuable contributors to collegiate conversation, Kimmelman will have to hold on to his unique position even as he navigates a new field. And like the critic confesses, perhaps students should “hope to ask some stupid questions.”
Installation view of Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Photo © Jason Mandella.
Reactions, responses, and reviews of the Museum of Modern Art’s recently opened exhibition regarding housing in the American suburbs have steadily been popping up here and elsewhere on the Internet. The five design proposals put forth in Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream have been called “propositions” in the spirit of instigation, catalyzing necessary conversation on cultural assumptions and priorities. I admit that I am too closely tied to the exhibition’s project to offer any sort of fair review, but it is with that spirit in mind that I argue those five propositions and the show in which they are contained manage both to reveal and underscore a fundamental conflict in the planning, design, and development of affordable housing and in the approaches taken and not taken in response to the crisis still being faced. That conflict was seen throughout the six-month research and design process and is seen within each of the exhibited projects, in the differences between them, and in the varied criticisms and commentaries they have thus far elicited.
Images from MoMA exhibition site: http://www.moma.org/foreclosed
The newly opened show at the Museum of Modern Art, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, through July 30, fails to accomplish what it claims: to address one of the most critical issu…
