Designing in the public interest is often challenging–and controversial. How do you know when to do public interest work and when pro-bono efforts are going towards greater good? In our office with the recent launch of our pro-bono Social Impact Design Initiative and partnership with the 1% Program at Public Architecture, we continue to learn from our work locally.
Chris Hardy, a designer with our San Francisco office, gave a lecture at ASLA’s Northern California Chapter this Spring to talk about the benefits and challenges of pro-bono work. In the lecture, he mentions six ways that pro-bono work makes us better designers:
- New and otherwise unavailable projects help us broaden our experience and train young and intermediate designers in on-the-ground project work;
- Each project makes us better designers, particularly (and often) locally;
- Younger staff can take ownership over the process in ways that might not be available yet in big office-wide projects within the firm and demonstrate leadership and project management skills;
- The project is often an opportunity for mentorship and learning between staff and new contacts within the field;
- Strategic volunteering–when a project is pro-bono at first but beneficial to the firm in the long-term–can bring projects that are otherwise unavailable to the firm. For example, when a community has a need for an amenity that’s very strong, but there’s no visioning documents or initial support, a landscape architect can assist with the visual and preliminary documents needed to get a project up and running to later phases;
- Inter-office collaboration: with quick charrettes and idea brainstorming, you can meet people within the office and collaborate on a quick project with a tight timeframe and generate new ideas quickly.
Additionally, Chris noted that pro-bono and local projects are “often small enough to get your hands dirty” and they are also discrete–in that you can finish them–so that designers can participate in local design-build projects they can point to fairly quickly. These projects, in turn, serve as a model to help us do more work in the field in the future and act as a catalyst for creating a new market or niche area of expertise within your firm.
As he concludes in his lecture, “pro-bono work is often the beginning of a longer process, and we can learn a lot while doing it and capitalize on our experiences to share and grow.”
“As long as we’re passionate, that’s all that matters.”
Chris Hardy is a designer with SWA’s San Francisco office; he holds an MLA from Cornell University and a B.S. In Conservation Biology from Duke University. He is part of the Social Impact Design Initiative at SWA and spearheads projects focused on ecological design and collaborative community infrastructure.
Posted by Sarah Peck in Community, Social Impact on