Tree of Hope at Safe Haven Park

Collaboration is huge in the real world and is huge in my healthcare studio. Our professor is treating us as if we were her employees to prepare us for what is to come upon graduation. I have to admit i LOVE it. Our first project was a collaborative effort of myself and 2 other group members to submit an entry to the IDEC international student competition. The premise of the competition was to research a need of The Lost Generation (children who's parents lives were taken away from the AIDS epidemic in South Africa) and find a need to address. My group found the children lacked a childhood. Therefore, we created the Tree of Hope at Safe Haven Park, a community gathering place where children can let loose, have fun, and interact with their peers. Below are our 3 project boards!

Stewardship: healthcare r&r

Simply for me the word stewardship means responsibility, nothing fancy or prophetic. It was engrained in me when I was in 8^th grade a week before I was about to graduate middle school and move onto a bigger and better thing known as high school (what was I thinking). I received the St. Pope Puis X Stewardship Award at my Jr. High’s ‘Award Ceremony’. I can remember I was dumb founded when my name was called to receive it. My thoughts: ‘what did I do to get this? I’m pretty sure it was nothing that I tried to accomplish; I’ve just been doing what I normally do all year’. Turns out I unintentionally took on the most responsibility in the 8^th grade class.

However, I don’t believe 8^th grade was the only point in my life where I had a perspective of the value of stewardship. My parents raised my three older siblings and I to be responsible for all our actions, to weigh the consequences and to look at how they would affect not only ourselves, but also those around us and those that would come after us. Having six people, two dogs and a fish under one roof creates three things: high utility bills, outrageous grocery bills and for a mother who LOVES to shop, a lot of clothes. But it also taught me a lot about natural resources. I might have grown up in ‘it always is cloudy in Pennsylvania’, but I couldn’t have asked for a better part to live in; beautiful trees, tons of animals and a gorgeous lake all in my backyard. So how does having high bills and living in the middle of the woods teach me anything about stewardship? Well, energy is expensive so turn off the lights and open the blinds, energy is expensive so turn off the air conditioning and open the windows, energy is expensive so turn off the heat and put on a coat.  Don’t look at hand-me-down clothes as used, look at them as vintage. Leftovers aren’t for the dog, they’re another meal that you don’t have to buy, don’t have to use energy to cook or water to clean up after…or as much as you did the first time around. That’s what I learned from my mom and dad at least.

As an interior designer in furthering and developing the idea of stewardship, I can take these little lessons from my childhood, blow them up into something much larger and incorporate them into all of my future designing. Preserving the worlds’ natural resources can be done with automatic light sensors or faucets. Positioning a building to conform to the landscape in a way natural water flow isn’t interrupted or is hit by the right sunlight at specific times of day can do wonders on lowering energy use. If a hospital is built in Arizona where it never rains, put solar panels to use as one of its energy sources or if it’s in Seattle where it always rains why not collect water on the roof for an h2o source. In healthcare facilities promoting and sustaining good health and curing illness are top ‘to-dos’. As a responsible designer it’s my job to specify materials that don’t contain harmful chemicals, are sustainable in a way that is beneficial not only to sick people, but also to our deteriorating environment. Chronic diseases such as obesity and asthma are becoming more common in industrialized nations because of chemicals, hormones and air quality. Studies have shown that people feel better when they’re in touch with nature, whether it be a vase of flowers on their desk or a breeze from outside, people who are sick aren’t any different than people who are healthy when it comes to nature. Why are so many healthcare facilities packing boxes with no holes? As responsible designers aren’t we suppose to listen to our client? The hospital committee might be the ones funding the project, but we have to remember we’re designing for the patient, so put as many windows in that box that health codes will allow! 

Workspace Design Magazine: Jan.2012

The Technology Behind Relationships

By Jamie Krywicki | January 1, 2012 at 1:25 am | One comment | jan 2012, Technology | Tags: future, workplace

Close your eyes and rewind back to when you were six years old and your imagination was working overtime. When you considered the future, perhaps you thought, “People will have jetpacks, cars will be able to fly, maybe even teleportation!”

Brilliant ideas. How easy life would be if they were true.

Now with some wisdom, we still ask ourselves what the future will be like. And for those of us in A&D, “What will the future workplace look like?” is an all-too-common question.

Some people may answer, “I don’t care, I better be retired by then.” Others may say, “The idea of a headquarters may become extinct, because people will be working from home to save money.” Or for those of us that keep up with new work environments you may say, “It’s already happened, it’s called Google.”

Maybe I’m still trapped at six, but my answer has only two words: The Jetson’s.

The Jetsons

An animated sitcom originally airing in the 60s and again in the 80s, The Jetsons was the image of the future. Robotic contraptions, holograms, whimsical inventions, and supersonic tubes depicted the year 2062.

It’s with visions planted by this program that I now imagine a future workplace as an amusement park for adults. The typical cubical will be for the history books, replaced with coffee shops that can transform into personal offices or meeting rooms simply by pressing a button on a iPhone or iPad.

Instantly the quaint round coffee tables and lounge chairs will transform into executive desks and task chairs. Coffee bars will flip over to reveal copy machines, computers, and various paper supplies. Making copies, running errands and grabbing coffee from Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts will be done by robots called interns.

Telephone conversations and meetings in-person won’t be necessary. Since teleconferencing and email have become so popular, the future will bring advanced videoconferencing and interactive boardrooms. Holograms will include all of our colleagues. Automatic doors that open from floor-to-ceiling will be the entrance to every space possible, if there are physical office buildings, that is.

A small-headquartered future.

The way trends are happening now with working from home, ruling out the extinction of headquarters isn’t impossible. The saying goes, history repeats itself, and when the first computer was invented, it was the size of an entire room and now it can fit in the palm of your hand.

Much like the reduction in the size of the computer, the concept of a company’s headquarters is bound to be minimized as well. Rather than the advancements in technology being directed to suit companies as a whole, I imagine they will be focused to suit each individual at their own respective homes.

Small Headquarters

Although the future of the workplace is exciting to imagine, not every aspect of the future is foreseen as positive. While email, videoconferencing and working from home may be convenient and less expensive, there is an aspect of the social workplace that is becoming extinct. This aspect is one we long for since we were children.

Personal interaction, much like making friends on the playground when you were younger, parallels discovering potential employees in face-to-face interviews rather than solely on paper. This individual’s potential is displayed through walking the job site, collaborating with colleagues and solving problems. The interview is crucial. How you present yourself as in individual, your background, upbringing, the weakness you’ve overcome and the strengths you’ve developed aren’t portrayed in an 8.5” x 11” space.

Much like on your resume, the social skills, ethics and values parents have instilled in their children are almost invisible in an email today. Anyone can be trained to use correct grammar, punctuation, and flattery.

Open Office

While we dream up the workplace of the future, why don’t we dream up how to keep personal experience for the employee as well? Dream up how to form new, and strengthen existing networks and how to form loyal relationships with clients. Imagine how the futuristic workplace will be with both the latest and greatest technology and the best people out there.

Technology advances each and every day. Personal interactions are dwindling by the minute.

The future workplace we all dream of should not exist of holograms or hovercrafts, but rather the perfect balance between real technology and real relationships.

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