DESIGN CORPS
Design Corps 2243 The Circle, Raleigh, NC 27608 Bryan Bell, Founder & Executive Director Victoria Ballard Belll, Architect Katie Wakeford, Architectural Designer & Assistant Editor Marie Schacht, Design Corps Fellow
Beth Chute: Director Marcus Hurley: Evan Supcoff: Director Director Board of Directors Jeremy Jepson: Laura Shipman: Drew Kepley: Melissa Tello Poole: Jim Hamrick: Steve Weinstein: Director President Director Director Treasurer/Secretary Director Cara Mae Cirignano: Director Evan Harrel: Director Motives/Ambition Design Corps aims to produce positive change for communities in need by providing architecture and planning services. In line with Carla Landa’s definition of ‘Activism’ in the course’s critical lexicon, they implement policy and actions that are “vigorous” in their “campaigning to bring about political or social change.” (Landa, Critical Lexicon) Design Corps engages the public by allowing people of a given community to be involved in making decisions while designing. Through the design and construction process, people in the community share in the various efforts, linking the people together and creating the foundations for an even stronger community body. Design Corps avoids executing their designs in a top-down manner, because they distrust their ability to locate and articulate the public interest among the community without the community support. In doing so, they allow the community itself to takes action to represent their “common good.” It shows their humbleness in their action because they understand their “inability, […] powerlessness and […] incapacity to do the ‘good’” (Illich). The goal is to let everyone in the community have a chance to participate in shaping their own lives, including the built environment and spaces where they would share and meet each other socially. Design Corps’s ambition is to work on tasks that government fails to provide. They pay a lot of attention in improving migrant workers’ housing quality. Migrant workers do not have a permanent living community, so their need is usually neglected by local politicians and underrepresented within the government. Their community is usually poorly maintained and inadequately managed. As a nongovernment entity, Design Corps tends to associate itself with a “higher moral standard” than the government that serves more locally and more specifically (Feher, 13). They care about the poor and the powerless within the society, and provide humanitarian care that government fails to provide. They replace the government as the entity carrying out the task of “alleviating rural poverty” and “helping communities adapt to modernization” (Fisher, 440). By doing this, they are not only improving poor communities, they also impact on “the relationship between society and the state” (440). When people see them working more efficiently than the government, they would put pressure on the government for improvement and demanding change that would impact in a larger scale. Feher, Michel. Non-governmental Politics. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Fisher, William. “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices.” Annual Review of Anthropology. (2013): 439-464. Illich, Ivan. “To Hell with Good Intentions”
Design Corps’ community service program is now ten years old. It has been successful in the past. It recruits the recent architecture and planning graduates, and allows them to provide technical assistance to communities in need. Design Corps’ community service program provides help with technical assistance in planning, design, and grant writing. Another program known as Community Design Fellows brings their technical educations and experiences to each local site. This group is composed supported by trained professionals and experienced experts. When they arrive at the site, Fellows identify the challenges and understand the resources needed through community involvement and participation. It ensures that the community shares in identifying challenges, creating a vision, and implementing design responses as a whole. Community Design And Planning Locations Marion, AL: Taylor, AL: Newton Grove, NC: Seabord, NC: Pennsylvania: Job Training TUCCA Community Community Planning Seabord Self-Help Center & Self- Center Community Housing Help Housing Design Studio
Serving Communities within the United States Design Corps provides services in small rural communities, like places where low-income families are located. Today, labor for farming has been required to travel from other states and over the country. Properly designed housing must be provided for these workers to support their migration. Low-income farmers find this a burden and expensive, and the quality of their housing is often below standards. Their needs are ignored because politicians tend to address the needs of middle-class, in which they can get the most votes. Design Corps serves as a substitute for the government and provides care for these forgotten people. So, their working area depends on where there is high population of migrating farm workers. Their areas and scale of activities are therefore very flexible and different depending on their constituents. Migrant Housing Program Locations Florida: Migrant Virginia: Adams Chester Housing & 2004 Migrant County, County, Hurricaine Housing PA: Migrant PA: Mushroom Response Housing Worker Housing
SFI 13 University of Minnesota: SFI 2 Penn State University: Dignifying Design Good Deeds, Good Design SFI 10+1 School of the Art Institute of Chicago: SFI 1 Princeton University: Include Yourself Designing for the 98% Without Architects SFI 7 University of North Carolina Charlotte: SFI 14, Parsons The New School for Design: High Impact: Positive Change Through Design/Build TBA SFI 12 The University of Texas - Austin: SFI 10 University of Virginia: SFI 5, City College of New York: Design Is Relational Affordable Housing Going to Scale SFI Conference Locations SFI 10 Howard University: SFI 8, Harvard University GSD: SFI 6 Academy of Art University: SFI 9 Texas Schools of Architecture: SFI 4 Community Housing Resource Center: Social Economic Environmental Design Our Communities: FuturePresent Expanding Design GENERATE.ACTIVATE.MAINTAIN Choosing Relevancy From the Design Corps Website: Each year, Design Corps, in association with a local nonprofit organization or school, hosts its Structures for Inclusion (SFI) conference. Each SFI uniquely exposes attendees to both pathways to pursue alternative community-based work as well as evidence of the impact or influence of such work. From its inception in 2000, the dual mission of SFI has consistently been 1) to showcase design efforts that reach out to and serve a diverse clientele, and 2) to provide information on alternative career paths available to students and young designers. The Structures for Inclusion conference has a lot to do with the notion of support structure. Design Corps founder Bryan Bell likes to describe what he does as “being in the trenches,” because it means (hopefully) that he’s working with the end users who need our services. However, being in a trench, you don’t know what the people are doing in the trench next to you. We were not sharing our lessons, good and bad. Sambo and I decided we all should get together and share our lessons, be honest, try to help other people from making [the same] mistakes, and encourage some design students. That’s all it’s been. It’s just been collective sharing of ideas.
SFI 13 University of Minnesota: SFI 2 Penn State University: Dignifying Design Good Deeds, Good Design SFI 10+1 School of the Art Institute of Chicago: SFI 1 Princeton University: Include Yourself Designing for the 98% Without Architects SFI 7 University of North Carolina Charlotte: SFI 14, Parsons The New School for Design: High Impact: Positive Change Through Design/Build TBA SFI 12 The University of Texas - Austin: SFI 10 University of Virginia: SFI 5, City College of New York: Design Is Relational Affordable Housing Going to Scale SFI Conference Locations SFI 10 Howard University: SFI 8, Harvard University GSD: SFI 6 Academy of Art University: SFI 9 Texas Schools of Architecture: SFI 4 Community Housing Resource Center: Social Economic Environmental Design Our Communities: FuturePresent Expanding Design GENERATE.ACTIVATE.MAINTAIN Choosing Relevancy Beth Chute: Director Marcus Hurley: Evan Supcoff: Director Director Board of Directors Jeremy Jepson: Laura Shipman: Drew Kepley: Melissa Tello Poole: Jim Hamrick: Steve Weinstein: Director President Director Director Treasurer/Secretary Director Cara Mae Cirignano: Director Evan Harrel: Director Design Corps 2243 The Circle, Raleigh, NC 27608 Bryan Bell, Founder & Executive Director Victoria Ballard Belll, Architect Katie Wakeford, Architectural Designer & Assistant Editor Marie Schacht, Design Corps Fellow Community Design And Planning Locations Marion, AL: Taylor, AL: Newton Grove, NC: Seabord, NC: Pennsylvania: Job Training TUCCA Community Community Planning Seabord Self-Help Center & Self- Center Community Housing Help Housing Design Studio Migrant Housing Program Locations Florida: Migrant Virginia: Adams Chester Housing & 2004 Migrant County, County, Hurricaine Housing PA: Migrant PA: Mushroom Response Housing Worker Housing Maps and graphics drawn by Allen Gillers based on information found on Design Corps website, designcorps.org
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