Archinect - News

How can mindfulness make you a better designer?

2019-10-01T17:00:00-04:00

As designers, we often are presented with an overwhelming amount of data to accompany a design problem. There are the client desires, the code constraints, zoning, the desires of the design team, materials, structural systems, and the list goes on. Sometimes, we can feel bombarded or crippled from receiving too much info. Where do I start? We might think to ourselves.

Nadia Surtees, a design researcher at IDEO makes a case for taking a mindfulness approach in our design thinking. "Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of modern mindfulness, describes the practice as 'paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally,'" she writes. She goes on to list 5 ways she and her colleagues at IDEO go about using mindfulness to tackle tough projects:

"Adopt a beginner's mindset." According to Surtees, a beginner's mindset means "starting fresh, assuming nothing, and living the question." It can be tempting to assume we have the answer to something or to draw on our prev...

Mia Lehrer + OMA win over Eric Owen Moss, Brooks + Scarpa, AECOM to design DTLA's new public park

2016-06-10T14:52:00-04:00

Los Angeles is in for a lot of (proposed) change, especially in its downtown core. Yesterday, the City of L.A. announced Mia Lehrer + Associates and OMA as the winners of a competition to design a new public park called the FAB Park...Proposed for the well-trafficked streets of First and Broadway in downtown L.A., the 1.96-acre FAB Park will integrate “the themes of food, art, and land.”

Find out more on Bustler.

Previously on Archinect:

Take a look at these bold visions for Downtown LA's next park

A critical look at Downtown L.A.'s ambitious plans for two new public parks

Agence Ter and Team wins Pershing Square Renew with “radically flat“ proposal

The designers reinventing a visit to Planned Parenthood

2016-03-15T14:26:00-04:00

Amid the controversy that perpetually surrounds Planned Parenthood, it's easy to forget that the nonprofit organization is, first and foremost, a health care provider. It is the largest provider of sex education in the United States. Every year, 2.5 million people—men and women—visit its health centers for care and information. It administers life-saving cancer-screening tests and offers contraception. In some states, it's the only abortion provider...

"In 2014, Planned Parenthood embarked on an ambitious collaboration with the global design consultancy Ideo to hatch plans that would help the nonprofit do what it does best: care for patients."

For more design responses to public health challenges, check out these links:

Fog catchers: squeezing water out of thin air

2015-07-27T13:35:00-04:00

Simply look up into the sky at a single cloud, on average that white pouf holds 8 million gallons of water — enough to sustain 100,000 people for a day. Yet the water we harvest has become so scarce, its cost is greater than the devices invented to catch and deliver it. [...] How might we imagine new ways to collect water? How do we get it off my socks and into my coffee cup?

Fog catchers – contraptions that gather the moisture in our atmosphere for drinking water – have been used by humans and animals alike to survive in some of the driest places on earth. In Chile's Atacama desert, fog catchers have been in use for over half a century, and even are used to gather water to brew local beer. The Namib beetle (named for its habitat in the South African desert) has a pattern of bumps on its back that funnel trapped moisture into its mouth. Now, these simple water-capturing techniques are being looked to as one of the many potential relief systems in the American southwest's historic drought.

In one of their simplest forms, fog catchers are essentially fine-meshed nets, erected on the landscape at an angle suited to the area's fog and winds. The basic form was made drastically more efficient by MIT and Chilean researchers relatively recently, however there's more room for innovation in both smaller and larger-scale applications. In perpetually foggy places, s...

Designers imagine a world of self-driving, mobile offices

2015-04-28T15:12:00-04:00

Self-driving cars will certainly change our habits on the road. But truly autonomous vehicles will also affect how we work, says Tim Brown, chief executive officer and president of design consultancy IDEO...Without having to navigate city streets, people will be more productive during their commute. IDEO also envisions self-driving trucks...delivering everything from new jeans to grilled cheese. Most radical of all: Your workplace could be set on wheels to travel to you, rather than you to it.

Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

2013-12-30T13:57:00-05:00

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries. At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle.