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Lee Moreau|Audio

January 28, 2025

Design As Discipline

Design changes you. People are changed by the act of designing. Engaging in this strange exercise both about creating new things and thinking about the world in different ways, allows you to transform in ways that sometimes aren’t predictable.

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On this episode of Design As you’ll hear from:

Mariana Amatullo is co-founder and former Vice president of the Designmatters department at ArtCenter College of Design. She is currently Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design. Her first monograph, Inflection Point: Catalytic Moments in Designers’ Lives, is forthcoming. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti is Design Director of Supernomal, a design studio that creates architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. She is also Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she runs The Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab). 

María Risueño is Lead Design Strategist at Other Tomorrows.

This episodes joins the wider conversation about who calls themself a designer, the impact that can have, and what that means.

In her upcoming monograph, Inflection Point: Catalytic Moments in Designers’ Lives, Mariana Amatullo is profiling celebrated designers and looking at their careers through the lens of purpose. It is an exploration, as she describes, of some of the most fundamental questions of the discipline of design:

How do we advocate for the value of design as a field of research and practice in non design fluent environments? How do we measure value? What is inspiring about this field is that it allows us to really address a lot of the social issues that we are contending with as human beings in a very vulnerable and interconnected planet.

Elizabeth Christoforetti shares a perspective informed as both an active practitioner and educator:

As we think about what it means to practice with design agency now, I think we have to think more broadly about what the tools, and techniques, and mechanics are by which we actually make change.

And, María Risueño reflects on the main takeaways from her conference presentation at the Design Research Society Conference, entitled “Expanding the Scope of Design”. She shares the main focus of that conversation:

Saying that if everything is designed, nothing is designed —that's a risk. I think that's also a unique opportunity for design to get in places where it hasn't been part of the conversation and and a tool that people not trained as designers are actually going to be able to use. And I think the collaboration part of this conversation is really exciting.

Transcript

Lee Moreau Welcome to Design As, a show that’s intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. This season, we’re bringing you six new episodes with six new keywords to interrogate. This episode, you’ll be hearing three different design voices speak to the idea of design as discipline. I’m Lee Moreau, host of The Futures Archive from Design Observer, Founding Director of Other Tomorrows and Professor of practice and design at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design, which hosted the 2024 Design Research Society conference earlier this summer. There I got the chance to sit down with various guests, leaders and speakers who are attending the conference, and we’ve compiled their voices into this episode about design as discipline. It’s a roundtable in three parts. On this episode, you’ll hear from Marianna Amatullo—

Mariana Amatullo The craft of the discipline, that the deep knowledge of the discipline, its connection to empathy, to questions about how humans connect with each other in this space. You know, in the moment of genAI, all of that is coming to the forefront. And so there’s a lot of new work to be done. 

Lee Moreau Elizabeth Christoforetti—

Elizabeth Christoforetti As I’ve been going back and looking through history about how design disciplines have changed over time, they’re always changing in relationship to moments of extreme complexity. 

Lee Moreau And Maria Risueño—

Maria Risueño In areas of our society and academia industry, all of it —that was not— designed was basically not that’s not where design started. And in a way, it feels like the scope is expanding and more people are calling themselves designers than than in the past. 

Lee Moreau This conversation about design as discipline is interesting to me because it was clear from some of these conversations that design changes you, that people are changed by the act of designing. That engaging in this strange exercise both about creating new things and thinking about the world in different ways, allows you to transform in ways that sometimes aren’t predictable. And one of the central questions or conversations that’s been happening in the last few years is who gets to be a designer? Who gets to call themself a designer? What does that mean? And while I think this is a very rich conversation and there are lots of different perspectives, I think there’s some essential definitions around the difference between designing for self and designing for others, and the kind of professionalism that that requires and understanding that balance, both as a professional, as an academic and as a person, is really important as we engage the world day to day. And I think that’s a conversation that should be happening a lot more in in the practice and in the education of a designer. But it doesn’t happen as much as it should. And it was lovely hearing some of these reflections about design as a practice and a discipline coming out of this conference. 

Lee Moreau I’m here with Mariana Amatullo here in Northeastern University’s recording studio. It’s June 24th, the first day of the conference. And there are a lot of, let’s say, familiar faces from Design Observer who are here. You’re one of the voices. Mariana Amatullo is also the vice provost and academic dean for continuing professional education at Parsons School of Design. You’re a practitioner, scholar, an academic administrator, a design strategist. And I follow you social media — and you’re like seemingly at every conference that’s taking place. What particularly excites you about this week? 

Mariana Amatullo I think the framing. Interested in, you know, how we are framing and reframing themes that have been around for others that are emerging with more force in institutions around the world. I’m about to spend a month writing and spending time with a book that I’ve been doing research on for the last year. So—. 

Lee Moreau What are you working on? 

Mariana Amatullo This is important. 

Lee Moreau What’s it all about? 

Mariana Amatullo Yeah. So the working title of the book is Inflection Point: Catalytic Moments in Designers Lives. And I’m profiling about 35 very celebrated designers from around the world whose careers have been defined by purpose. And so I’m asking questions about design leadership, about social innovation, which, as you know, is the field of my research for the last 25 years. And so having this opportunity to hear from colleagues about how they’re thinking about the lenses that are driving purpose in their own research is something that I’m very excited about. 

Lee Moreau I mean, there’s a million topics you could take on, but why did you settle on this notion of purpose? Why was this the topic that’s going to define this next chapter of your career? 

Mariana Amatullo You know, this book is my first monograph. As you know, I’ve been editing books about design and social innovation for years now and coming out of, you know, 20 years or so of leadership with design matters that are center and a very socially driven practice out of Parsons. The book continues, sort of exploring one of my obsessions, which is how do we advocate for the value of design as a field of research and practice in non design fluent environments? How do we measure value? What is inspiring about this field that allows us to really address a lot of the social issues that we’re contending with as human beings in a very vulnerable and interconnected planet. 

Lee Moreau You just use the word fluency or fluent. But I’m wondering, since there’s so many contexts that we enter where we’re like, you’re questioning the fluency, right? Like, that’s like, that’s a huge topic. 

Mariana Amatullo It is. And, you know, as an educator, it’s something that I’ve I’m always confronted with. Designers, and, you know, I teach in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, where we’re training a next generation of leaders in design to really shape design arguments in companies and nonprofits and government. And they’re often having to be very persuasive and effective with non design fluent colleagues, Right? So that developing that argument in ways that are potent, that are effective, that are data driven, becomes very important. So it’s it’s a recurrent theme for me as a as a researcher. 

Lee Moreau And is there a historical moment that you could look back on that where you’d say like, there was a period where the there was a sense of fluency everywhere and we’ve sort of lost it. Are we trying to regain something? 

Mariana Amatullo That’s a good question. You know, I think that the field of design is still a very young field compared to other disciplines. 

Lee Moreau That makes me feel good. 

Mariana Amatullo It’s still a young field and there’s, of course, been this moment of the design thinking sort of explosion and that that space in business design conquering, so to speak, that space. And we have seen the era of the chief design officer, right. And and these big design teams being built at IBM and other places. And now we’re in a moment of flux. Right? We’re in a moment to a lot of folks and friends like Robert Fabricant and others are writing about this. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Mariana Amatullo How that space is no more. And so I think it’s an interesting moment of change and where, again, the craft of the discipline, but the deep knowledge of that discipline, its connection to empathy, to questions about how humans connect with each other in this space, you know, in the moment of genAI, all of that is coming to the forefront. And so there’s a lot of new work to be done. 

Lee Moreau In this moment of change, which I acknowledge, and I think Fabricant’s series of essays are, I mean, very clear and spot on. It’s also an opportunity, right? So as we look to the future and, you know, I think he’s put out a couple of suggestions about where things could go or where we need to be paying attention. But you as an educator, where are you focused? 

Mariana Amatullo I am very focused on the question of rigor and craft. And, you know, I always say that strategic design is a way of crafting new arguments and decision making in a potent way. And I think it’s very important for this next generation of designers to be very clear on what the tools are out there, how they can manage them, but also be clear that, you know, the tools will continue to change, right. So this explosion of technology is definitely changing how we practice. And it’s important to be at the driver’s seat. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Mariana Amatullo So I’m really focusing on this question of leadership and rigor and that vertical right in that team. 

Lee Moreau Mariana, it was wonderful spending time with you. Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you at the conference. 

Mariana Amatullo Thank you so much. Lee. Wonderful to be part of your series. Thank you for the invitation. 

Lee Moreau Thank you. 

Lee Moreau Today we’re at Harvard University, and I’m here with Elizabeth Christoforetti. We’re recording in the SEAS Building. Elizabeth Christoforetti ,is the founding principle of Supernormal, an architecture, urban design and research practice. She’s also a professor of practice in architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Elizabeth, you sort of have one foot in academia and one foot in practice. How do you balance that? 

Elizabeth Christoforetti It’s complicated. 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti /laughs/ I think it’s completely worthwhile and really hard. I mean, you know, on one hand, you wake up in the morning on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you walk in and you think about history and theory and pedagogy. How do we teach and how do we make sure that we’re responding with research to the imperatives of our time. And on the other days you wake up in the morning and that usually includes Saturdays and Sundays too, and you have to say: Okay, well, how do I apply all of that and how do I make it relevant so that we can really make the change in the world that we want to see? So I think having those two sides of the coin is-is incredibly important. And to me, the moment that we’re in is this incredible inflection point that we get to play both sides of that and really new and interesting ways. 

Lee Moreau So what’s the project at Supernormal that maybe perhaps couldn’t have happened before because of some of the things that you’re using or exploring in-on the academic side? 

Elizabeth Christoforetti Yeah, that’s a great question. So I always think about the projects that we do in Supernormal as the things that are supported by people who can pay us. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti So people who are going to, for some reason, 

Lee Moreau That’s clear, yeah. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti Profit from the work or in the public sector, you know, are going to be able to advance a kind of political or policy related ambition. Whereas the projects that I pursue in my lab, which is called the Values or the Built Environment —Laboratory for the Values in the Built Environment, are the things that maybe don’t have a clear profit, that they’re driven by value systems that aren’t necessarily supported in the private sector or are testing out things that feel a little bit too risky for the public sector. There is an interesting project that happens to flip between those two sides. It started off in practice and it was a neighborhood plan. Seems like a very straightforward thing for the city of Boston. A lot of recommendations came out of it. My firm was responsible for using some interesting technology in geospatial analysis and some data to take a really close look at what the needs of housing were in a neighborhood called Mattapan. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti It is an historically black and immigrant community that has an incredibly high rate of homeownership. And so we were trying to figure — out this is a cool market— how do we enable really good housing that’s contemporary and that serves the needs of the people there? Many multigenerational households, for instance, but allows people to increase their equity in the neighborhood such that when the market flips, there is less displacement of the people who have been there for generations and more naturally occurring housing for the nieces and nephews and single mother households of the families that are already there. So in practice, at Supernormal, we made a lot of recommendations, we did what we think are some smart designs for prototypes of very small scale houses and other things. And when it was all said and done, the city ended up adopting a few of those very few. One of them was something called additional dwelling units or accessory dwelling units. And so it went off into the world and they changed zoning and policy and some programing.

Lee Moreau Which is not easy. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti Even though it’s hard, changing all of that is easier than actually enabling people to pick up that policy and create new dwelling units or new houses on the other side. Because permitting is hard and these things are expensive. And unless you’re operating at, you know, 200% of the area median income and you have a lot of money swishing around, you can’t afford it. So for all of that policy change, we couldn’t get anything done. All right. So now here we are. It’s 2024, and we’re looking back on our recommendations from 2022 and saying, well, that was great, but not so effective. And there isn’t really anyone that’s going to pay us to solve this problem. So we pulled that into the Laboratory for the Values and the Built Environment, the Vibe Lab. It’s the geekiest name ever, and I love it. And we said, All right, here’s the problem setup. We know that policy is there. We can put these new small homes, these additional dwelling units in the back of somebodies house, and we can help them to age in place to allow for their nieces and nephews to live there. But what are the real problems? Why aren’t these things actually being built and what are the mechanisms that we need to be solving for them? So we did a lot of analysis. We actually did partner with a variety of cities, a variety of departments within the city. So Mayor’s Office of Housing, the Boston Planning and Development Association, Mayor’s Office of Urban Mechanics, the Housing Innovation Lab. So this is a talk about policy, you know, innovation. This is now working across departments to try to figure out how to solve an incredibly complex and multi-pronged social and technological problem with multiple stakeholders within city government. So we’re working with the city government. We also went out and did a series of interviews in the world and we discovered,  that there were some design things that architects would normally solve. There were still some problems to be solved, like we had to figure out some construction type issues and how to solve for like fire access and stuff. But really the barriers to entry were financing. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti So we realized that unless we designed new instruments to finance these houses, no houses would be built. So there would be no architecture unless the architects got with the banks and decided to design financing. Long story short, here we are a year into that project and we have convened eight banks with the city of Boston. We have convened a number of local contractors and manufactured home companies, and we are now in the process of developing new term sheets for new financing that will then get linked into a set of easily approved designs. So the things that we would normally do and that are also redesigning the permitting process. So that’s a lot of stuff. But really the conclusion here is that, you know, nothing was enough alone. We really had to operate outside of our traditional silos as architects and think about the role that we play in policy and even financial design in order to be leaders to really solve this problem. 

Lee Moreau Designing financing doesn’t sound like the sexiest design problem, but the outcome is pretty compelling. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti I mean, it’s like even less sexy than values for the built —. 

Lee Moreau /laugh/. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti The values, what I can’t even remember the name of it. 

Lee Moreau So what is the name of your lab again? /laughs/

Elizabeth Christoforetti Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment. 

Lee Moreau Vibe Lab is easier. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti To Vibe Lab. Yeah. Vibe Lab. So, no, it’s not. But when you bring together the banks and you really start having the conversations, you realize that actually, the banks want to help too. But they don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to connect the dots. A lot of this work had originated out of some work I was doing with Fannie Mae of all groups, you know, between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they own about 99% of mortgages in America. And we realized that there were no mortgages available for homes that were not considered single-family or multifamily. So that means no additional dwelling units, and that means no 2 or 3 family mortgages. So when we start to talk to the banks, you realize they care a lot. They actually want to find a way and they’re in fact compelled to do so by the government through some regulatory measures. But they can’t quite figure out how to connect the dots and fulfill the mission that they’re required to fulfill to help communities with these mortgages. So it was kind of fascinating. I mean, in the end, I think it was more of a connecting exercise and anything else. I’m certainly not an expert in finance, but it’s been great to hear how passionate our colleagues in banking are about doing the same things we are, but with very different tools. 

Lee Moreau What does this story make you think about the future of design or where we are, or what the potential is? 

Elizabeth Christoforetti You know, I think about this all the time through the very narrow lens of how do I teach architects what it means to practice design. And I think what it used to mean to practice architecture was something very, very specific. If you wanted to change the built environment you had, go find a client and you would design a building and it would be remarkable. You had an enormous amount of agency and autonomy over what that building looked like and how it would be and operate and impact the world. And that’s just not the world we live in anymore. We live in a world where our buildings are designed by real estate investment trusts and regulatory infrastructure, such as zoning code, which, you know, I also design and building code. It can feel like buildings are designing themselves. And so as we think about what it means to practice with design agency now, I think we have to think more broadly about what the, the tools and techniques and mechanics are by which we actually make change. Now, if you still want to design architectural details, there’s a place for you, right? But if more holistically, what you want to do is transform society through the built environment, we have to look upstream and start thinking about operating not only at the scale of a single project, but also at the scale of policy and finance and technology. 

Lee Moreau So I’ve been asking everyone sort of where they see the future of design, but I’m going to frame it a little differently for you, which is like when you think about the future of design, is it a process of zooming in or zooming out or something in between? Because it seems like you’re actually going in both directions at the same time? 

Elizabeth Christoforetti We have to hold in our hands and in our heads the capacity to have deep expertise in something and then rapidly zoom out and understand where it’s relevant. I’ve been doing a little bit of writing lately on on this kind of moment and where design practice lives right now. And as I’ve been going back and looking through history about how design disciplines have changed over time, they’re always changing in relationship to moments of extreme complexity. So the Industrial Revolution, The Enlightenment, right? These kind of moments when everything is thrown up in the air and nobody knows how to respond to it. Like we had Victorian architecture as the first response, right? Like, I feel like we’re in that moment again. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti We’re at this incredible moment of complexity, and I think that design is kind of, you know, bunching together. It’s both everything and nothing at once. And my hope, my, like, critically optimistic hope is that it’s going to start to recombine and coalesce into slightly different disciplines than we have right now. I mean, at the end of the day, even if we look at the disciplines of the built environment in my own institution at Harvard, they’re very strictly defined by scale. But in reality, when you start to add data into the equation, like scale doesn’t become as relevant as other ways of being connected or of of operating. 

Lee Moreau Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for taking the time to speak with me. 

Elizabeth Christoforetti Thank you so much, Lee 

Lee Moreau Design as is a podcast from Design Observer. Check out another one of the podcasts from Design Observer, The Design of Business The Business of Design, which is back for its 12th season this year. 

Ellen McGirt DBD is going into its 12th season. My goodness, it seems like a lifetime. We have a wonderful sponsor in Deloitte and it’s given us a lot of leeway to dig in and do some excellent reporting. I’m going to be a solo host this year, which is going to be new for me, but gives me time to get more guests on the air. And we’re very much focused on the heady business of equity. And I know that this is a word that’s not in favor at the moment, and there’s lots of lots of conversations about race and justice and inclusion and diversity, which I think is really a distraction from the bigger job of what business should be. So we’re really focusing on the people who are redesigning business for equity and how that can work. And where it can be helpful and joyful work as well. So tune in in January when we launch again. 

Lee Moreau You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Lee Moreau I’m here with Maria Risueño, recording at the SEAS Building at Harvard University on June 25th. Maria is a senior design strategist at Other Tomorrows where we work together. Hi, Maria. It’s great to see you and spend time in the booth with you. 

Maria Risueño Excited to be here. 

Lee Moreau So, Maria, you are —we know each other very well. You were a student at MIT while I was teaching there many years ago. And then you are now senior design strategist at Other Tomorrows, which is a studio where we work together,. 

Maria Risueño Yes. 

Lee Moreau Which is amazing. And we do all kinds of cool projects. But you did other things here at the conference, so tell us why you were here participating. 

Maria Risueño Yes. So what brought me — what brought us here because I was leaving the session with with you Lee, yesterday was a collaboration, a partnership with Swissnex, in basically trying to understand what’s happening in the field of design. Why Morningside Academy at MIT is happening and what the future holds for for the design and all the practitioners that are here today. So we were working on a project, a qualitative research project last year in the last 18 months, and we got the opportunity to present that. We had a great conversation yesterday. 

Lee Moreau And it was a packed room. 

Maria Risueño Yes. 

Lee Moreau It was standing room only, actually. What was where did the conversation center itself or a couple of things that people were interested in. 

Maria Risueño Yes. So I think something that was really interesting in the session was the fact that the session was, the title of the session was The Expanding Scope of Design, and the fact that design seems to be pervasive and taking place in in areas of our society and academia, industry, all of it that was not design was basically not that’s not where design started. And in a way, it feels like the scope is expanding and more people are calling themselves designers than than in the past. One of the quotes that was brought up yesterday during the session was was from someone at M.I.T., from Skyler Tibbits, who I think they said: If everything is design, if everyone is the designer, then really nothing is designed because that’s and that’s really a risk, right? We we really need to take a step back and think about how do we articulate the value of design and what really makes a designer, what type of value design brings to the table and what is unique about that. Just because the way democratization of the tools, really, it’s a kind of a risk towards the the practice and the academia. 

Lee Moreau I mean, if everything is design then nothing is design, I mean, that’s going to be provocative from both sides. So, right. The formalists are going to be like: Yeah, obviously that’s not design at all. And on the other side, there’s a lot of people that consider themselves design researchers don’t identify as designers. 

Maria Risueño Yes. 

Lee Moreau So many people in that room where I’m kind of on both sides or on either side. Did that heat up as well or did that how did that land in the room? 

Maria Risueño I think we another theme that came to that point, Lee, the notion of trust, like how could someone in the room mention that and in design education students, academics need to show a level of trust, unprecedented levels of trust in the sense that students need to come in understanding what am I going to get out of this education and academics and teachers and educators need to be able to articulate that value in the shifting landscape. And that’s something we we felt that was very present in the conversation. But to your point, you were saying that if everything is designed, nothing is designed, That’s a risk. I think that’s also a unique opportunity for the setting to get in places where it hasn’t been part of the conversation and and a tool that people not trained as designers are actually going to be able to use. And and I think the collaboration part of this conversation is really exciting. 

Lee Moreau Where do you feel you are in your own journey as a designer? You’ve come recently from academia and now you’re a senior design strategist at Other Tomorrows. Tell us about your journey, your process. 

Maria Risueño Where I am in the process, I think this goes back to also when you’re in a design project. I mean, I’m trying to approach my career, my journey, as designer. As if  it was a design project. It really is, right? And I think the the mantra that I’m trying to repeat myself, I have I love mantras. The number one mantra that I love is eventually everything connects — people, places, ideas. Eventually everything connects. So I think, where am I in the process? I think— I did this exercise of mapping all the people that I know, the places that I’ve been, and it’s a starting to like connect, but you don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s the second mantra, right? And I think being here, I’m learning about people, institutions, tracks that I that I even know about, and especially working as a designer. Every client, every industry is a new talent and you learn skills. And I think when you put those two together, it’s when magic happens because everything is connected. And then you meet that person who’s going to become your mentor or who’s going to become your leader, that’s going to propel you forward. And I think I’m trying to make those connections right now in where I am in the process. 

Lee Moreau So I want to talk about the future. When you think about the future and where design is going, what gets you excited? 

Maria Risueño We’re seeing people approach design with a sense of agency and a sense of experimentation that I-I think it’s very exciting. What I’m trying to say, I really admire graphic designers, brand designers, architects who create their own version of the discipline, and they create their own niche or they create their own practice within a discipline and they’re able to kind of invent or create a new world around that topic. And, you know, that is expansive that that sense of, okay, graphic design is this, I’m going to I’m going to create and build a new way of doing things that is going to define that discipline and is going to actually separated from others. And I think some of the trends we talked about yesterday in the session or we’re hearing about in this conference, I think we’re starting to see that happen right now, whether that’s in graphic design, in UX, in spatial design. 

Lee Moreau Maria, it was wonderful spending time with you. Thank you so much for taking time out of the conference, but also for everything that we’ve been able to collaborate on together. So grateful. 

Maria Risueño Thank you. Thank you, Lee. 

Lee Moreau Thanks again to Mariana Amatullo, Elizabeth Christoforetti, and Maria Risueño for taking the time to sit down with me. Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at Design observer dot com slash Design As. You can always find design ads on any podcaster of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know, write us a review, share it with a friend, and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer Special thanks to Maxine Philavong at the Northeastern Recording Studio and Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt. This episode was mixed by Judybelle Camangyan. Design As is produced by Adina.