“We largely educate our students according to a medical-model of practice, in which designers mostly work with individual clients, as doctors do with individual patients, to develop custom solutions to site-specific problems. As we have seen in the emergency medical response in Haiti, that approach works best when dealing with people in need of intensive and immediate care; but medical doctors have much less to offer the broader population, whose long-term needs involve sanitation, clean water, and safe and secure shelter… A prevention-oriented model of design practice would involve a more entrepreneurial way of operating, in which architects would not wait for commissions to come to them, but would instead proactively approaches communities or even entire countries with appropriate and affordable ideas of how to avoid the next likely disaster.”
Excerpted from a fascinating article over at Design Observer… it’s worth the time to read the whole piece.
