Beyond The Box
Architects are trained to find solutions. We have a superpower many other people don’t have: we can see a problem and create a way to solve it. This gives us a huge opportunity to lead both as traditional practitioners and in roles in our society that require creativity and solutions for critical problems.
This week on EntreArchitect podcast, Beyond the Box: Architects Practicing Beyond The Traditional Design Firm with Katie Crepeau.
Background
Katie is an architect and a business consultant based in London, England. She’s an advocate for and a practitioner of social impact design. She’s the founder and editor for Design Affects, an online platform that inspires, teaches and connects those involved in social impact design and much more.
Origin Story
The earliest memory Katie has of engaging with architecture is around the age of five when she was living in a home she was moving out of. She remembers drawing the plan of her bedroom, complete with the red-orange carpet, and she added all the various elements of that space.
Katie’s dad is an engineer and her mom is a teacher who studied art, so a big influence was seeing both of their personalities and approaches to doing things. Both of them inspired Katie and her family to be creative: her dad was focused on precision and technique, and her mom on the expression of creativity.
As she began studying and practicing, she wanted to connect with people. Katie studied at Tulane in New Orleans, a very different and distant place from where she grew up in California. There she explored and grew in a new city around new people and was able to define who she was as a person.
She thought she’d be pursuing the traditional architecture path, but she’s also aware that she’s a “question-asking” type of person. Following graduation and licensing, she wanted to improve the profession of architecture and reconnect it to who we are as people and to the people we’re trying to impact in the first place.
Early in her career, Katie worked with small firms that did residential and urban repurpose and regeneration in New Orleans. When she moved to San Francisco, she got more involved with commercial and developer-led projects.
Her background, including volunteering and seeing the change in people because of her giving, led her to take a night course from Berkley called Architecture is Activism. Then began the journey of the next six years of her life to focus on social impact design.
What is social impact design?
Social impact design is working with marginalized or underserved communities and developing products or services that help them create a better environment for themselves. It includes architecture, systems, and everything that comes along with it.
Eventually, Katie became an advocate for social impact design. Though working with a group of architects who were all pressing toward the same goal but lacking a certain business acumen, Katie started looking at other firms who were doing similar things.
What is your advice for someone who has a problem they want to solve?
Katie advises people to start with a project. Don’t start an organization until you have a project and a client and can validate the demand for what you’re doing. She has a ton of eagerness as well, and a lot of her early projects reflect that. In actuality, it’s about validating your idea before you do anything. Identify the people you want to help,