Katie Crepeau, the founder behind the site Design Affects and a current writer for Public Interest Design -blog was interviewed online on 4.2.2014.
Katie’s interest in public interest design began with a university course led by Matt Miller from Project H at Berkeley. She was working with the projects of Architecture for Humanity in San Francisco Chapter for a while, where they were running for a “community design office”. However, managing the office ambitiously enough was too much to manage on voluntary basis. This initiated the founding of the Design Affects -site, which aims to document ways to work on public interest design on full time basis.
Currently this has led Crepeau to work for a startup focusing on neighborhood interaction in London and write 1-2 posts for PID-blog a week. She also recently became a member of the board of ngo Azuko. When asked to mention a few inspiring practitioners on the field, Crepeau mentioned Katherine Darmstad from Latent Design as well as Jan Gehl and his way of basing design on anthropological research.
Some other interesting initiatives discussed in the call:
Co-Housing
Peter Devlin, architect at PTE who is working on senior cohousing designs in London
Cohousing event put on by CPRE
London
Social Design Talks (Mapping Social Design)
Harriet Harriss & forthcoming book Architecture Live Projects