Written by Glenn Baker, director of Easy Like Water

I’m heading off to the Sundance Film Festival Jan. 20 to pitch my film-in-progress, Easy Like Water, to broadcasters.  The film is almost ready – we’ve got an early rough cut — and I’m excited to get this story out about an ingenious sustainable design solution and its creator.

Easy Like Water is a one-hour documentary film about an innovative Bangladeshi architect who is building floating schools, equipped with solar-powered internet, in his flood-prone riverine community.

Architect Mohammed Rezwan has created floating schools outfitted with solar-powered computers in flood-prone Bangladesh.

Flooding – increasingly destructive and unpredictable – destroys more than 300 schools a year here.  Bangladesh is a real-life “Waterworld,” and Mohammed Rezwan is the country’s Noah. “If the children cannot come to school, I thought the school should go to them,” he explains.

With a concept that is elegant and homegrown, Rezwan’s organization, Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, is helping his community adapt to the new climate reality – and cultivating the next generation of problem-solvers.

I grew up in South Asia, and always felt Bangladesh got short shrift when it was labeled a “basket case.”  So Easy Like Water is also the story of my personal quest to replace that label with a more nuanced portrait that depicts the developing world as a cauldron of ideas and energy – and Bangladesh as a place where the world may turn for guidance when it finds water lapping at its doorstep. “It will not be only Bangladesh that goes underwater,” asserts Nobel laureate climatologist Atiq Rahman. “New York will go underwater; London will go underwater. Tokyo will go underwater.  The question is: are we going to be wise enough to act now?”

Using “environmental Jujitsu,” Rezwan has harnessed the water to connect his community. But can this soft-spoken local hero overcome both flooding and global indifference? Easy Like Water shows the human face of the unfolding climate disaster – and tells the inspiring story of a bold innovator who is building a future that floats.

The film provides an entrée to exploring America’s biggest “head in the sand” issue –the immediacy of global warming. Through that schema it weaves together a host of related areas: design for good, climate change as a human rights crisis, girl’s education, sustainable agriculture, empowerment of the rural poor, and yes, even tigers.

Oh, and the title?  In Bangla, “Panir moto shohoj” means “no problem” or “piece o’ cake” – literally “easy like water.”

Learn more and watch the trailer at: www.easylikewater.com

Third-grade girls board a boat school on the Atrai River in Bangladesh.

Glenn Baker is an award-winning filmmaker with more than 30 documentaries broadcast on PBS. He produced and directed “STAND UP: Muslim American Comics Come of Age” for the PBS series “America at a Crossroads.” Baker grew up in India, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tunisia, an experience that informs his approach to making media that reflects diverse viewpoints and promotes dialogue.  

Photos courtesy Glenn Baker.

Written by Shun Fukuda

About 9 months after the earthquakes in the Tohoku region in Japan, the country is still rebuilding. The many helping the clean up of the region have planted new trees and plants. The roads are accessible and the airports are functioning again. The damage can still be seen, but slowly the region is cleaning up. I wanted to see if there were efforts other than the clean up in those areas.

On one of my video viewing sessions, I had come across an episode of one of my favorite Japanese programs: Tensai! Shimura Doubutsuen. This program features celebrity and comedian co-hosts featuring unique or cute animals and interacting with them. The episode I had come across was a special feature of Masaki Aiba bringing animals to a school. Watching further, I realized that he was bringing various animals to make the children at the particular school smile and enjoy their day.

The school is in the Fukushima prefecture, where two schools that were near the disaster area are using an unused school building as a temporary joint school. Ookuma Shougakkou and Kumamachi Shougakkou both were located near the reactor area and the schools were re-located to this unused school building 150km away. Many of the children have parents who work at the nuclear plant and are constantly worried about their parents.

As said by the narrator of the show, the children have been taken from their homes, and live in temporary living quarters while the contamination is being taken care of. They have experienced a huge disaster and have been scarred psychologically at a young age. Masaki planned to cheer the children up and return smiles to their faces. Within the video, it is said he had brought 100 different animals to show and interact with the children.

Throughout the day, he shows them animals such as alpacas and hamsters and lets them touch and feed them. He also educates them on various unique abilities in animals, such as viewing a chameleon’s long tongue through special goggles. I kept watching, glued to the screen and seeing the children smile and laugh, I realized that even small actions such as this is a step to letting those affected in Japan recover. Through creating smiles, Masaki lifted some of the worries from the children.

Shun Fukuda is a writer and student at The College of William and Mary. He is currently finishing up his undergraduate degree with a major in English.

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

You wouldn’t think that a single brick would change the course of human events. Or a single block of concrete. But if you’re thinking about how to make homes safer from earthquakes, a single brick or block can be the difference between life and death.

Dr. Elizabeth Hausler, founder of Build Change, has put a lot of thought into bricks and concrete as lifesaving materials. Elizabeth has an armload of degrees in engineering and she really understands how to make a good brick and a good concrete block. She’s taking that knowledge around the world, to China, Haiti and Indonesia and she’s using it to save lives.

When the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, Elizabeth realized she had to do something meaningful with her engineering savvy. “When I was watching the events unfold on September 11th, I just felt really compelled to use my engineering skills to benefit humanity,” she told me in an interview.

On September 11 it so happened that she was trying to decide about applying for a Fulbright fellowship – the deadline was upon her – but the events of 9/11 focused her resolve. She applied. She got the fellowship. Then she traveled to India in 2002-2003 to learn what made one house earthquake-resistant while another fell. It was on that trip that she formulated the best ways to rebuild safer after a disaster and – most importantly – put long term change in place.

She called her program Build Change, and she has since taken it to China, Haiti, and Indonesia and helped thousands of homeowners create homes that are earthquake resistant. You want to know the secret to a seismically-safer house? Elizabeth learned that homeowners, builders and government officials needed to know more about the materials they were using. You could say they just needed to know how to make a better brick. It doesn’t sound revolutionary, but when you change construction practices you change a culture, and you also create opportunities for people to make money and shelter themselves.

“We start out doing forensic engineering. Basically, after an earthquake, there are so many lessons that you can learn, just by looking at the buildings that collapsed and the buildings that didn’t,” Elizabeth said.

After she gathers this evidence she does something that more NGOs and aid groups are learning how to do. She listens. “Usually there’s some expertise within the country about how to build an earthquake-resistant house,” she told me. By talking to residents she can understand why the buildings collapsed and what local people can do to make new construction better. She’s traveled the world to study the aftereffects of nine different earthquakes and “we see the reasons why buildings collapse in these kind of environments and the reasons why they stand up are pretty much the same in every place where we work.” She’s turned those reasons into a curriculum that can be taught to local engineers, builders and homeowners. A simple, symmetric layout for the home, strong connections between the building’s elements, good bricks that are fully-fired and strong, and concrete that has enough cement in it and has been properly cured. Basic stuff. The genius in the method: It is teachable.

“For example, in Haiti right now we have 42 Haitian engineers, architects and other construction professionals on our team who we’ve trained in the basics of earthquake-resistant design and construction, and now they go out and do training programs for us. We’re trying to empower Haitian engineers to really drive the process themselves,” Elizabeth said.

Build Change doesn’t need to bring in new technology or new materials, because people would be less familiar with them and, anyway, they wouldn’t be available in local shops. Instead, Build Change makes small, significant changes to existing building methods. In Indonesia, it was as simple as soaking the bricks in water before using them. That easy step strengthens the bond between bricks and mortar, which strengthens the entire wall. Making local construction methods and materials affordable also makes them adoptable by local people. No matter how smart your design idea is, its meaningless unless it can compete in local markets and people use it. Build Change has posted some impressive numbers: more than 18,350 safer houses, more than 2,800 builders educated through on-the-job training, and more than 3,000 engineers who know how to make a better brick, a solid concrete block, and a safer house.

Hear Elizabeth tell more about her story in the be global podcast.

Learn more about Build Change online. The organization is raising money to continue rebuilding in Haiti and you can use the Universal Giving website to donate.

All images courtesy Build Change.

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

I’m thrilled to announce the debut of Shelter: connect, the educational outreach initiative of the Shelter documentary.

Shelter: connect creates a virtual bridge between cultures, enabling design students in the U.S. to connect with communities in the developing world, sharing innovative design ideas to address urgent shelter needs. It is driven by a series of workshops Richard Neill and I will be leading.

A key player in the Shelter: connect initiative is our new hire – outreach coordinator Caroline Markowitz. Caroline is a recent Princeton University graduate. While at Princeton, she majored in history with a minor in environmental studies and was a four-year member of the varsity lacrosse team. She wrote her senior thesis about the World Bank funded Narmada Dam Project in India and the role of environmental and humanitarian NGOs and organizations in persuading the Bank to halt funding due to poor environmental and resettlement regulations.

To develop and launch the Shelter: connect initiative, Caroline is working with Caitlin Boyle, founder and president of film.sprout.  Film.sprout is a consulting and booking agency that helps documentaries achieve broader social impact. Caitlin developed and ran audience outreach on celebrated documentaries like King Corn, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, The End of the Line, A Small Act and Bag It. It’s wonderful to have her expert advice and guidance as we build out the Shelter: connect initiative. Caitlin is a pro who is respected throughout the industry.

Coming in January, look for some major design changes to this blog to accomodate the goals of Shelter: connect.  If you’re interested in learning more about the program, get in touch with Caroline in our San Francisco office.

Shelter: connect was piloted this past fall at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and we look forward to launching it, and a short video about it, early next year.

Shelter | Written by Caroline Markowitz 

You would not think that harvesting rainwater and soccer would go together. But that’s all that architects and social entrepreneurs, Jane Harrison and David Turnbull, could think about during the 2007 Homeless World Cup in Copenhagen. This event, founded by Mel Young of Big Issue fame, is unique in that it’s the only international organized soccer competition for homeless people.

It just so happened that Jane Harrison and David Turbull, co-founders of ATOPIA Research, were in Copenhagen, participating in the Metropolis Biennale organized by Copenhagen International Theatre. Taking advantage of this opportunity to participate in the Homeless World Cup Event, Jane and David were stunned when they realized how much rainwater could be harvested from the 16 meters by 22 meters street-soccer sized pitch. Street soccer, a game played with four players on each team, is literally the game of the streets and informal settlements. Engrossed in the energetic and community oriented feel of the Homeless World Cup, Jane and David staged a game with soccer players from the African teams to share the seeds of the idea.

Why not combine street soccer with mass community rainwater harvesting? Putting the two together would mobilize a community commitment to the project, thought Jane. “Soccer and water was very logical,” Jane explained “and at a very basic level it made tremendous sense to bring those together.” From this, PITCH: Africa was born.

PITCH_Africa game at the Homeless World Cup

Let me rewind the story a little and tell you what ATOPIA Research is and what it does. In 2007 Jane Harrison, a faculty member at the Princeton University School of Architecture, and David Turnbull, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, the Cooper Union and University of Bath in the UK, founded ATOPIA Research. As Jane explained over the phone, ATOPIA Research is a non-profit innovation and development organization that uses architecture and architectural thinking to inventively address tough environmental and social problems in the developing world, including projects in the United States. The organization develops projects and ventures that actively educate and aid in the transformation of poverty-stricken communities around the world.

“We are not motivated by the idealism of being good citizens and ‘doing good’ – we prefer to leave the moralizing out of the picture. Too much aid is delivered under a patronizing cloak,” says Jane, “Genuine transformation requires intelligent, innovative integration of all types of knowledge and expertise, and a great deal of humility. Both bottom up and top down initiatives are insufficient alone to address the scale of the challenges and need to be integrated. Our work is about really coming to understand how the interrelation of social dynamics, environmental predicaments, community needs, and economic viability can produce real, positive change. It is precisely in the regions of the world where constraints are the most extreme, that real innovation is possible.  The West will come to realize that it needs these innovations as well.”

PITCH Africa launch, Los Angeles 2010, Soccer World Cup

And so, PITCH: Africa, which became a non-profit venture in its own right earlier this year – carries as its motto: “One soccer pitch creates…one million liters of water one school one clinic one market one meeting place,” explains it all.

Why Africa?

According to PITCH Intern, Dana McKinney (Princeton ’11), PITCH_Africa involves building a porous street soccer pitch and placing 32 shipping containers underneath the field to collect rainwater. Using end-of-life shipping containers, vast numbers of which are discarded in Sub Saharan Africa to construct the water tank, may be ingenious but it is only one of the methods used in PITCH, explained Jane. Construction materials and methodology are always decided on a location-by-location basis and depends on what makes greatest economic sense and what will be of greatest value to the community. Thus, as Jane explains, they are still figuring out the most intelligent approach.

“The thing about rainwater harvesting,” said Jane, “is that it is powerful and potentially liberating for communities that will never have access to the luxury of large scale piped and centralized water systems. Groundwater extraction through borehole drilling can be a very short sighted and unsustainable enterprise in many regions, and prone to failure given that borehole maintenance requires technical expertise not available to most communities. Boreholes are by no means a catch all solution.” Rainwater harvesting can be done anywhere that it rains and where water is needed. The technology can be understood, learned, and taken on board by the community.

“PITCH_Africa is about learning to conserve in a socially dynamic way. When using renewable resources to organize your community, you’re not relying on resources that don’t exist. Rainfall could supply a huge percentage of water needed,” explained Jane. If all runs smoothly, they will break ground in January and hopefully complete PITCH_Africa by 2013. The town of Liakipia, in Kenya, is fortunate enough to be the first place a project like this will be built in Africa, although ventures are being developed in Nigeria, Madagascar and Senegal, as well as early discussions with communities in eight other countries including South Africa. According to Jane, Kenya “is the best place to start with rainwater harvesting. They really understand just how much their survival depends on it.” Jane’s reasons include: irregular rainfall is increasingly a problem, groundwater supplies are hugely problematic, drought in Somalia is causing refugees to move to Kenya, and they’re already having to dig phenomenally deep wells to harvest water, which is contaminated with fluoride. “The mentality about water is remarkably similar to that of oil,” said Jane, “The problem with fresh water resources, as with oil, is that they are often millennial old and non-replenishable.”

Jane, David and their team have been working with a school in Liakipia. The children, according to Jane, are trilingual and fully numerate by second grade, despite very, very basic facilities. “It’s quite humbling,” explained Jane, “For instance, the children right now are going to be working on incorporating a drama part in their curriculum. The children are working on a play about why you filter rainwater and will be performing it in the community to share their understanding with their families and elders.” Not only are Jane and David empowering the children to teach the community about the upcoming project, but she and her team are also building a relationship within the African scientific community and the African media. Dr. Wole Soboyejo, professor of engineering at Princeton University and technical advisor to ATOPIA Research said, “You have to think holistically about energy, water, and the well-being of the people. Keep them motivated to think of their own solutions.”

The Worldwide Importance of Water

Jane’s concerns about water extend past Africa, circling back to the United States. Jane explained that lessons learned in the developing world must be studied and applied to the western world; natural resources are limited, but Jane asked, “Why do we have such a wasteful attitude to water resources in the US, it is as if we have all decided to agree that the freshwater supply is never ending?” One response that ATOPIA has is to extend the PITCH project to the United States through the PITCH_USA initiative. PITCH_USA, using the technology patented for PITCH_Africa, has been designed for Street Soccer but adapts itself remarkably easily to Basketball and Volleyball. The focus on using the unifying energy of sport as a catalyst for community rainwater harvesting remains, but a secondary focus on food and nutrition, issues now crucial in America, is added. The Star-Spangled Sports Pitch sits within a Star shaped Community Garden. Rather than utilizing the rainwater harvesting to help a community thrive, the rainwater will irrigate the garden, which will be a project for homeless children.

Plan diagram showing pitch and garden.

Studies show that once you have become homeless in society, your sense of time is drastically altered. Jane said, “Gardening programs are a potent way of teaching people how to understand the impact of investing in things over time. Furthermore, learning about nutrition on the back of sport is a lot more fun than being spoon-fed information.” The connection of place, where one can grow things, and time, tending those living things so that they will grow, may well help formerly homeless young people grow a more meaningful relationship with shelter. Jane and David have been collaborating with Lawrence Cann, Director of Development and External Affairs at H.E.L.P. USA; Founder, CEO at Street Soccer USA.

Wole Soboyejo and Jane Harrison exude passion; love for their work poured out in every word during our interviews. It was clear from the first words they spoke on Skype that heart drives PITCH_Africa. “First of all, we only develop projects in areas where we are contacted by communities,” said Jane, “We’re not trying to force this on people.” Both Wole and Jane believe that empowering the people in affected communities is the only way for a project to succeed. Jane continued, “It’s very important that we integrate all aspects, all the time. If the knowledge isn’t integrated or wanted in the community, we’ve satisfied our own interest but it doesn’t have a long-term impact.” It’s this kind of global approach that has spelled success for many in the developing world. Those who design for a culture, and who listen to those they design for, succeed.

Jane teaches her design students to crosscut. For her that means thinking about a project as cutting across different disciplines and communities.

 “A project is always one thing, but get your projects to at least three different things, not by adding on a room for this and that, but by making the same thing function in multiple ways. One set of resourcing having multiple positive effects.”

-Jane Harrison

Consistent with Jane’s teachings, PITCH_Africa is not only a soccer field, but also a rainwater harvester, community center, and place for learning. A place of assembly – an Agora, in the truest sense of the word. PITCH_USA can provide the same for communities in America.

To learn more about Jane’s work and PITCH_Africa go to www.pitch-africa.org. The site is under construction, but you can  click here to donate to PITCH:AFRICA. Funding for the development and testing of PITCH_Africa has been provided by the Annenberg Foundation. Watch a live demonstration on the PITCH here.

The inspiring story of Wings Over Haiti begins with a teacher in Long Island, New York who wants to involve her students in a project. Using Facebook and other social media, Melissa McMillan connects with a pilot, a builder, a celebrity or two, and was able to start construction on the school in October, 2011.  Here’s a video by Richard Ficara that tells how it all got started.

Wings Over Haiti

Photo by Miguel Contreras

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

How do you turn a garden on its side and grow it up a wall? And why would you want to?

Going sideways with your greenery might be a way to provide healthy food in densely-populated urban areas. According to a recent study conducted by the University of North Carolina, there are five fast food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States. You’re five times a likely to encounter a chicken mc-something than you would a vegetable. Transforming that rude encounter with a mysterious animal part into something more nourishing has engaged the hearts and minds of gardeners, activists, architects, and designers.

In San Francisco, you have a project called Little City Gardens. It’s an experiment in local control of the food system. In Alameda, a group is exploring repurposing a military base to transform it into an urban farm.

Then there’s that sideways thing. The Food Chain is an architectural and planning intervention which aims to eradicate hunger in urban areas. One thing they’re doing is taking a garden and turning it on its side so that it can grow on a building. That way you get to use existing structures, save space, and put food gardens where they can feed people.

Robin Osler, an architect in New York who does high-end retail architecture and beautiful homes, started exploring urban farming at the urging of a singer named Taja Sevelle, and it’s an interesting story. Here’s a short video about it.

Architecture sometimes has the reputation of being an elitist profession. The average person might ask, ‘Hey, would would an architect do for me?’ Robin’s answer to that is that architects should be involved at the grassroots level of society. “I think that’s where we can do the most good. It’s certainly personally satisfying to us,” she says.  After she installed the vertical farm she heard a story of a kid who had never seen a tomato, outside of that red circle atop a McDonald’s hamburger.  He reached up and grabbed one from the vertical farm, bit into it, and had a revelation. Here’s the story in Robin’s own words.

Download audio file (tomato-story.mp3)

Robin has traveled the small- and medium-sized cities of America for her architectural projects, and she has seen how the design of cities lose their human scale when neither urban planners nor architects are involved in that design.

“Architects understand scale,” Robin says. “But the public has to be educated, the developers have to be educated, the city has to be educated. Because everybody thinks if they build it bigger, it will be better.”

The bigger-better formulation comes from the idea that bigger means more revenue and jobs. But big is not always sustainable when you consider water, power, sewage, population density, and bigger is not always human scale. Which brings us back to growing produce in cities. Green spaces vitalize cities. Even in a city a densely-packed as New York, public, green space enhances the value of the land. Think about the land around Central Park. Worth quite a bit. Robin has started Grow Studio to nurture urban agriculture projects from the ground up so that developers and municipalities can integrate urban agriculture into their communities.

To find out more about Robin’s projects, including a plan to create vertical farming walls and a teaching kitchen for a public high school, go to EOA/Grow Studio.

To see what’s going on in the world of urban farming and to find out how you can get involved, become part of the Urban Farming Global Food Chain.

Photo Credit:  Miguel Contreras

The Virtual Exchange Program got off to an energetic start yesterday at the University of Minnesota College of Design. Richard Neill and I traveled to the campus to run a workshop with architecture professor James Lutz.

What is the Virtual Exchange Program?

During this active production time for Shelter we are meeting architects and engineers all over the world who are designing for good. We also meet people everywhere who would benefit from good design. We started to think about how to bring them all together…

The Virtual Exchange Program (vXp) is an open source forum for sharing design expertise and knowledge. It fosters dialogue among architecture, design and engineering students and people in developing nations and elsewhere who would benefit from an exchange of ideas.

I’ve spoken with architecture and design deans and professors at Pratt, Parsons, USC and other schools. Uniformly, the sentiment from them is that it’s often not practical to travel design, architecture and engineering students around the world to connect with faraway people. Although travel programs can be costly, worldwide dialogue about design is necessary.  (vXp) fills the need for design sharing and distribution with a new take on international study.

Since we make media for a living, we can create engaging videos that share humanitarian design projects in storytelling form.

What makes this different is that we burst beyond traditional methods of communicating design, architecture and engineering projects by using video and audio. We open an online communication channel for people needing life-saving design solutions. They are heard by the best and brightest students who are in a position to answer the call and create those designs. Media is the ‘virtual’ part of the exchange.  The dialogue (vXp) creates can lead to actual people getting on actual planes. But at this stage of the project, opening the dialogue is what counts. Look at a prototype video that I just finished editing from our Haiti production.

Here’s the plan. Wherever we go to film Shelter, we find architecture, engineering and design students in developing regions of the world, or in disaster recovery areas, and ask them to voice their needs for humanitarian design. We record them and make a short video. Then, guided by architecture, design and engineering professors, we show the videos to students here and ask them to respond with viable projects – projects that resonate with the needs expressed.

Yesterday in Minnesota we piloted an early version of (vXp) in a workshop we conducted at the invitation of Thomas Fisher, professor of architecture and dean of the College of Design, and James Lutz, the professor of architecture mentioned above. Jim led a group of graduate architecture students to Haiti last March.

We split the workshop between exploring design for good projects that we’ve filmed and talking about process of making short videos to promote, explain and propagate student projects.

While on campus, I interviewed Tom Fisher, who is a big picture thinker in architecture, design and policy. I will post some clips of that interview soon, but for now, have a look at Tom’s blogs on the Huffington Post.

We’re looking forward to bringing (vXp) to other colleges and universities.

Follow Lee Schneider on Twitter.  Shelter is on Facebook.

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

Hope comes designed in amazing packages. I experienced a little of that hope this morning at USC, where I was giving a talk about Shelter on the theme of ‘designing for a culture.’ The freshmen architecture students liked the Shelter clips I played. Nobody napped during the talk. (Hey, students can be a tough crowd.)  I focused on two questions:  Why does design matter?  And also, when you design, who is really your client?  

After filming in Haiti this summer, a conceptual driver for the film took shape.

Designing for good might begin as a lofty principle, but on the ground and in country, it’s really about designing for a culture.

As we film Shelter around the world, I am seeing how architects, engineers and designers who listen to their clients and take time to connect with the culture they’re working in  – these are the people who do successful projects.  Those who are willing to adopt a visionary approach to the importance of design – these are the folks who prosper.Design matters. An example?  Steve Jobs.  Apple. When I asked the crowd of nearly 200 who had anything made by Apple, all hands went up. Apple has not only designed for a culture, Steve Jobs also created a culture.

To show how an architect or designer’s connection with clients can lead to unexpected alliances, I screened a piece of short media about EDAR, a portable structure in use in cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, and also a short film Richard Neill and I made for the Architecture and the City Festival.

My favorite part of the morning came as some students were being honored for their creativity and achievement. The video projects they created captured the exuberance and freshness you can find in an architecture class.  Have a look at one of my favorites:

Many thanks to Lauren Matchison and Kara Bartelt, who invited me to speak at Architecture 114 – Architecture:  Culture and Community.

Follow Lee on Twitter.

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

It’s always an amazing experience to screen a film for a live audience. I find that I learn so much from how they react to scenes and moments: a ripple of laughter here, contemplative silence there, or a simple ‘huh,’ signifying a small revelation.  We screened two work-in-progress sequences from Shelter at the San Francisco Public Library this week as part of the Architecture and the City Festival. The screening provided me with a lot good feedback and a lot to think about and we continue the shape the film.

It’s equally amazing to me to watch a film come into focus as we work in production. Many months are spent preparing: pre-interviewing potential subjects, test-filming them on flip cams, mapping out schedules and strategies. Then there is a sparking moment when I  meet those people in person and feel the gravity of their stories.  Here are the sequences that we showed in San Francisco.

 While filming in Haiti in August I saw that designing for good means that you have to design for a culture.

You have to have a dialogue with the people you want to design for, and understand how they have built in the past.  This might seem obvious, but it is equally obvious that, humanitarian design fails when it is imposed on a community instead of being created in a partnership.  It’s the kind of partnership that we are going to forge with our outreach program. The leading edge of that program is something we’re calling the virtual exchange.  While in Haiti I filmed Haitian architecture students, asking them about their hopes and dreams for the future, how they believe would be the best way to rebuild (and build in) Haiti, and what message they might want to send to architecture students in America.   We will show that footage at the College of Design: University of Minnesota in the fall – and then record statements and ideas from students there.  We’ll take those statements back to Haiti on our next production trip.  That’s the essence of the virtual exchange program.  I’ve spoken with the deans of architecture and design at various schools, including Pratt, Parsons, and the New School for Design, and some schools here in California, and received enthusiastic support and great advice. I’ll let you now how the planning is going in future articles.

Next week we start our planning sessions for production in Japan.  We’ve been invited by Architecture for Humanity fellow Nathaniel Corum to following a design/rebuild initiative near Sendai, site of the nuclear accident, and also in communities devastated by a  tsunami.  It promises to be a very different trip from the Haiti production section: instead of Haiti’s August heat we’ll have Japan’s November cold, and since there are few structures left standing, we’ll be camping and charging the cameras off solar arrays.

Follow me on Twitter.  Check out Shelter on Facebook.  Donate to the film via the San Francisco Film society and it is tax-deductible.