Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo
After Hurricane Sandy caused more than $60 billions of damages in the New York region, the Obama administration launched the Rebuild by Design competition to generate new solutions for reconstruction that would rehabilitate devastated infrastructure and protect the region from the fierce storms that Hurricane Sandy and the best climate science presaged. The competition billed itself as using “collaborative, design-driven problem-solving to help communities and cities build resilience,” a process that would allow urban areas to “overcome existing creative and regulatory barriers by cultivating collaboration between designers, researchers, community members, government officials and subject-matter experts.” True to form, the 10 teams of international designers selected to participate in the competition held numerous community consultations, where they gleaned information about what mattered most to residents in the recovery process. The design teams combined this feedback with data about the physical damage and the economic prospects of the region in several iterative cycles of design and produced half a dozen designs that were allocated funding for implementation…
Hurricane Florence Is the Atlantic’s First Major Hurricane
The Atlantic hurricane season has suddenly found its legs. Following some summer doldrums, a number of factors have come together to fuel a run of tropical weather. That includes Hurricane Florence, which just became the first major hurricane of the season.
The storm reached Category 3 status—the threshold for major hurricanes—on Wednesday morning. The storm was packing winds of 120 mph and the National Hurricane Center said it was “still strengthening.”
The storm is still out in the middle of the Atlantic, which is good news. Hurricane-force winds extend only 15 miles from its center, making it only slightly bigger than Hurricane Beryl, this season’s first hurricane (though that said, tropical storm-force winds extend 90 miles from the storm’s its core)….
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