Reflection on this semester, on food deserts

In the last month, one way my thinking has changed is that I’m seeing more clearly the formidable challenge of true social innovation. The concept that social innovation should result in sustainable and significant improvement is a high standard (and necessarily so). The notion of a designer swooping into an unknown context, “designing” something with limited time and understanding of the domain, only to leave the client with some useless and unintegrated artifacts has been burned into my mind as extremely undesirable. I hope to never do that professionally. While this semester is short and I run the risk of being that designer, still, I hope to provide something of lasting value.

Providing neighborhood access to fresh, healthy food is the effort with which I will align. Proper nutrition and healthy food benefits a community on such a fundamental level, since good health forms the foundation of the quality of life. So when a community as a whole does not have access to healthy food (i.e., it is a food desert) because of prohibitive cost, distance, and/or geographic barriers, it is truly a disadvantaged and burdened community that is at risk for chronic illness among other ailments. Our team will focus on augmenting or facilitating the solutions for these underserved communities.

Already, even with my limited understanding, the issue of food deserts seems nasty. From what I have read, land-use policy, race, socio-economic status, land value, crime rates, and economics have all contribute to the creation of food deserts. Not only that, but I also question whether the metrics that have been used to identify food deserts truly identify food insecurity.

Though the problem of food deserts is formidable, as a student of this class I will gladly–and perhaps also naively and overly optimistically–take the opportunity to understand the problem of food deserts at least here in Pittsburgh, and hope that my understanding of the problem (in context of the community and current convention) can somehow reach the depth necessary to produce something of lasting value. I am willing to “fail (and learn) fast”.

By Jay Liu

Blog 1 – Max Brown

I am lost. This semester I decided to take this class as a personal challenge.  I have never worked with public policy before and have not done much work in designing for social innovation. When I signed up to take the class, I knew that I would have trouble with the understanding of the ideas of policy and how a graduate class worked and functioned. With that said, I am lost. Most of the time in class I understand the surface level of what is going on but at the same time, I feel like there is so much more than I can be understanding.

As a mentioned before, I took this class as a challenge, I have never done anything with public policy before and I am definitely out of my comfort zone. Another factor to this class that is scary to me is that since it is mostly graduated students, I am one of the youngest people in the class but also have the least amount of experience in the real world. When we went around the room introducing ourselves I was amazed by how accomplished many of my classmates are. What have I done so far? Pretty much nothing important. With graduation only a few months away and my post college life looming, is causes me to ask the question, what do I want to do in my life?

This semester so far working with my group has been really great and I feel like have already learned a lot from them as they are from different disciplines and have many skills to offer. I am looking forward to really diving deep into the problem we have chosen and really try to make a solid effort to make a difference in someone’s life. Many of the projects we do in design school set us up to build the skills to do great things in the world but this project gives me the opportunity to do so.

Getting Going

As someone passionate about making products and services that have positive political and social impact, I naturally gravitated towards the Design and Policy for Humanitarian Impact course. This course provides many opportunities to enhance my design skills both in the areas of products/services and impact policy.

Within the last year, I have developed an interest in how people engage with banking institutions from a communication design point of view. An interest that stems from my previous work with IDEO around intrapreneurship—the promotion of innovative product development and marketing—for financial institutions. This is where I was able to learn how to “Fail fast and Fail often,” by testing every assumption that came to mind. Through working in this environment I learned how to grapple with the uncomfortable and most importantly the unknown.

Based on my passions and experiences there is no surprise that I am in a group developing an initiative to supplement the Bank on Greater Pittsburgh policy set forth by Mayor Peduto’s office. We have hit the ground running, which is very telling of the kinds of individuals that we are and our seriousness around adding value to the lives of people in the city of Pittsburgh. Leaving no stone unturned, as a group we are learning how to work cohesively. Bellow you can find images that depict the beginning steps of our journey.

1. As a group we defined what programmatic success looked like for each of us. In this exercise I was also able to get a better understanding of the things that are important to each group member. This was an opportunity for the group to see where we have convergence and divergence in our definitions and thought process.

After determining what would constitute success, we then determined the persona of the people who would use this service.

2. We used various guiding questions to maintain a scope and focus.

3. We ensured a space of collaboration by having each member share there take on how this service should work.

4. We further delved into how people would become connected to the service.

5. It became clear that the current process is a bit complicated to follow and that there may be room for more streamlining through better communication design.

6. After listing our assumptions, we then developed a timeline.

Taking on this journey of understanding the needs of Pittsburgh communities, through Bank on Greater Pittsburgh, with my group is something that I am looking forward to.

Shawneil, Team 5

Jessica Weeden: #1: Project Brief Process

Before moving here, I had high expectations for Pittsburgh.

It amuses me when people say that they were dreading or apprehensive moving here, but were pleasantly surprised upon arriving because I had the exact opposite experience. Once here,  everywhere I turned little things were letting me down. I was used to bad roads with lots of pot holes, but these were worse. I was told Pittsburgh was a pretty walkable city. The hills that left me sweaty at before my first class told me a different story. My first experience with the bus left me confused and frustrated. I was disappointed.

But I’ve come to see that all these shortcomings mean there is opportunity. Opportunity for growth and improvement.

Pittsburgh seems to me like an eager kid brother. There are so many things it dreams of accomplishing, enacting, and having here. It just needs to figure out how to make that happen, as Peduto’s 100 Policy Papers show.

However, Pittsburgh is a mature city with a long history. I think the biggest factor for Pittsburgh not keeping up with urban technology and trends is the steel mill collapse. Though it happened in the 70s, the impact has reverberated through the city and can still be seen today as it continues to recover. For my group, the impact is most significant when looking at lower income workers and where they are coming from. A lot of those necessary jobs are taken by former factory workers who belong to the baby boomer generation. The same generation that is going to be retiring in droves over the next few years. This lack of lower skilled jobs being available has limited the hispanic population coming to Pittsburgh. One stat our group came across during our research said that “…immigrants who have arrived in the United States since 2000, 55 percent have come from Mexico and Central and South America. In Pittsburgh, that figure is 17 percent.” (x). This will become a problem as those baby boomers retire here and attracting an immigrant population should be something the city is concerned about to both bring diversity and help the economy.

However, something that has always concerned me is something that was brought up a few times in class, both by Kristin and Zak, and by Mitch Sipus: the worry of being a privileged outsider helicoptering in like we’re there to save the day. I believe that talking to the people you’ll be working with is important to any process. However, I’ve struggled with just how to reach them. As someone not naturally outgoing, or at ease in unfamiliar situations, I wonder about how best to achieve this. This is a skill I’m constantly trying to work on and develop throughout all my work but I believe this class will be crucial in helping me. Being pushed out of my comfort zone is never a pleasant experience, but I know it is valuable in my growth as a designer and a person.

I look forward to seeing where this project leads my team and better understanding the issues facing Pittsburgh as we progress.

Finding Connections to Shift Benefit and Power

I have very much enjoyed working with my team throughout this process, and think that our varied backgrounds and passions contribute greatly to the vitality and range of our discussions. I think our project idea is uniquely tailored to the issues our group identified as being common areas of interest, and seeks to solve several seemingly disconnected problems in one stroke. Coming from a technical background, this project is very much out of my typical depth but it has already altered how I see facilitating planning stages for projects of all kinds. I hope that through the semester’s work I will continue to gain additional perspective on all project stages.

Typically in engineering projects, I am focused very intently on the details of the project, like logistics, allocating resources, and fine tuning the deliverable. But this project requires looking at the big picture and finding connections between different demographics that can be used to magnify benefit to acute populations. Even though I feel a bit out of my element, I am very much enjoying this project and am eager to engage more directly over the coming semester. I find I draw much more heavily on my personal and professional experience instead of my academic background.

I think one of the early lectures on power shifts resonates very deeply with our process and project. Our research on national trends in neighborhood revitalization and immigrant support, as well as Pittsburgh and Peduto specific approaches to local problem solving seemed to intersect with the trend mentioned in lecture about goods and service sharing helping affect consumer power. We saw the wide range of projects and initiatives Peduot is attempting to implement and figured the best way to facilitate success was by solving problems in tandem. We feel our project has the potential be a nexus of support and resources for many different sectors of Pittsburgh.

Listening to the radio a few weeks ago I heard a talk about Newt Gingrich during his time as Speaker of the House. The press had been urging him to make a decision to act in a military conflict, and his response was, “And then what? We attack, take out the leader, then what?” The radio jockey was discussing how this had been a guiding principle in his life, whenever he had to make an important decision he would ask himself, “And then what?” so as to assess the ramifications of his action. I feel we have used this as a mantra in our group as well, albeit subconsciously. As we are fine tuning our project idea, we continue to discuss how making one alteration to the program could affect the other parties and issues involved. I think this consideration of downstream and external effects is a crucial element of policy planning, and hopefully it will increase the likelihood of success for our service.

In terms of historical context leading to the formation of our current target problem, I think the biggest factor is historical and traditional acceptance of segregation. Immigrant populations have categorically been denied access to education, employment, and general social promotion for decades, and certainly the economic hub of coal-powered Pittsburgh is awash with this same issue. Neighborhoods were traditionally centered around different ethnic populations (for quite sensible reasons), but this categorical separation made it very easy to exclude those neighborhoods from receiving services, resources and long-term investments. While certainly the desegregation acts of the mid-20^th century and repeal of harsh post-war anti-immigration legislation allowed these slighted communities to advance, they have never quite attained the equal footing rightly owed to them. Our solution hopes to provide a small stepping stone that helps these communities get closer to that equal ground.

Looking Back, Looking Forward – Anna Malone

When I was 17, I went on a trip with my friend’s church youth group to Juárez, Mexico. I hesitate to call it a mission trip in part because I have never been religious. (It was my friend’s church.) However, most of all, I hate to admit that I participated in a mission trip, that I wear the label of “Girl Who Participated in a Mission Trip,” that I have a photo like this, archiving and preserving my past self, the self who didn’t know any better, who didn’t even know that she should know better:

(Note: To find any photo evidence from this trip, I had to search Facebook for a good thirty minutes: I hid it from myself well.)

I want to make several comments about this picture, observations that reflect on that mission’s project as a whole. Our goal was to build a house for a family that did not have one. Our time frame was a week, the length of Spring Break, because after that we had to get back to school, to our real lives. Looking at this photo, you might notice several things:

1) The background shows the neighborhood in which we were working receding into the horizon. It seems to go on endlessly. Many other houses and shacks in this neighborhood were falling apart, in need of repair, or abandoned.

2) Everyone that appears within the frame of the photo is an American volunteer. Local residents of that community are nowhere to be seen.

From where I am standing now, after seven years of reading, growing, changing, and learning to be thoughtful—I realize the difference between the kind of work I did in Juárez and the kind of work I want to do for this class, and in the future.

In Juárez, we came into an environment that we did not understand. We came into this environment with a problem already identified and a plan for “solving” that problem already in place. We did not immerse ourselves in the community to find out what any of the residents actually wanted, what they thought the problems were. We did not do research on a systematic or policy level to better understand the complex and multi-layered issues that make Juárez what it is today. Juárez is a city where families do not have houses, but giving one family one house is not a solution to this issue. Homeless families are a symptom, a side effect of deeper problems—problems that extend past that neighborhood, past that city, past that country even.

Why is Juárez a city plagued by crime and poverty? To build a family in need a house might be an act of compassion, or it might be a gesture made back at oneself. Is “charity” a humanitarian action, or is it an easy way for the volunteers to feel good about themselves, to feel like they are saving the world, without actually considering what this would mean? While relief efforts have value, especially in emergency situations, I now realize that they will never produce change. They will never root out and solve problems on a systematic level. Relief efforts and “charity” will never prevent the conflicts and traumas that lead to our need for them.

Humanitarian work will not have a deep impact if: it operates on an accelerated time frame, does not involve active collaboration with the community it attempts to help, and does not value extensive research and imaginative thinking when it comes to identifying problems and iterating solutions. I want to make clear that mission trips are not the only example of this “band-aid on a bigger issue” work.  For example, as Carl DiSalvo explained during his talk “Design Experiments in Speculative Civics” yesterday, 24-hour Civic Hackathons also often produce “band-aid,” short-term solutions. Working under unrealistically tight timelines, often motivated by the idea of attracting potential future employers, getting funding, or having a unique experience, teams at these events don’t take the time to consider the long-term causes of the civic problem their app is supposed to address. They don’t consider alternative or parallel solutions that don’t involve tech. They also do not receive input from community members negatively affected by the problem.

How can designers and policy makers work with communities to come up with real, long-term solutions to issues that are affecting their lives for the worse? Can we plant the seeds for long-term change on a short-term time schedule? Definitely, the idea of researching, designing, and perhaps implementing our project in the course of a semester is giving me some anxiety in these beginning stages. I am excited to move forward with my team’s project. Yet, as we continue working to turn blighted properties into something of value, I want to ensure that we are continuously touching base with real-live community members from that neighborhood. Can humanitarian work re-imagine community members as active participants in a project, rather than as people to help? And how might shifting our view of these dynamics increase the rate of effectiveness such projects ultimately have?

Blog Post 1 – Food Agendas

I have been passionate about the topic of food for about two years. Most people treat food pretty casually. Our individual consumption is made-up of a million tiny decisions we make on a daily basis over an extended period of time. And when we start aggregating these decisions across individuals, we begin to form a picture of our collective consumption – across neighborhoods, cities, and even countries. At the individual level, most of us are aware that our dietary habits have a cumulative influence on our health, wallet and even social life. But few of us realize the choices we make as a collective form a powerful political landscape that affects everything from our public health to the state of our environment. Comprehending the scale of the impact of our collective food systems should make anyone into a “food activist”. And yet few of us are.

 

My entry into “food activism” was motivated by my strong connection with animals. I learned about the horrors of the industrial food system and began grappling with feelings of guilt and remorse for choosing to support the system that brought farm animals to my plate. “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer greatly influenced my thinking on this topic. From this book, and from a host of other sources, I learned that our collective choices around eating animals (and animal by-products) impact the welfare of not only billions of animals, but billions of humans. And that in the background, our choices often support a lobbyist farming-machine that is held unaccountable for the massive negative externalities it produces.

 

The fact is that if we all simply decided to stop eating meat, a number of positive outcomes are likely –

 

• Carbon emissions will be reduced by more than 15%
• A massive influx of grazing land would become available for alternate uses
• Rates of heart disease and obesity will drop dramatically
• Rates of antibiotic resistant pathogens will plummet
• Billions of animals would be saved from a life of misery and torture

 

Essentially, we would be able to alleviate problems of a massive scale. But while it sounds so simple (just stop eating animals, duh!!!) – it’s obviously hard to do. Our relationship to food is complicated. Even people who are acutely aware of the impact of their individual food choices struggle with making the right choice. I never made it to veganism and nor did Jonathan Safran Foer. My partner never made it to vegetarianism, but he eats meat rarely and chooses his sources carefully. And for many people in this country who reside in areas deemed as “food deserts”, being able to choose their food items and sources is a luxury out of reach.

 

For me, the main challenge in planning for this project was to narrow down the problem to a manageable chunk. Since there are so many entry points to food activism, it was hard to hard to resist making our vision too ambitious or to tackle too many fronts. But since everyone in our team had a different entry point into food activism we were able to meet in the middle and zero-in on a more pragmatic approach. Thinking locally and keeping our focus on Pittsburgh was helpful. Since industrial agriculture is not local to Pittsburgh, we decided to focus on the end-user and support initiatives that increase community access to healthy food. Some of us are primarily motivated by the desire to help impoverished communities, and others by the desire to decrease dependencies on industrially farmed meat. The beauty of food-activism is that it has the potential to be so broad-reaching that these agendas do not contradict.

Blog post 1: This Smoky ol’ Town

By Chris Taschner

Growing up in Pittsburgh in the ’80’s I experienced some of the worst times this city has seen from an economic stand point. There were many problems left by the collapse of the main industry in this steel town. Not least of these problems were those resulting from the pollution the steel mills put out every day for decades before leaving town. As a kid I heard stories of white collar workers going downtown with a white shirt on and coming home with a grey shirt. Stories of how the street lights had to be on during the day because it was so smokey. These images left a big impact on me as a kid. I never understood how people could let the filth around them get so bad that the inherent beauty of this area would be blocked out.

Pittsburgh has made great strides since my childhood. The city is much cleaner, people can actually get to the rivers, there are bike trails. Most importantly the city government has increasingly turned it’s attention to encouraging green buildings. Mayor Peduto is the most progressive mayor this city has seen in decades. Probably the most progressive mayor since David Lawrence. His 100 initiatives are a refreshing change for a city used to a very opaque mayor’s office. This new spirit of transparency is not only a welcome change but is more than a little inspiring. Now more than ever there is a feeling that things can get done in the city, that there is somewhere to turn for organizations and non profits.

One of the areas that the mayor has chosen to focus his attention on is green buildings. There are a number of green buildings already in pittsburgh, and there is the Green Building Alliance to help encourage more green building. However, with the rapid increase of new technology and increased focus on green building and methods for becoming carbon neutral this seems like an emerging market right here.

The emerging markets lecture and readings had a big impact on how I understand humanitarian efforts. Often it seems like there are so many problems that deserve attention in this world. Deciding where to put one’s effort always seemed kind of arbitrary to me in the past. It is comforting to have something to hang one’s hat on when it comes to choosing a problem to spend time and money on.

For the Heart, Head, Hustle assignment I came in with a few ideas of what I thought that I’d like to focus on. The only one that I had any ideas for any sort of direction that could be taken was the STEM initiative. However, it became very clear that this wasn’t on anyone else’s radar. In the chaos that was that day I got a pretty good idea of what the trends of the class were. In the end I chose a group more based on the individuals than the topic. I chose a group that I felt I could work very well with and get along with based on the Heart, Head, Hustle assignment.

When taking a look at the problems of energy consumption and benchmarking in Pittsburgh a few ideas immediately sprang to mind. I have been working with the people at Sensor Andrew for the last couple of years at CERT and got to know a little about their motivations. I knew that an interest in energy consumption was a partial driving force behind the sensor project. As a team we agreed that meeting with them would be a good place to start. That meeting provided a lot of useful information and some very good suggestions for our direction.

On the whole I’d say that this group is very much product driven. We’ve attacked this problem in a very software development lifecycle fashion. At this point we are gathering stakeholders’ requirements in order to begin to design. We’re all interested in gathering as much info as we can with an eye toward creating something that can contribute to the ultimate goal of completely transforming this smoky ol’ town into a green city.

Blog Entry 1 – Liana Kong

I’m still quite afraid to say that I don’t completely understand what’s going on, and that I’m very much out of my comfort zone. I originally took this class to fulfill a requirement and that it was interdisciplinary and that I had no experience in public policy. In all honesty, it was safe to say that I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. It was immediately evident that I was one of the youngest and least experienced person in the classroom and I started to feel smaller and smaller.

I was in a class last semester about sustainable social change, and overall, for my project group at least, it was close to a complete failure. I found that it was difficult to maintain interests in social change when you’re thrust into a certain topic that was not nearby or easily scalable. This class turned quite interesting for me because it’s all about impact here in Pittsburgh. For quite some time, and even a little now, I never considered Pittsburgh to be my home. Undergrad seems like a transient time in our lives where we live at “home home” and then school off and on for four years. Things going on around Pittsburgh was of no concern to me, because it just happened to be the place where my school was located. Now that I’m graduating soon, realizing what’s going on outside of the CMU bubble is suddenly becoming more and more relevant.

Listening to Mitch’s talk the other day was very eye-opening for me. One thing I’ve struggled with for a while was when do I want to create social impact? Do I even want to create social impact? For a while I figured I’ll get that job out of college pushing pixels or pumping out renderings then try to find something that really mattered to me later on when I had some sum of money in my bank account.  It’s something that I battle with constantly, especially with graduation looming around the corner.

It’s interesting that we’re doing a project on energy benchmarking, because I just finished a project in senior design studio on monitoring personal water use. What I found through the brief research and interviews that my group and I did was that it was difficult to encourage awareness of overuse when water is so cheap. One thing that came up with our meeting with SensorAndrew was the fact about how little people care about energy conservation. It’s hard to change people’s perceptions when it doesn’t affect them in real time or in the near future (<10 years from now). The question of much change one person can make is a struggle because essentially it is very little. If many people make little changes, of course it adds up to something substantial. However, finding a way to push that way of thinking is difficult because again, energy, water, utilities in general are relatively cheap in America. While there is a financial mindset in terms of saving energy to save on money, efforts are nearly negligible.

Team 1: Blog Entry #1

Our team is looking to address two problems simultaneously. Our current project idea is to design a program that works with lower income immigrants to train them on the job and possibly certify them to enter the workforce by enlisting them to apprentice on historical preservation projects throughout the city. Or if it is more viable, on general low-income housing construction projects, with a focus on historical preservation efforts, that would provide the immigrants with a place to live while subsidizing costs for constructors.

In this way, we are hoping immigrants can begin to feel ownership over their new home/neighborhood/city while also gaining marketable skills, and learning English while they work. This system supports both historical preservation efforts as well as integration and support for immigrant communities.

In our efforts, we hope to learn more about how so many aspects of a city are tied to and support each other. We are interested in learning about how immigrant communities affect a city’s economy, and how we can encourage economic growth with this underused resource. We are also interested in learning about funding of historic preservation efforts and how historic preservation is tied to blighted neighborhoods.

We hope others will be motivated to see historic preservation efforts as an asset to the city that can spur further economic growth.

Pittsburgh has a long history of immigrants, but recently the majority are highly educated workers recruited by major universities. In most US cities, lower-skilled immigrants often take the role of the laborers, kitchen workers, landscapers, roofers. However, with the collapse of the steel mills in the 1970s, in Pittsburgh many people left and others filled these roles. With the coming retirements of these baby boomers, there will be a dearth of workers to fill these roles. Pittsburgh hopes to start attracting immigrants to fill these roles again which bolster the economy in other Rust Belt cities. Nationally, there is also a high demand for plumbers and related skilled laborers.

From an immigrant support perspective, there are a number of organizations trying to connect people with jobs. Not many focus specifically on immigrants (e.g. Goodwill) and those that do are national programs (e.g. Higher Advantage) that lack a local focus. Other local immigrant services seek to teach ESL and interviewing skills (e.g. Allegheny Intermediate Unit and the Career Development Center) , but don’t work to actually train or teach marketable skills to immigrants. Our program would seek to fill this need and possibly work in conjunction with existing efforts. There are other organizations around the country in larger cities that seek to help both immigrants and refugees (RefugeeOne) that we’ll be looking to for inspiration and guidance for how to work with people from various cultures and backgrounds.

For current historical preservation efforts, Pittsburgh has two major organizations: Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation (PHLF) and the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). Both offer interesting partnerships for us to consider. We are particularly motivated by the idea of Pittsburgh’s issues being interconnected and leveraging this to imagine a more ‘big picture’ outcome from a project, serving many needs at once.

We believe it is a good time to enter this space because Peduto seems to be leading Pittsburgh into an era of growth and change. We believe it is important that through this period Pittsburgh retains its unique character. Revitalizing a city should mean bolstering the existing resources as well as developing new ones. The time is right to encourage people to target both areas of concern with a single effort.

We are still working to understand the details of how historical preservation efforts currently work. We are looking to speak to both the URA, PHLF and Habitat for Humanity in the coming weeks. These methods will serve as a starting point for how a project would be organized. We’re also interested in learning from Habitat for Humanity about how to organize construction efforts with a group who may not be trained to do so.

We will know if our efforts are working by looking to immigrant employment statistics as well as the rate at which historical preservation projects are being undertaken and completed. Another measure of success would be the rate at which we have immigrants signing up for the program as word spreads across communities.

Our next steps include reaching out to existing organizations to conduct expert interviews and continue to gain knowledge of the two existing landscapes (immigrant population needs and historic preservation efforts) as we further explore where the two intersect.

Blog #1: Diya Deb – The Bigger “Nudge” Picture

I am a designer with no policy background and no management background. Thus when I came into this program and chose this course all I knew was that I wanted to somehow work on projects that might help me get a perspective of working in social innovation. Previously I used to follow stories and read the news about new development but was never personally part of these social initiatives. I was thus just a consumer of second or third hand information.

The romanticized idea that the system had little money which was compounded with poor administration from the Government and stakeholders side brought in a notion that nothing big could be done without power and lots of money. Though I still believe that some parts of this still holds true I realize through this course that money and people are not the only factor that influence social innovation.

The time and policy that lend their hand to innovation was an important revelation. Benjamin Franklin made it happen in another way. He treated it as a gain gain business scenario that would improve the society as a whole. What is interesting is that it was not always easy but shear perseverance at the problem and at times it took lot of time to implement sometimes over years.

But in contrast to that, the article “ Why good projects fail anyway ” written by Nadim F.Matta and Ronald N.Ashkenas speaks about this unique combination of a project task that was given to a team with just 100 days to meet its target. But I guess its like the Albert Einstein quote “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” I don’t know if that is a representation of the time spent previously to locate the “problem” and the solution given 5 min which in this case is the 100 days.

The “nudging” of things to make things happen that was mentioned by Speaker was by far the biggest eye opener for me because it was real with facts from the ground level with relations to the “top” level. It was real and brave. To imagine rebuilding a town still in struggle is not a small task. It also showed the how ones persistent initiatives lead to an opportunity to work in this field and the opportunity to work in the field based on what one wanted to do. It was inspirational.

The speakers talk along with the lectures during the sessions brought into scope the importance of proxy / local data over the information we presume from our policy and existing information or existing solutions that were provided earlier. I see that in the project we are working which is “Pittsburgh After School: Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street.” It is not just a direct correlation but a system that needs to be nudged here and there to make the system work. Yes we are facing policy issues in the sense that the current policy is not supportive towards the low cost or free after school care. I was also amazed at the social coming together of people to get their child to school and after-school care in the Co-ops between moms and the lack of information or advice available for lower income families to deal with their child getting to after-school care.

Maybe its a policy over look that needs to be addressed or maybe its a social mindset that needs further delving into. We are still gathering this local data and hope that their representation can help us improve or solve this real life problem. Naively I end hoping that my first, first hand participation in this field is more fruitful in dealing with real life information which may lend its support to real life people just like the articles I read.

Blog Entry 1 – Ken Chu

I like to help people.  And I like to solve problems.  So this class has been a really exciting opportunity for me to explore these two things because I have spent almost twenty years building a career that satisfies the latter of these two affinities, but not necessarily or directly the first – or at least, not in the way that I like to think about “helping people.”  I’ve long ruminated on why I’ve never taken the leap to explore a career in a more socially conscious field – something more altruistic.  I like doing things like fundraising for charities.  I like the idea of helping out at food banks or soup kitchens, but I’ve never actually done it.  I like the idea of Habitat for Humanity, but I’ve never signed up to volunteer on a project.  I like the idea of going to some underserved community and helping to turn it around, but I’ve never actually investigated opportunities to engage these kinds of activities.  In some ways, I bear some shame about my lack of active engagement in these types of social projects.  In my head, I’ve long romanticized the whole notion of solving social problems and challenges and, as I listen to NPR and hear all the stories of truly selfless people doing amazing things to make life better for others, I’ve long wondered to myself “why am I not doing these things?”  It’s not that I don’t care about these things.  The thing that I have feared the most is that one day, I will finally realize that the one thing keeping me from doing something that makes other people’s lives better is that I don’t have the courage to make the personal sacrifices necessary to be a better person.  It’s an awful realization to have about oneself and I’m still holding out hope that it’s not true.

The journey in this class over the last several weeks has been difficult to process.  The classes themselves have been invigorating and exciting.  Our project – dealing with blight – has been a topic that I have thought about for a very long time.  I grew up in a government-subsidized housing project in the middle of Boston in a neighborhood that was once blighted, but which has since become one of the most desirable places to live throughout the city.  So the topic has personal connections for me.  My group is pretty amazing and I feel lucky to be working with them, but I also feel disadvantaged because my work and career and life experience in dealing with social challenges seem so small in comparison to the work that some in my group have done.  So there is this feeling of not bringing enough to the table – a feeling which I have long known that I really dislike.  But the conversations have been incredibly energizing and I find myself being exposed to so many new ideas and things, and the same is true of the discussions in class.  But sometimes all of this is overwhelming.  On the one hand, it’s exciting to learn about all of this.  But on the other hand, it reminds me of how little I know about all of this and it makes me feel small.

The research that we have been collecting and digesting has had much the same effect on me.  Again, while really exciting to learn about these things and to feel more knowledgeable about the topic of blight (in addition to all the fascinating readings and research on design and policy) and what is happening around the topic, I often am overwhelmed by the largeness of blight.  I find myself paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem and don’t know how or where to engage it.  I think this comes from wanting to solve it – wanting to do something that completely eradicates it.  And the pressure of failing in that endeavor makes me not want to do anything at all.

So having the pressure of this class to embark on this type of project has been good for me, although a bit on the scary side.  Exposure to things like the work that Mitch Sipus was doing in other countries has helped put things in perspective for me.  One of the more amazing things that I have been seeing from this class is the whole notion of “needing to start somewhere.”  It’s such a simple concept, but listening to Mitch talk about his first several weeks in a refugee camp and navigating the path to beginning his work was so inspiring because there wasn’t some big mysterious process or method that he was using to engage the work.  But rather, those first several weeks were just about having the courage to make friends.  Which is difficult and scary, but not nearly as daunting as solving blight or eradicating hunger or creating world peace.  My group is very initiative oriented and a group of very “hands-on” people.  This has also been useful.  I find that I could spend infinite amounts of time talking about the problems and the ideas but I just don’t know where to get started.  But they have really challenged me with the idea that we can be more active participants.  Again, it’s scary, but I’m excited for what will come.

Many of the readings on design and policy and social engagement have been fascinating, but have also resonated as familiar because the ideas and concepts behind some of them are not so different from some of the tools and techniques that we employ in making theater.  In some ways, it has been enlightening.  In some ways, it has been validating.  But all of it has been new and I find myself writing down names and references to ideas and people and systems and concepts, and trying to find it later for review.  But it’s a lot and I often find myself wishing for more time.  For instance, the mention of Lucy Kimbell lead to finding several writings that were really eye-opening, but which also lead to other articles and papers that were equally fascinating.  So I return to the constant struggle between feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed by it all and learning to just pick a point and a place to start, and starting.

The topic of blight is really complicated.  Why it exists, what perpetuates it, why it is so difficult to deal with – the answers to all of these questions are extremely complex.  The work being done by organizations like GTECH has been amazing to be exposed to and it was comforting to find that the company was founded from the work that people were doing for a systems project while in school.  I think what is really important about this topic at this point in time for Pittsburgh is that there seems (at least anecdotally) to be a population boom coming on and, if that happens, urban blight, and how that evolves within the context of an increasing population, and the effects of that evolution on existing populations will be really important to navigate carefully.  The decline of the steel industry in Pittsburgh was likely largely responsible for much of the blight in the city, but as the city starts to grow again, we need to make sure that we are not so excited about the influx of new people that we forget the people who have lived here for so long.  I think this is why my group is so focused on the “people” and “community” facets of this topic.  Slowly but steadily, we are untangling some of this and finding a space to engage and it’s been really useful to be on a team that is comprised of people who are not paralyzed and who are ready to be active participants and who are making it safe for me to come along on the ride.  But I also realize that I am also driving the bus and it’s a little less daunting with the help of some friends.

Interdisciplinarity

by Ronald Chang

Of Mayor Peduto’s 100 Days; 100 Policies to Change Pittsburgh, it was easiest for me to choose an initiative involving technology. There are always new developments in technology and simply by combining different disciplines, namely data analytics (business intelligence), green technology, policy, and design, it seemed inevitable that we would be able to discover something new, perhaps something others have missed or simply did not have enough resources to pursue. Finding a group and arriving at benchmarking buildings on energy efficiency as our group project is particularly serendipitous. Battling climate change and promoting energy efficiency has always been an important issue to me. Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. has fallen dismally behind other nations when it came to environmentally friendly policies and alternative energy. I also happen to be taking a course using sensors and microcontrollers which I could certainly use to our advantage. Unlike some other projects, this energy efficiency project is much more objective in that improvements can yield quantifiable and tangible results that can be sustained if proven successful. With numbers and metrics, we could easily convey a promising venture to policymakers and investors and gather momentum. The real difficulty lies in changing behavior and countering apathy towards energy conservation. Because energy is so cheap and is not taxed according to its environmental costs, there is no incentive for people to invest in infrastructure that saves energy, especially since it will take decades to make a return on investment. Fortunately, behavioral psychology and economics are also interests of mine and if/when we do arrive at that point, there are plenty of ideas to play around with that may motivate people to care about reducing energy usage.

While I have not experienced any significant shift in the way I thought about social entrepreneurship, many of the readings and lectures did resonate with me. I had recently read a book titled The Click Moment by Frans Johansson, which discussed how people succeed and innovate in an uncertain world. According to Johansson, the key is to take plenty of small risks. While the message is quite simple, it is applicable in many of my most recent assignments that involved creating something. There are plenty of successful innovators, artists, business people, and activists who are able to accomplish so much by simply being prolific. While they’ve each experienced many failures, by taking small risks and iterating on things that work, these people are able to quickly make up for losses. In relations to this project, taking small risks means reaching out to many people, asking many questions, and bouncing ideas until we find something that sticks. Since risk and uncertainty is key here, this means pursuing things that are likely to lead to a dead end but still having explored all options.

Finally, having read the articles about trends and where things are headed in the next few decades, I am particularly grateful that I am taking interdisciplinary courses such as this one where each student offers a very different perspective and skill set. Being able to work closely with people that think differently and are capable in different disciplines is a rich learning experience that is not unlike how things are outside of school. While in the past, people were fine just specializing in their particular fields, it seems that people that can code applications, design solutions, communicate results, and navigate government or corporate bureaucracy are people who are most successful. Doing well and innovating in the future (and presently) also means being able to work in cross-disciplinary teams, taking ideas and concepts from a completely unrelated field and applying them towards solutions in another field. Policy and design are two fields that don’t seem to cross paths often and that’s what makes this course and these projects particularly unique and exciting.

Blog #1: Redefining and Reflecting

by Rene Cuenca

For me, social innovation is experiencing a resurgence at a time when cultural boundaries are shifting. A wave of new social initiatives is coming into view world wide, where we are beginning to “design” different kinds of living environments that are more collaborative, more socially just, and specially more sustainable. During my undergraduate career I have always been trying to ride that wave, tying Environmental Policy and Architectural thought to provide my own idea of what sustainability could mean for different contexts in the built environment. The idea that sustainability emerges from the overlapping intersectionalities in a Venn Diagram of three separate circles has been something I have challenged from the beginning of my studies. Now, as I delve deeper into how design and policy could, simultaneously, prove solutions to difficult social, technological, and economic issues, it has become even clearer to me that a sustainable approach does not come from disparate realms of environment, economics, and culture. It is all a continuum. A sustainable approach places itself on none of these things and in all of these things at the same time. This is such that everything is interconnected, interdependent, marking a new sort of ethos in the design and architectural design thinking.

My interests have rarely been admiring highly awarded buildings for their design. Instead, I am very interested in the notion of how can overall community processes and autonomous architectural modes can start to define the built environment as well as aspects of life in the city. How does the mapping of complex social relation start to give a clearer sense of community or city life? Many times this can be physically evidence in cities with high use of public space, a positive public arena based on placemaking techniques and healthy public space where common ownership and stewardship come to define healthy community values. Other times the evidence is less clear, a sort of Software urbanism where the intervention of social relations and social programmes create a greater representation of a good city This is what first drove me to the issue of blight in the city. In a sense, blight represents a rupture in this public system… a reversal of community histories… a place in the community that is not in the community. The reason I took this class was because this is the way I feel architects should approach the realization of building form and projected urbanities: design and policy for humanitarian impact.

Major Peduto makes it clear that in the issue of blight, a lot could be done to improve the quality of our cities. What’s more, the Land Bank policy and other socioarchitectural initiatives set forth by the many organizations tackling this issue have made it clear that communities are in clear risk of different market forces including property rights, gentrification, deteriorating infrastructure, and community development.  I was attracted to blight because the term itself connoted the process that happens to plants whereby they get infected by pathogenic organisms. Yes, the answer could be one design solution that we could propose, but in the end the problem is system and organic in much the same ways. Much talk about passive design and interactive technologies has been made to make architecture a living organism, but in the context of social innovation I am also interested on how the architectural process can become a living organism in itself.

Currently my group, Team 2, has made significant findings in the issue of blight in Pittsburgh. We have met relevant professional in field and came across significant policy leads that can start to open the door as to how our group might fit in into some sort of creative solution. One of the things that stuck out to me the most while having these meeting with people from EvolveEa or GTECH was the idea of how to redefine the concept of ‘Blight’ not only as an opportunity for city-wide development and community empowerment, but to also think critically to what it means to be blighted. We might think, as an outsider, that a certain community is blighted because we don’t wanna walk through it or because we see vacant lots and unusable space… but at the end of the day there are people living in that community that must deal with aspects of their neighborhood in a way that they do not themselves would describe their communities as such. The same has been true for other equity-driven terms like the ideas of a ‘Food Desserts,’ which a variety of social designers and architects have used to back up bring-healthy-food-to=poor-communities project which study after study has shown that the fresh-food push does nothing to improve the health of poor people, who continue to live markedly shorter and sicker lives than better-off Americans. In this example the standard way “food deserts” have been defined may overemphasize — and in some cases mischaracterize — the problem of access and draw attention from other factors that influence what people buy and eat, like food prices, preparation time and knowledge, marketing, general levels of education, transportation, cultural practices and taste. This sort of thinking is what I want to welcome to our project proposal: a way to reimagine blight and gentrification so that we are talking about the relevant policy, cultural, and economic systems that make it so.

One of my initial suggestions was to redefine the idea of the Community Land Trust so that we can design a program away from a Trust (that is the legal entity) into trust for each other, our community systems, individual goals, and overall value. What if we design a system parallel to the Land Bank through the use the Conservatorship Law in order to use blighted properties for short term ‘pop-up’ solutions. This programme could be all compiled into community efforts to create small autonomous Land Trusts that empower community members. In this way different types of communities can come together under a Land Trust outlining common community goals for the use of urban space in/close to their houses, making the process of acquiring land more determined (and perhaps easier) while solving the fact that the land bank might take a while to be implemented or struggle to give voice to various community needs. In this way we can redefine the idea of Land Trust to incorporate social inclusion and community empowerment as well as allow community members take active use of the land. Of course, these ideas are preliminary and could work as ideological extrapolation from the ideas of my other team members. As we move forward on the project I am excited to figure out how a system sustainable strategy could entice us to come up with a creative solution to the issue of blight in the city.

Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street

Our topic is #78 Pittsburgh After School: Providing Learning Opportunities to Keep Kids Off the Street. Through our exploration of the topic we have come across policy concerns and social coming together. Our detailed report can be viewed on the given below link.

Impact Lab 1

Timeline