Our Future World

2050: It’s up to us.

At Arup, I work as a foresight practitioner, where my job is to consider the future of the built environment and how today’s designs can make an impact; as well as thinking about the future impact we want to make to consider how we can design things today to achieve a future that is fit for us all.

Photo courtesy of Arup

By Jonelle Simunich, Senior Foresight Strategist, Arup

In writing Arup’s 2050 Scenarios: Four Plausible Futures, a report recently published envisioning city life in 2050, we struggled when we got to when we got to one particular scenario, the Post-Anthropocene. While the other three scenarios (Human Inc., Extinction Express, and Greentocracy) consider both positive and negative aspects for society and natural systems. The challenge for Post-Anthropocene—where both society and planetary conditions improve—lied in that we all thought we knew what the positive future would looked like; harmonious, green, peaceful, plentiful, and so on. This is meant to be the future we all want to see, to live in, to inhabit, yet it was the most difficult to envision. How can we design a city, build-ing, system, experience, glassware, document, anything, when we are tied to making planetary improvements; mapping, analyzing, and adapting systems; and doing things in a way no one has ever done before, or that no one really knows how to do? 

And, to be honest, trying to paint a picture of peace and harmony does not produce the most attention-grabbing results. Humans thrive on tensions, on struggles, on the leaders for negotiations and conflict. Designing “utopia” and a world that considers “Spaceship Earth” is much more challenging than one might initially envisage. Consider what world you might want to live in, what impact you might want to make on the world, and how that impact could play out in the future. Many of us are able to start by listing out pieces, aspects, and elements we like, want or wish to see. But designing that in 3-D is more of a struggle. As such, my design challenge to you is to design the 2050 YOU want to see. Take into consideration the impacts you want manifest-ed into reality. If you had unconstrained condi-tions, what would you envisage? My challenge to you is not to design any future, design one you really and truly think will be better; while considering the impact it will make on future people, planet(s), cities, systems, processes, wellness, on anything and everything. We all want a better life, for us, for our fami-lies, for our friends, for our people. But have any of us ever really considered the detailed design? Here are some questions to get you thinking. Will it mean more money or less? Will it mean constraints, and how so? What will success look like? Will it mean happiness? What will we have to sacrifice, if anything? What does resource consumption look like? What might the various economic models look like? Are they the same everywhere or will it vary by location? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself and our cli-ents daily. The future is unknown, yet one thing we know is we all want to design, build, construct, and inhabit a future that is better than today. Which bodes the question, “What does better look like?” Our existing social constructs tell us that “better” means more money, more stuff, more consumption, more, more, more. Well, what would a future look like if we didn’t have more, but had less or some other model? Is there even an option of having a better future that doesn’t consist of “more, more, more?” Is there a way to have more that doesn’t endlessly extract resources? The planet, and her resources, have underpinned our modern economies, and been the only model many of us in North America and Europe have known. 

Post-Anthropocene: A path to a regenerative world where society consumes resources at a rate in which they can be replenished. Humanity recognizes and values ecosystem services, in turn helping to improve the quality of life for both the planet and society.

Humans Inc.: This period reflects a business-as-usual trajectory from 2020. The condition of humanity has continued to improve, but it comes at the expense of the environment. Climate considerations have become subordinate to economic development and societal well-being.

Greentocracy: The Earth and its health has the highest priority on every national and transnational agenda. Global efforts for climate action have been made at a significant cost as humanity lives in self-imposed servitude to the environment.

Extinction Express: Natural resources that had been previously taken for granted and consumed led to the destabilization of natural systems. Resource and energy shortages are pervasive around the world. Society is driven by fear of the ‘foreign’ and ‘different’ as isolationism has been on the rise for years.

Impacts

The future is fiction. It is a story we tell our-selves. A story we create. A story we have the ability to take actions toward, or not. Each and every one of our daily interactions is a step to-ward the future; be it knowing or unknowingly. Did you decide to drink water today, or a soda? Did you walk to work or Uber? Did you say hello to your co-worker or rush to your desk? It’s the daily decisions we take that make the biggest impact on our collective lives. With the changing world we’re living in, questions around what the future could, should, and must hold is increasingly prevalent. Will it look like X, or Y, or Z, or Q? There is no way to really know, but we can get a bit closer by looking at trends, data, and by delivering scenarios to help us start to approach this question. In my role as a foresight practitioner, I help people think about the world we want to live in, and the ones we don’t. Scenarios are one way to help us. By juxtaposing positive with negative, or the desirable with the undesirable, we can start to paint the future we want, the future we don’t want, and the future we think is most likely. Following scenario development, we can then start to think more practically about how we want to construct that vision.

Arup’s recent publication looks at the world in 2050 and considers all these things. In this document we designed four different plausible futures based on planetary health and societal well-being improving or declining as drivers for our communal future. What would the world look like if planetary and societal conditions both improve? Could people and the planet live in harmony? The Post-Anthropocene depicts such a future where people only use the resources they need and consider their everyday impacts on each other, as well as on the environment. What would happen if both planetary and societal conditions degrade? Extinction Express outlines the grim conditions for the majority, where decades of desires have stripped the planet of resources, where chaos rules, and every-person-for-themselves is the modern mantra.

What if we put our planet before the needs of the people? Restricting resource use, restricting access to nature, restricting people’s lifestyles in an effort to get to one-planet-liv-ing. Greentocracy illustrates what the future might look like if humanity is able to transition from using 1.7 planets per year to using less than one. What if we carry on as we are? Using up re-sources as we see fit, building cities as we see fit, but all in honor of improving the lives of humanity globally? Humans Inc. describes a world where resources are used frivolously in honor and effort to better the quality of the human condition; but at the expense of our one-and-only habitat.

None of us know what the future really holds. But we can imagine. We can begin to design, plan, and build toward it. We can put the plan-et or people at higher priority, but with either option we will have unique consequences and benefits. Or shall we consider the reality of what a planet in harmony might look like? I hope my questions have left you curious, puzzled, inspired, and determined to think about how you might design better for both the planet and people. 

Never Standing Still

An Interview with Adèle Santos

Whether Adèle Santos is transforming the MIT School of Architecture and Planning into a world-renowned institution, designing clothes and coats, creating public housing, re-building cities that have fallen victim to natural disasters, gutting and re-imaging her warehouse home that was once the site of a children’s circus, starting an architecture school, or merely being the wonderfully stylish and magnanimous force of energy that she exudes, she is never standing still.

Photos by Ben Gebo

Interviewed by Sarah Merion

She first started her design education by gaining a diploma from the Architectural Association in London before moving on to Harvard, where she completed her Master of Architecture in Urban Design. After these, she concluded her formal education by completing her Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning University of Pennsylvania.

Adèle has held various leadership roles in academic institutions and most recently was the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was recruited in 2003 to come to lead the school, which she did for a decade from 2004-2014. In a testament to her ingenuity, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning received the esteemed award of #1 School of Architecture by QS World University Rankings in the final year of her deanship. Since stepping down from being Dean, she has continued to be a valued MIT facility member, co-director of the Levinthal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and active in continuing her private practice, Santos Prescott and Associates, which has garnered international reputation. Adele is an advocate for gender and racial diversity and has spoken on various lectures about the importance of representation.

I sat down with Adèle to talk about her life dedicated to forging new paths in design.  

Design Thinking for Rocket Scientists

Removing Barriers for Innovation at NASA

In the 1960s, the average age of a NASA employee was 27. As a brand new agency with a once-in-history mission to put a human on the moon and bring them back to Earth safely, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration was moving fast and loaded with young talent. This is where we get the term moon shot, meaning a plan to innovate quickly and achieve something big that was previously thought impossible.

Photo by NASA/Bill Ingalls

By Brian Romer, Director of Design, Thomson Reuters Labs

Image by Walt Feimer, courtesy of NASA/Goddard

Photo by NASA/Cory Huston

Image courtesy of NASA

Gliding to Success

The MBTA and thoughtbot Launch an App for Train Officials

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), known locally as simply “the T,” is the leading public transportation provider in the metro-Boston area. Before the majority of the city was restricted to the walkable radius around their homes, the MBTA and thoughtbot partnered for a digital communications project on the T’s most complex line, the Green Line. The Green Line is a light rail system, with multiple branches and a two branch extension currently underway.

Photo by Kyle Tran

By Jaclyn Perrone, Design Director, thoughtbot & Katrina Langer, Head of Web and Content, MBTA

Picture it: a trolley click-clacks through treelined streets, carrying baseball fans and college students down Commonwealth Ave in Boston. It stops at Harvard Ave, where more than 4,000 people board the train every single day. Passengers tap their CharlieCards and load cash on their tickets, asking the driver where to exit for Fenway, or where to transfer to the Red Line. Meanwhile, cars cross in front of the train–over 4 lanes of traffic and 2 sets of railroad tracks to continue their journey up Harvard Ave towards Downtown Boston. Then, the traffic light turns green, indicating that the train can cross the intersection, but a few people are still waiting to board. The operator holds, and by the time they’ve closed the doors and are ready to leave, the light is red. So they wait.

Meanwhile, the train behind it is just leaving Warren Street—it’s supposed to be 7 minutes away from Harvard Ave., but it’ll be there in 4 minutes at this pace. An official at Harvard Ave. radios the operator. “The headway gap is too short,” they say. “Wait at Warren Street just an extra minute.” At this point you might wonder, “Isn’t it a good thing to have trains arrive closer together, especially on a busy day when there’s a Red Sox game?” Well, not quite. In fact, maintaining even headways—the time between each train’s arrival—is essential to the efficient operation of the Green Line. Evenly spaced trains are safer, reduce crowding, and ensure there aren’t empty trains needlessly traveling through the system. The officials who make decisions about when trains can leave are called inspectors. During rush hour, there may be as many as 19 inspectors in the field deciding when to send new trains into service from the rail yard, assigning operators to trains and scheduling their breaks, monitoring crowding at stations, and yes, making sure trains are evenly spaced during service. They do all this over a radio station dedicated to Green Line operations, and with paper forms called train sheets. Radio communications and paper forms have served the Green Line well. As far as processes go, it’s easy to learn and keep consistent.

But in 2018, as the MBTA’s Customer Technology Department was wrapping up a significant re-build of the technology that powers real-time information for customers, they started to wonder: Could we use this technology to surface real-time train data for operations? They were pretty sure they could, but wanted to partner with a design firm that could bring leadership and rigor to the process—that’s where we came in. thoughtbot is a design and development consultancy that partners closely with clients to bring products from validation to success while mentoring them on the process. We kicked off a 3-month project with the MBTA team called Green Line Intelligent Decision Execution System (GLIDES). Discovery In the initial discovery phase, we learned a lot about Green Line operations. It’s about way more than just monitoring traffic lights. When the MBTA came to us, they had an objective that they wanted to solve: How might we improve communication between officials on the Green Line? The first phase of design thinking is Empathize, which means learning about your customers and the world in which they operate. In order to do this, we interviewed 21 MBTA officials, operators, and supervisors to get a better understanding of how the Green Line operates as a whole, across all the different positions. We had a series of objectives for our interviews:

• Get a sense of the different relationships within Green Line operations.

• Evaluate where we can supplement manual processes with technology.

• Identify inefficiencies and communication gaps in their workflow.

• Understand the broader context of Green Line operations.

• Identify at what points officials need more information to perform a task more efficiently.

• Identify user needs that are unarticulated. Focus on their feelings towards a particular workflow and their motivations in certain situations.

thoughtbot and the MBTA team held one-on-one, hour-long interviews with different officials over the course of a month. Oftentimes, our team would split up and interview multiple people in one day to cover more ground quickly. We asked questions such as:

• Walk us through your typical day.

• What’s frustrating?

• What’s rewarding?

• What types of decisions do you make throughout the day?

• What types of information do you need to be successful?

• What is challenging to access?

• Can you tell me about a challenging experience you had on the job?

• How did you handle it?

• What tools did you use?

• If you had a magic wand and could fix one thing right now, what would you fix?

After a day’s interviews were over, we would come together as a team and synthesize. We captured our observations (things we heard, saw, felt) on sticky notes, and over time clustered similar ones together to form overarching in-sights. We came up with over 30 insights, all of which could easily spin off into their own product offering. The task at hand was prioritizing these insights and choosing one that we could tackle together in this short time that would yield the highest impact. This marked the second phase of the Design Thinking approach: Define. Now it was up to us to use these insights to determine an objective to work toward that focuses on a critical, common, unmet need that we heard throughout our interviews. In order to inform the priority of our ideas, we created a series of user personas to further document our findings. We aggregated our findings into seven different personas, featuring the Chief Inspector, Desk Official, Dispatcher, Operator, Pull-out Inspector, Supervisor, and Yard Master. The personas dove into topics such as: Goals, Behaviors & Habits, Technology Access, and Relationships. It was important to create and share artifacts like these from the research phase to help inform future MBTA projects. Once we established an understanding of the different players in the Green Line ecosystem, and the nature of their relationships—including the questions they asked each other and the blockers they experienced—we revisited our insights and determined that reducing radio chatter would have the greatest impact on their community.

At this time, Green Line operations used a single radio channel for communication in order to ensure that all operators and inspectors were kept informed of critical service information. However, there were times it was taken up with questions that could be easily answered through software (e.g. Who is operating a particular train?). Questions like these prevented more urgent information from being distributed, which introduced challenges into the communications flow. For the Green Line, timing is another logistical challenge. For example, operators have scheduled, paid breaks during their shift. If the train they’re driving gets stuck in traffic on Huntington Ave., it delays that break time. They’re still entitled to their full break, but then the next train they’re scheduled to drive will need to leave later. Furthermore, while inspectors can see where trains are scheduled to be according to paper train sheets, real-time information about train operators and locations was only available by radio. This makes it difficult to adjust train schedules according to breaks and shift changes.

Finally, inspectors can (and do) use Green Line radio to find out where the trains are and who’s driving them. As a result, the radio channel is full of chatter-communications about break times being delivered right alongside in-formation about emergencies.

Prototype

After developing a problem statement (How might we reduce radio chatter?), we were now ready to begin the third phase of the Design Thinking approach: Ideate. As a team, thought-bot and the MBTA sat down and did a series of design exercises to help us generate as many solutions as possible to solve our objective. We started with a round of Mind Mapping, which is used as a warm-up exercise to get our ideas out of our heads and onto paper. From there we did a few rounds of a rapid sketching exercise called Crazy Eights, to get as many solutions and ideas out as quickly as we can. Finally, we finished up with an activity called Story Boarding, which allowed each of us to develop an idea further by diving into the details of its interaction. After a few rounds of sharing and critiquing our ideas, we converged on a final storyboard that outlined the screens of the prototype we wanted to build.

Our research revealed a number of opportunities for improvement, so we continued our process by building an app prototype that mirrored paper train sheets. Accessible via any browser on smartphones, it includes train location, operator information (the badge number and scheduled shifts for two people on each train), arrival predictions, and a visualization of headway gaps. This took us right into the last two phases of the Design Thinking approach: Prototyping and Testing. Our first prototype had a few key objectives:

• Provide more context about what’s currently happening in the system.

• Create a way for Green Line officials to keep each other updated about non-emergency issues.

• Improve the fidelity of our data by making crucial train sheet data digital.

These objectives took the shape of an experience that showed train location, operator information, reported issues, and train sheets. We created this experience as a low-fidelity, click-able prototype to start, so we could get it in the hands of officials quickly to hear their feedback and iterate on the design. This prototype wasn’t functional—it was a series of static screens created in a design program called Sketch, and linked together in a prototyping tool called In-Vision. We went back out to our interviewees and showed them the prototype on our phones to get their feedback. We asked questions like “What’s happening on this screen? What information is missing here? When would you use this feature? What would you do next?” After multiple rounds of showing and iterating on our prototype, we started to have a clearer idea of what we wanted to build for our first version of the product, our MVP. thoughtbot and the MBTA created a backlog of all the features that we wanted to include in our first build, based on user feedback from testing. Once this list was created, we prioritized and honed in on which features would be required in order for our app to function and provide value. These features included train lo-cations, train sheets (entering who is operating which car), and a way to collect user feedback. We also decided to integrate analytics from the start in order to gather information on usage to inform future iterations. With a plan in place, we started designing and developing the first version of the app. Designers honed in on visual styling and user experience, while developers laid the foundation for the back-end functionality. After a few weeks, we had a real, working app! It was piloted by 7 inspectors on the B and C branches of the Green Line. We wanted to learn three critical things. Was the app easy to use or were there barriers to access? Did inspectors think it would help them do other parts of their job? Was this a scalable process, ideal for us across all parts of the Green Line?

Expanded Pilot

Once thoughtbot and the MBTA understood that the app was useful based on our prototype, we expanded the pilot to inspectors at Reservoir, Riverside, Harvard Ave., and Boston College stations. This part of the test was about efficacy—or, does this app do what we think it will? In particular, we hypothesized it could even out headway gaps the way previous research suggested it might (reducing customer wait time by as much as 30 seconds). We also hoped it would provide more holistic, real-time information to inspectors and dispatchers on the Green Line, thereby reducing chatter on the radio, and helping everyone make better deci-sions about service needs along each line.

Results

In the first few weeks of widespread use, the team uncovered that this app provided a more equitable, reliable source of information for inspectors and dispatchers, and it did improve overall employee morale. And, while it didn’t measurably reduce radio chatter, it did ensure a consistent source of train and operator location information if the radio was needed to communicate disruptions or emergencies. Anecdotally, inspectors looked forward to us-ing the app every day. They loved the automatic updates to train location. Here’s the unfortunate news: About two weeks into our pilot last year, we ran into an issue with the GPS system. Essentially, unrelated to any of our work, the GPS service provider had switched network protocols, making location tracking unreliable (If you took the Green Line at this time and relied on arrival predictions through the MBTA website, Google Maps, or Transit App, you may have noticed this).

Over the next few months, all-new GPS units were installed on every Green Line train to accommodate the new GPS protocol. It wrinkled our hopes and dreams for the GLIDES app, but it did not deter our spirited approach: as of this writing, GLIDES is back up and running, to the relief of designers, developers, and Green Line inspectors, who, at least once a week while the app was down, emailed our team to say, “Hey, when is this app going to work again? We miss it!” Well, it’s back now. The GLIDES app is now in use, creating data to help the MBTA improve communications among train officials and to deliver a more reliable service to customers. And although our work on the GLIDES project is over, we’re excited to see how our partners at the Customer Technology Department will continue to build on the product development methods that we introduced and the research findings that we uncovered during our time working with them on the Green Line.

Legendary Streetwear

A Profile of jeffstaple

In February of 2005, the shoe that catapulted sneaker culture to the masses was finally released. While not designed to be a hyped icon, this new shoe, named the Pigeon Dunk, was one of the most sought after silhouettes, and the limited number of pairs available caused chaotic scenes to develop in New York’s Lower East Side.

Photo by Brian Alcazar

By Sabaat Kareem and Thais Jacomassi

Outside Reed Space, a now-closed landmark streetwear boutique, people began to pitch tents along the sidewalks days before the release. Through a blizzard, more and more came to await the coveted shoes. When the line got to be over 100 people, the police arrived. Arrest threats were made to those who refused to leave after so many hours of waiting, yet the crowd fought back. While sneaker culture had been largely underground, this riot catapulted it to the limelight. On that February day, jeffstaple became a household name.

Staple Design is a creative firm founded by jeffstaple. Originating in 1997, the New York-based firm works with some of the world’s most prestigious brands on design, identity, and mar-keting. jeffstaple is deemed one of the most in-fluential designers in the streetwear world, and his firm’s expertise is highly coveted by brands like Nike, Adidas, and Puma. In addition to his brand, jeffstaple founded Reed Space, produced a creative magazine called Reed Pages maga-zine, became the creative director of TGS Holdings, Inc. retail outlets, and created his own podcast called Business of HYPE.

The man behind the design giant, Jeff Ng, was born to Chinese immigrant parents who moved to the United States to start a family. He grew up in a middle class, suburban city in central New Jersey as a minority in a predominantly Jewish-Caucasian community. Growing up, Jeff’s world was all about comic books, sports, music, streetwear, and sneakers. He followed athletes’ careers, the shoes they wore, and their collaborations with athletic and fashion brands. He was fascinated by the small differences in products like sneakers and jerseys and became an avid collector. Jeff explained that, more than the actual sport games, he was always interested in the players’ costumes and how they would be marketed. Knowing that his parents wouldn’t finance his shoe obsession, at 13 he took various odd jobs and bought all the newest sneakers from the local mall. Those sneakers were his prized possessions, and he kept them lined along the walls of their dining room on display. Jeff called himself an “extremely average” high school student—“I wasn’t a phenom grow-ing up in the slightest.” At his suburban pub-lic school the curriculum revolved around rote memorization, which Jeff was not interested in and did not excel at. While his parents dreamt of him being a doctor or a lawyer, it became evident that those were not viable paths for Jeff by high school. Back then, Jeff learned the most from his art teacher, Michael Reed, who taught him the difference between being good at tests and being intelligent. His teacher taught him the value of education and opened Jeff’s mind to what it meant to truly intake knowledge.

“My high school art teacher, Michael Reed, was really inspiring. He passed away my senior year, and it was his passion for education and art that pushed me to work even harder and pursue college. I was really into creative writing, but I didn’t think being a novelist could be a real job, so I took up journalism as the next best thing and got into NYU. There were a couple of Asian journalists, like Connie Chung, at the time so my parents were OK with it—if they saw an Asian person do-ing something successfully then they thought I could do it.”

At NYU, Jeff’s world changed drastically. After coming from an overwhelmingly white community, being in a school with a large Asian population helped him embrace his ethnic background. Jeff said he had an identity crisis throughout his adolescence. Out of the 1,600 students at his high school he was one of only three Asian kids. Until attending NYU, he was embarrassed to be Chinese. He didn’t like to speak Chinese or bring Chinese food for lunch. Being a minority among so many students, he was subject to bullying and racist remarks. At NYU he opened up and found he was proud to be Asian. He joined Asian student groups on campus, even those of countries he had no attachment to. He began to really under-stand the personal ramifications of racial ten-sion in the U.S. and reflected on his childhood relationship with race—a mediation that would lead him to success in the next few years. As a student at NYU, Jeff balanced his course work with his job clerking at a graphic design studio and other odd jobs. At his clerking job, his boss saw creative potential in him and began teaching Jeff how to use the Adobe Creative Suite programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc). Jeff says this was the first time he saw people making a living off of artistry and was enthralled. He decided he wanted a more creative education and tried to transfer to Parsons School of Design, but was not accepted due to his lack of formal art work. Luckily, Jeff found his way into some of the foundation 2D and life drawing courses offered at Parsons, and eventually got into Parsons’ Communication Design program where he excelled. Securing a solid foundation in digital programs, Jeff decided to try something more.

“My second year at Parsons I took a silk screening class and fell in love. I got tired of printing on posters and started printing on clothes. T-shirts and fashion are such a powerful vehicle of communication. If I gave my friend a piece of art printed on a shirt one day it could mean ten thousand people are seeing my design. I was sneaking into the lab at night to make them with a friend since the teacher only let us print on paper in class. Then on March 7, 1997, I was walking around Soho wearing a political shirt I made. A boutique manager asked about it and bought a dozen on the spot. It was my first order, and those 12 shirts sold out in a week. They doubled the order, then another store put in another one, and before you know it, I got a big order from Japan for 1,000 pieces. I knew I couldn’t make that many shirts breaking in at school anymore, so I decided to leave Parsons and pursue this clothing line thing.”

Jeff, shocked at the sudden success of his political designs, committed to the task of branding himself. He picked the name jeffstaple based on the nickname, “Staple,” that his friend made up for him. The success of his Staple clothing line led to Staple Design. Through his school internships, such as his internship at PNB Nation, Jeff learned that effective storytelling plays a vital roll in an artist’s success story. He explained that PNB taught him, “What separates the boys from the men is the ability to market an idea and tell a story.” He used these skills to make sure people were not only buying his designs, but buying a culture and a narrative.

One of his earliest clients was Fadar Magazine. Fadar sent Jeff to Japan to conduct research on the rarity and exclusivity of Japanese Nike products. For the article, Jeff designed layout, did research, and wrote the piece. After an influx of commissioned design work, Jeff released a collaboration with Nike with his signature Pigeon logo. Designed in 2003, the Pigeon Dunk Low took two years to be released in a limited run of 150 pairs. Focusing on the grit and energy of New Yorkers, the Pigeon Dunk was created as a symbol of the New York hustle and remains one of Jeff’s most key legacies. When the shoe came out in 2005, the ensuing frenzy to obtain a pair was dubbed the “Pigeon Riot” and introduced the public to the sneaker craze. Although there was no money spent on marketing the Pigeon Dunk, the shoe is one of the best known icons in streetwear through pure word of mouth. The shoe’s wholesale cost was $30 and sells for over $7,000 today.

While Jeff is considered an influencer, originator, and key opinion leader (KOL),
he has always found the biggest reward through hard work. Jeff explained, “Other people had to tell me I was an influencer. In 2010, someone at Nike told me they have a ranked chart of people who move the needle, called influencers, and I was in the top five. Whenever a company had any initiative that involved trying to capture the youth audience, Staple Design was the go-to.”

He now uses his extensive knowledge and success to guide up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. He said, “I would love to create platforms where young creatives can access everything I have learned and use that as a starting point so they don’t have to take a de-cade like me.” He thought of creating a podcast as a passion project and like many of his ideas, it quickly became internationally popular. The podcast, Business of HYPE, advises new creatives about the complicated world of design and entrepreneurship. Jeff’s drive to reach out to the next generation comes from his business’ innate connection to youth and youth culture. He explained that as creatives get older they tend to lose their energy and drive, but have decades of wisdom and experience. Young creatives have limitless drive, but little experience and knowledge. To Jeff, helping young people is a two-way street, as the young people bring the raw energy while he provides the insight. In the future, he hopes to be able to streamline communication between these two groups by finding an effective platform to broadcast information.

Lessons Learned from Quarantine

Designing for our New Normal

As interior designers, we design places where people want to live, work, and play. However, the COVID-19 crisis and the need for social distancing has led us to question—what happens when work, life, and play all collide in the same space?

Photo by Anton Grassl

By Tracy Dupont and Janine Byrne, Prellwitz Chilinski Associates

Historically, when we’ve created multifamily environments, we have designed smaller scale units enhanced with robust communal amenities, which now during quarantine have gone unused. Our new reality sheds fresh light on how to design spaces that can accommodate all of life’s twists and turns.

After a month of social distancing measures, we posed a simple question to our office of architects and interior designers in an effort to illuminate the shortcomings of the work/ home environment that have been uncovered while staying at home: “How have you altered your personal home space to best suit your current needs?” Though the results are anecdotal, themes arose that gave us a glimpse into how we can enhance our design to better accommodate for present and future needs.

Working from home comes with its challenges, which are exacerbated with the need to stay indoors even in our free time. Our co-workers employed small environmental changes, such as moving furniture to create makeshift office spaces, opening windows, and gathering houseplants, to try to create their ideal home environment. These simple changes can be translated into large scale design efforts, which combined with more scientific approaches, can help make our combined “live, work, play” spaces better.

Apartment Interiors, From the Outside In

Currently, apartments in urban settings are often smaller to increase density, with in-unit auxiliary spaces appearing only in larger dwellings. To balance the opportunity for work from home, and potential needs for social distancing, we should consider the usage mix in the standard apartments as well as the general look and feel we view as standard in design.

We can improve the look and feel starting from the outside in by increasing visible green space. Creative building massing and setbacks can make way for balconies and windows overlooking mid-level roof decks, gardens and broader vistas. We often use unique and memorable apartment views to help differentiate apartment concepts—improved access to daylight and overall apartment aesthetics will only become more desirable in the future.

Taking Cues from Micro-Units

Inside of apartment walls, change starts with flexible furniture. Designing in flexibility allows residents to make the space fit their needs, whatever they may be. We’re hired to design apartments sized from micro-units to 3-bedroom condos, each with their own challenges related to spatial needs. As the most challenging, micro-units offer significant lessons learned that can be applied to other unit types when attempting to maximize flexibility.

There are multiple techniques we use to create efficient use of space in micro-units, ranging from built-in storage, stacked beds, and nooks to create space for multiple usage while maximizing available floorspace. By using these techniques for future unit design, we can get the most out of apartment square footage. First, we can consider stacking and mounting furniture— we can ‘go up’. By wall mounting shelves, we create more floor space. Taller kitchen cabinets, hung higher, create more storage.

Though they are stationary, built in cabinets, bookcases, and furniture, give space for tenants’ personal furniture within the unit. A built-in desk combined with a bookcase creates a dedicated workspace. More unexpected elements, such as murphy beds, can add a bit of whimsy along with extra floor space.

In a micro-unit, we design everything to be functional. Hallways include storage, and former dead spaces (such as under the bed, and the corner of an apartment) make way for shelves and pull-out drawers. There’s a space for everything to reduce clutter, making the home a more inviting place to be.

Elements from micro-units can be used when building in privacy for any size apartment. Going forward, we imagine that apartment design will continue to move away from including dining rooms, and instead include multifunction ‘nooks,’ or workspaces tucked away for visual privacy. Using pocket doors instead of traditional swinging doors can maximize usable floor space, while creating separate rooms. Leaning away from the current standard of open concept design, we can design for multi-bedroom apartments to have generally separate common space (e.g. living room, kitchen) giving tenants places to hang out outside of their bedrooms.

Using techniques from micro-units, we can design apartments to maximize the potential of available space. Built in shelving, lofted beds, and convertible desks create flexibility in small spaces. Photo courtesy of PCA

Common Spaces Outside of Apartment Walls

The current era of social distancing has reinforced the necessity for flexible design of public spaces to ensure that they can meet our evolving needs. Modern urban apartment buildings are designed to include many communal amenities, such as libraries, demo kitchens, fitness, and work spaces. We will need to treat these spaces differently—more like health and wellness facilities— to ensure cleanliness. Until this point, we’ve designed communal spaces with warm materials such as reclaimed woods and soft cushions, that are not hyper-cleanable but rather aesthetically beautiful and comforting. We may need to revisit priorities in communal spaces, should the worldview on shared space change.

We need to build in the capability to sectionalize these communal spaces. Creating smaller, more modular amenity spaces will allow them to be cleaned as needed and closed to create space for social distancing. Small ‘think tanks’ or single- user work spaces can be used as places for tenants to get out of their apartments. In the future, the ratio of enclosed to open spaces should skew towards enclosed or enclosable. Small mitigations such as built-in sanitizing stations, and touchless technology where possible, can be integrated within shared spaces in attractive ways.

Taking cues from health and wellness facilities, we can design spaces with non-porous surfaces for easy cleanability, as well as natural viral and bacterial resistance, and mechanical systems that keep air from spreading contagions. For example, copper door handles can help reduce the spread of infections, as copper is inherently an anti-microbial product. Instead of a reclaimed wood work table, we may consider black metal, for easy cleanability. Advanced HVAC design & filtration systems within the walls and above the ceiling can help mitigate the spread of contaminants through the air between adjacent spaces.

Changes such as these clearly extend to all markets—office, retail, hospitality. The conversation about cleanliness and anti-microbial design will continue to evolve, with more solutions coming forward in the coming years. As designers, we intend to look toward changes in materials and industry.

Enclosed common spaces create private spaces outside of apartment walls. Common area amenities that combine open and closed areas allow residents to choose what suits their needs at the time. Photo courtesy of PCA

But What You Can Do in Your Home?

Clearly, the COVID-19 pandemic will affect all aspects of our lives. The extent of that effect is currently unknown, however we can reflect on lessons learned and evolve our best practices. In our own homes, we can make ourselves more comfortable by taking inspiration from what our coworkers did. Based on our team’s experiences, and lessons learned from many interior spaces designed for multifamily apartments, one could start by implementing the following changes:

• Adding a second monitor to your home computer or laptop 
• Setting up a video-friendly light source and background for video
• Creating sound control or mitigation with drapery and rugs • Gathering desktop organization tools— keeping things organized and separate
• Making the most out of underutilized corners and empty storage
• Bringing plants indoors to improve green space

By improving the interior design of our environments, we can make our homes more comfortable for all of life’s unexpected changes.

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