Architects are designers, but not in the way multidisciplinary designers function or operate. I was fortunate to be a part of a cohort of designers who were tasked to work on addressing housing crisis for students in Los Angeles under Mayor Karen Bass and the Los Angeles Community College District. 

Now, every designer who is given a systems level challenge lights up in happiness because its a truly wicked problem in and of itself, but its a challenge none the less that is worth tackling. So what did I do? I packed my bags and headed over to LA from Chicago where I got to work with 3 architects in training and 1 urban planner to address the student housing crisis.

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If this portfolio website has taught you anything, it’s that the design process always starts with Discovery - WHO are we designing for, WHAT are their pain points and HOW might we best learn from them within the context of the problem to better serve. This discovery phase was a whole immersion experience into the entire ecosystem ( or frankly a portion of it) to give us a peak into the lives of students who live this life everyday. - Empathy.

With concrete data, we knew that the average time it takes to build anything that addresses the housing crisis could take anywhere from 6-12 years. That was too long a time span when the challenge was to help scale the solution to 56,000 students who needed affordable housing now.   

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Key Learnings for me whiles working on affordable housing challenge for students:

1. In hindsight I should have approached this entire challenge as a traditional UXR project. Taking the insights from the immersion and intercepts and connecting them directly to the business value of the architecture firm that brought me on. Perhaps that way, they would have been more likely to have agency and follow through with the strategic plans and outlines we came up with.
2. Multidisciplinary Designers work very very differently when banded together than when we band with other disciplines from other fields even if within the design realm. I found that I spent more of the time (probably 80%) trying to make architects not immediately conclude that the immediate solution might not always look like 4 walls and a building. It took more effort to convince architects that maybe addressing this problem from the systems design level might just be the solution which would not require 8years, lots of bureaucratic red tapes not to talk of the potentially billions of dollars to actually erect a building. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I guess.