Sixteen Students

Nine Advisors

Six Countries

Three Departments

Two Semesters

One Goal

We, all the living inhabitants of planet earth, are currently experiencing great and swift changes. There have been greater and swifter changes to the planet from collisions with asteroids crossing our orbit. These have been quite rare and life on earth has always re-grouped and reinvented itself. This is the first time, however, a species of planet earth is the cause.

The changes we are experiencing now are numerous and they are intensely affecting all aspects of life. These changes can be traced back to activity by the human being and their mismanagement of the earth’s plentiful resources. The planet has been stripped and polluted in the name of a cheesy profit. What kind of profit is it when untold numbers of species have disappeared, resources wasted and polluted, life on the planet threatened?

The human being has revealed itself to be a greedy being, maybe too smart for its own good. But not smart enough to understand the consequences of his shallow greed.

How do we, the cause of these issues we are facing, change our goals to harmonise with the rules clearly set by our mother planet?

I am a visiting professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. My own practice has included design of space, products, structures and work I call art. In the last few years, I have heard a calling from my students to spend less time designing for the consumer, and focusing instead on the issues that stare at us.

Climate warming and relentless consuming of the earth’s resources have caused enormous shifts in our weather and continual battles for the resources that remain.

Fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other storms, and more than all the other natural disasters, flooding, have wiped out communities, devastated regions, and are causing permanent changes in our world, major shifts in populations and strife over disrupted climates.

What this Emergency Housing class had as its goals were simple and very complex. Having worked in all three of these design fields I understood not one of these disciplines would be able to address the issues that would need addressing alone. I proposed to Pratt a two-semester class that would involve students from architecture, interior design, and industrial design in roughly equal numbers. We would do serious research—we would look at the wisdom of groups of nomadic humans and what their housing was like, we would find advisors who had experience in aiding those after major natural disasters and designers who were creating new products that could be of benefit and we would talk with fabricators and manufacturers to find materials that would meet the projects’ requirements.

This was a major undertaking, and it was taken on by a unique group of 16 students, who came from 6 different countries, who studied in three different fields of design, who worked with nine invaluable advisors, over two semesters for one goal—to design a strategy for Emergency Housing for the human victims of the growing destruction caused by ever increasing natural disasters.

Kevin Walz