Design for an Empathic World: Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self - Hardcover

Van Der Ryn, Sim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1610914260 ISBN 13: 9781610914260

Publisher: Island Press, 2013

Synopsis

Despite an uncertain economy, the market for green building is exploding. The US green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double in size by 2015 (from $42 billion in construction starts to $135 billion). But green-building pioneer Sim Van der Ryn says, “greening” our buildings is not enough.  He advocates for “empathic design”, in which a designer not only works in concert with nature, but with an understanding of and empathy for the end user and for ones self.  It is not just one of these connections, but all three that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

Sim’s lifelong focus has been in shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. Instead of thinking about design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with—everything from buildings to wireless routing—he advocates for a focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. Basic design must include a real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. Understanding ones motivations and spirituality, Sim believes, is critical to designing with empathy for natural and human communities.

In Design for an Empathic World Van der Ryn shares his thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. With a focus on the strengths and weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings he looks at promising trends and projects that demonstrate how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Architects, urban designers, and students of architecture will all enjoy this beautifully illustrated book drawing on a rich and revered career of a noted leader in their field. The journey described in Design for an Empathic World will help to inspire change and foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.

About this title

About the Author

Sim Van der Ryn is President of The Ecological Design Collaborative, a design and consulting practice providing comprehensive services though the non-profit Ecological Design Institute established in 1969. He has been at the forefront of integrating ecological principles into the built environment, creating multi-scale solutions driven by nature’s intelligence for over 40 years. Sim has served as California’s first energy-conscious State Architect, authored seven influential books, including Ecological Design, and won numerous honors and awards for his leadership and innovation in architecture and planning including a Fellowship of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (1997); Rockefeller Scholar in Residence, Bellagio, Italy (1997 and 2013); a Commendation for Excellence in Technology, California Council American Institute of Architects (1981); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971). He is an adjunct architecture faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Design for an Empathic World

Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self

By Sim Van der Ryn, Francine Allen

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Sim Van der Ryn
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-426-0

Contents

Preface: A Journey to Connect with the Natural World, 
Foreword: A Sustained Awakening of the Human Heart, 
Watercolors, 
Chapter 1: Introduction, 
Chapter 2: Human-Centered Design, 
Chapter 3: Nature-Centered Design, 
Chapter 4: Lifetime Learning Design, 
Chapter 5: Opportunities for Empathic Design, 
Chapter 6: Journey to the Inner Self and Outer World, 
Notes, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The salvation of the human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.

—Václav Havel

In the fall of 2008 after the beginnings of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, I started getting frantic calls and e-mails from both young and seasoned architects who'd been laid off and also a smaller number of communications from people who worked on Wall Street—mostly young but also some more senior people. I'm not sure why they contacted me—the architects might have known about me or read my books—certainly not the Wall Streeters, whom I did ask, "Why are you calling me?" Their answer was that they were referred to me by mutual friends.

My response took me back to backpacking experiences. Occasionally, when I was backpacking alone in western wilderness mountain areas, I would get lost. I had maps but GPS was yet to be invented. My first response was panic. Then I would sit down quietly and breathe slowly into my core, a place I now call "the inner self"—a sanctuary to go into when one is in difficult times. I would breathe, shut down my frantic mind, and follow the wordless intuition, which emerged from deep within my core.

My reply to those who contacted me was, "When you feel lost, throw away your mental maps and find a safe place, a sanctuary within yourself where your deepest self and inner truth lives." Some of my correspondents would stutter and end the conversation right there. Others would ask if they could visit me at my home on the rural coast of Northern California, and I met with quite a few.

I suddenly found myself acting as a life guide. Why was I willing to do this? I'm a member of the "Lucky Generation" born during the Great Depression of the 1930s who came into the workforce in the 1950s as America began a period of tremendous expansion and growth following World War II. When I graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan in 1958, I had lots of job offers, and not because I had been an exceptional student. Gordon Bunshaft, chief of design at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, then the top corporate firm in the country, offered me a job in New York. Touring the drafting room, I was dazed by the sight of more than a hundred men in white shirts and ties hunched over their drafting boards.

This was not for me. I flew to San Francisco and found many smaller offices that were hiring. After a few years completing my internship, I started teaching in the architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, and also started an office with a high school friend from New York, Sanford Hirshen. In my academic career, I was mentored in my work by department chairs and deans who were very supportive of my interests, even though they didn't fit into the mainstream architectural program at the time. Our young firm did significant work in low-cost and innovative housing and we had great clients.

When the calls came in from desperate young architects in 2008, I knew it was time to do what I could for other designers who did not live in a time as generous, optimistic, and supportive of innovation as my contemporaries and I had.

I feel gratitude toward an empathic older generation that nurtured and guided me as a young architect and teacher. My generation and the post-World War II baby boomers that followed have the opportunity to enable today's younger generation in their lives, which are more difficult than ours were. That is a task we should be grateful to accept as our legacy to a younger generation. As we get older, we hopefully feel ourselves more deeply living the truth of our inner selves; and sharing that with a new generation is something we can give to those who will follow us.

In this book, I share my thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. I focus on both the strengths and the weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings with a critical eye and suggest how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Mine has been a long journey. As Steve Jobs said, "You can only connect [the dots] looking backwards." The biggest lessons I've learned relate to caring for others and being true to myself. Carlos Casteneda once said, "Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't then it is of no use to us."

My lifetime focus has been shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. We now think of design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with: buildings, transportation, automobiles and highways, trains and buses, airplanes and airports, oil and natural gas lines, electricity, water and sewer systems, phones, computers, TV and radios. There is little focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. There is still little thought given within design professions to how someone will use a space or a building. The design brief or program is generally prepared by the client and defined mostly in terms of square foot requirements for different uses. Basically, design leaves out any real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. How many office workers would voluntarily choose to spend their working lives in windowless cubicles? Although it seems like common sense, the field of post-occupancy evaluation that I helped to found in the 1970s is still not broadly accepted. Post-occupancy evaluation uses observation and interviews as tools to uncover how occupants actually use and respond to the designed environments they live and work in.

This disconnect from end use allows designers to design without empathy for humans, to separate the work from themselves, and still too often, to design without empathy for the natural environment. It is not just one of these connections, but all three—to self, to others, and to nature—that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

At a time when the gap between the wealthy and the poor is expanding, we're faced with the possibility of peak oil, increasing incidents of human-induced as well as natural disasters (many as a result of or exacerbated by climate change), and challenges to strong in-person community networks brought about by more time in cyberspace than public space. We need to takes steps to reconnect design to the human and natural elements that are being lost at great expense. Design is much more than ratios, regulations, and beautiful 3D models. The way we approach design has implications for human and natural networks and the future of our planet.

Integrating the design of human systems and natural systems for the benefit of humans and the living world is ecological design, an important addition to our design toolbox. (This is the topic of one of my earlier books, Ecological Design, with Stuart Cowan.) But including the very important integration of connection to humans (self and others) is what I am calling empathic design. Empathy is learned and practiced through direct experience and awareness that there is life beyond the physical, material world.

A silent player in design is the structure of the human brain, which has not changed since humans joined the earth. Our brains are wired so we can instantly respond to immediate short-term threats, but not to long-term threats that we cannot experience directly. Empathic design implies thinking ahead, integrating probable future risks such as oceans rising, temperatures rising, soils declining in fertility, chemical pollution of water. Empathic design should consider both the precautionary principle as well as the law of unintended consequences.

Many people are not aware they have an inner self that shelters their deepest truths. We live in a fast-moving information-overload culture where people are encouraged to project their image of themselves, their persona—in the workplace and through social media.

MIT technology scientist Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other takes a hard look at how new technologies designed to bring us closer together are driving us further from each other and from ourselves. We don't find our deeper inner selves on our smart phones, texting, social networks, or in Internet conferences.

I'm not suggesting that we return to the Stone Age, but that we understand the implications of technology on design and community. New technology has provided enormous benefits to design and facilitated the creation of communities online as well as in person. But online communities and our thirst for a constant stream of information on a device should not replace human interaction. It was the mechanization of the world that separated design from its human and natural roots, and part of the reason design is now faced with a pressing need to become more humane—to become empathic.

When did design enter the human story? Early humans made simple tools of stone and wood to pound plants and seeds to eat, kill game for food, skin animal hides for clothing, make fire, and paint themselves and their caves with pictures of animals. Agriculture is the mother of architecture. Agriculture created hierarchical systems of power and control that served wealth and power, and five thousand years later, that is still architecture's major purpose and client base.

Sigfried Giedion's monumental work Mechanization Takes Command meticulously examines the history of mechanization and its effects. He begins with designs to eliminate handcraft in building, agriculture, and homemaking. He recounts the development of the mass assembly line, created first to disassemble pigs and cattle, and later to assemble automobiles. The book was published in 1948, before today's totally computerized robotic assembly lines. The larger picture we are left with is that the design of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Industrial Revolution resulted in the disassembly of the living organic world and the assembly of a mechanical world.

How do we reassemble or reconnect the built world to the human and natural worlds? Change in our design professions and practice, and in all of our institutions will come when enough people have empathy for other people and all forms of life. In Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, Don Juan instructs his students to walk as long as it takes in the desert until they find their spot, the place where they feel truly at home. I used this same approach in community design projects located in natural landscapes, instructing participants to walk in silence until they found the place that felt best to them. Usually, after some hours, we'd find people clustered in the same place—an example of discovering an empathic relation between self and place in nature.

In this book I do not address specific solutions for reforming society's institutions. My hope is that my journey and experience can provide inspiration and a path for moving toward more empathic design.

I follow this chapter with a focus on the practice of human-centered design, which was very much in focus during the social revolution of the 1960s and since then largely neglected. Following that, I explore design education, its strengths and weaknesses, and call for integrating hands-on design experiences early into a child's education. Next, I discuss nature-centered design, which is finally being welcomed as vital to responsible design today. That leads to a discussion of the possible opportunities for moving toward more empathic design. I close with a view of the journey toward one's inner self, where we each find our deepest truth and fullest heart.

I hope that this book will inspire collaboration within and across disciplines—that it will help to foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.

Ernest Callenbach, the author of Ecotopia, who died in the spring of 2012, left a wise and beautiful epistle on his computer shortly before his death. These excerpts capture the challenges and the hope for our future. "We are facing a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.... We live in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap oil based consumer capitalist expansionism.... How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it? Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse.... Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival skills are cooperative, good at teamwork, altruistic, mindful of the common good.... Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value."

CHAPTER 2

Human-Centered Design

The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.

—Cesar Chavez

In 1964, President Johnson pushed through the Economic Opportunity Act, the centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Governor Pat Brown appointed Dr. Paul O'Rourke, a longtime advocate for improving farmworker living conditions, as director of the new agency, California Office of Economic Opportunity. O'Rourke chose as its highest priority improving housing, health care, and child care for migrant farm labor families in California's Central Valley, where most of the US vegetable crops are grown. He retained my partner Sanford Hirshen and me to plan, design, and build facilities for migrant farmworker housing, health and child care in twenty-two rural counties. There were no building codes for farmworker housing. How could you write a code for families camping out under a bridge, sleeping in their cars, or living in an abandoned shack where a labor contractor stuffed as many workers as possible? Our assignment was not only to design and build the facilities, but also to find and secure the sites, which neither the counties nor the farmers were eager to provide. The industry needed tens of thousands of workers during the growing season and harvest times, but they didn't want them living in their backyards.

We searched for suitable building systems for both housing and separate health care and child care facilities. We also had to design infrastructure for each 100-home camp, including electricity, water, and sewer lines. We came up with a simple, straightforward system for the homes. We took two sheets of plywood, bonded them to a two-inch slab of Styrofoam, placed a two-by-four at either end, and we had a simple sturdy system for walls and roof. We didn't know it at the time, but we had invented the first version of what are now known as SIP, or structurally integrated panels, and widely used in high-performance building projects. We provided each family with living and sleeping space, bath, and kitchen at a cost of less than $5 per square foot.

Between 1964 and 1974, we designed and built thirty-three camps to shelter migrant farmworkers and their families in California. Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy's brother-in-law and director of the nationwide OEO program, and Robert Kennedy both visited the camps with great interest. Farmworker leader Cesar Chavez was in favor of farmworkers developing their own communities, and we supported that effort. Yet, forty years later, in spite of these efforts and interest from high-profile political figures, the lack of suitable housing, health care, and child care for service workers remains a largely unresolved problem across the country. While advances have been made in some aspects of human-centered design, more significant changes in the field of architecture may be necessary to become truly empathic.

Richard Farson, a psychologist, founder of the California Institute of the Arts and former board member of the American Institute of Architects, forthrightly addresses the issue of architects' seeming unwillingness to become advocates for users of their products. In his 2008 book The Power of Design, which was praised by many leaders in the design fields, Farson asks, "Is design a profession or a business? I think most designers would answer 'both' because they are not aware of the differences, let alone any ethical incompatibility between the two. Because in recent years architecture and design have become far more business than profession and because designers believe the corporate world is where their financial futures lie, they have come to share the values of that world. No longer do they expect to fulfill the social responsibilities they may once have cared about most. The results of our designs almost always affect the public, and so the consequences of any such compromise are actually borne by the public. As currently practiced, architecture and design are not essential because they are more business than profession."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Design for an Empathic World by Sim Van der Ryn, Francine Allen. Copyright © 2013 Sim Van der Ryn. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1610914260
• ISBN 13: 9781610914260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192