Looking Back at 2020 and Thinking About What’s Next…

As we move deeper into 2021, it’s worth taking a look back at what we learned in 2020 in order to assess where to go from here. It was a year that forced us to reassess so many things; from the nature of work, to the design of our private and public spaces, to basic social interaction. At SOUR, we embrace tumultuous times as an opportunity to accelerate positive change, and nurture collaborative problem-solving and ideation. Because if this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need, now more than ever, to come together and figure things out. It’s smacked us in the face, put into immediate relief issues of sustainability, social injustice, top-down hierarchies, inequitable distribution of resources, and failures of communication.

In the midst of all this, SOUR’s What’s Wrong With: The Podcast hit its 50th episode. What started out as diagnostic ideations with progress-makers across a variety of disciplines turned into panel discussions and expert interviews, which in turn lead to our podcast series. Throughout the process, it has been our goal to dialogue with, and synthesize data from, as many voices as possible in order to understand the true reality of our social/urban landscape. Through this pursuit, we can come to realize our mission: addressing social and urban problems through adaptive, sustainable, and inclusive design solutions.

We’ve come to see WWW/ as a bucket or a vessel, and each podcast as a drop accumulating within. There are bitter drops that smack of exclusion, violation, community trauma, and the harms of global warming. And there are sweet drops, flavored with hints of resilience, equity, inclusion, and diversity. The whole process serves as an effort to find balance in a constantly changing system, and as each new drop enters the bucket, we must reassess and adapt in order to understand the accumulated whole.

There have been so many insightful, inspiring, solution-driven guests on the podcast, and it’s impossible to name-drop them all. But it is possible to give a brief synopsis of what we’ve learned throughout these conversations, and to enunciate perspectives that have stood out to us as vital and often-overlooked components of an ever-evolving social/urban system.

The first deals with inclusivity, and specifically the necessity of designing for the marginalized, for those on the edges of society. By doing this, we can realize design solutions that actually work for everyone, because these ‘edge’ solutions carry over very practically into the mainstream. Manisha Amin, chief strategist and visionary at Centre for Inclusive Design, opened our eyes to this perspective, noting that design should be inclusive by default, not as an afterthought. She also focuses on the process of how we design things rather than the end-result. By including a diverse array of voices and backgrounds into the design process, we’re more likely to get a product that will work better for everyone.

This sentiment blends into themes of accessibility which have surfaced over and over throughout our conversations. On the one hand, there is accessibility at the design-level, where the diversity of our society is reflected in the diversity of those ideating the solutions to problems. But there is also the accessibility of the design process by the end-user. In this regard, architects, designers, and professionals in most any other discipline have a responsibility to educate the end-user, to encourage transparency, promote dialogue, and work collaboratively towards solutions.

This is particularly vital in our built environment, where marginalized communities are so often left out of design solutions, excluded from the design of the very spaces they inhabit. Such exclusion is often a result of a history of systemic racism and a colonial past that we simply fail to see or understand fully. Dr. Lucretia Berry, founder of Brownicity, pressed upon us the importance of educating ourselves on race issues, and of getting that education from experts who have studied it and know it’s complexities.

By ignoring or not fully understanding history, we can fall into traps where we think we may be doing something good, but that ‘something good’ could actually be a case of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Antionette Carroll, founder and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, spoke to us about the need for equity rather than equality. Equal access to something is an oversimplified model to base any program or design on because it ignores a history of systemic racism and injustice. Equity is about giving people what they need in order to make things fair, and taking into account these systems, it’s clear that historically oppressed and marginalized populations need more support and resources than others.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, architect, urbanist, educator, and author, mirrored this sentiment, noting that our built environment is grossly inequitable due to 400–500 years of a racist colonial history which have manifested in our physical environment. Red-lining, highways through poor neighborhoods, a lack of infrastructure — these are all symptoms of an unhealthy system, and we must think of housing and our built environment as intrinsically connected to our health.

Which brings us to sustainability. The health of our planet is a top priority, and we’ve been lucky to gain so many perspectives into how we can design towards a healthy, clean, biodiverse future. Whether we’re talking about a circular model of manufacturing and construction where everything is repurposed instead of built to become obsolete, or clothing that either biodegrades or lasts for hundreds of years, or water-saving systems that can stave off desertification — all these conversations around sustainable practices will be invaluable moving forward.

So what’s next? We have been obsessed this year with thinking about the “Why”, and have come to be particularly inspired by questions we don’t know how to answer. This has led us to research and gain insights into so many diverse perspectives, to fill blind spots and continue to build an awareness of what it means to part of this collective, human endeavor. We will continue to ask questions, to understand who we are designing with, to push forward into a post-COVID landscape of increasing digitization and understand what that means for our physical, built environment. We welcome the challenges and possibilities of the coming months and years, and know that, while it certainly won’t be easy, we can create positive change through open, honest, transparent dialogue between diverse groups of people working towards a healthy future.