No License Required

The most important skillset you can have in your design arsenal is people-watching. Not being the best at rendering scenes, not being the best at communicating your ideas, people-watching. So whenever I am out on a site, before taking measurements or listing other empirical data, I just sit there… and look at what people are doing. How people use a space will tell you a lot about what is working well and what is not working. It is reading body language at scale. Imagine you are with a friend...

Design is hard. One shared space must meet the needs of thousands of different people, in different situations, daily. So when you come across a space that is designed well, it is often life-changing. There are six factors all designers need to consider in order for their designs to become one of these beloved and life-transforming spaces. Look at the Plaza del Castillo in Pamplona, below. What attracts you here? Pamplona's Plaza del Castillo | Photo source: me Most people primarily visit...

The short answer is yes. However, the reasoning behind that yes is more nuanced. From my personal experience, design school is failing to output confident decisions makers. Design school exhibition at my alma mater. (photo 2016) It should turn out designers, regardless of title, who can go into any area of the design field and trust their decisions will improve the lives of the end-user. When a designer can’t confidently prove how their design decisions will better people’s lives, those final...

On day one in design school you are shown that the best designs are out-of-the-box, never-been-seen-before structures wrapped in materials that look like they were found on the moon. Over the course of the next four to six years (depending on the length of your design school) this idea is reinforced over and over and over and over again. Ultimately leaving one idea inside the minds of many young, impressionable designers: If you want your work to be great, you have to design the most flashy...

Hi there! This is what I was listening to while writing this week’s installment of No License Required. Studies from the 80s (Whyte, p 24) and today (Happy Cities, p. 8) have shown that by building out social infrastructure, we can increase people’s dwell time (aka loitering) by as much as 50%. It seems straightforward enough but what is social infrastructure and how can we get people to stop seeing loitering as a bad thing? Let’s be clear here. Aggressive behavior is bad. Aggressive behavior...

There are three questions I think every designer should be asking themselves whenever they face a new design project. Does the place we are looking at do its job today? Can it sustain itself financially long term? Does it feel good to be in? Asking these questions can help you pinpoint issues and scope of design work grounded in people’s needs and that can save hours of time when coordinating with stakeholders. Here the focus turns from what you design to how you design it. Let me explain....

Hey there! Long time no talk, I know. Life has been pulling me in a lot of different directions and its made me question what I am doing with Studio Leonardo, a lot. Like A LOT. Honestly, while the numbers may look good on the outside, internally I’m struggling. Because what am I doing, really? What even am I? What do I call myself? I can’t call myself an architect (spoiler alert, we’ll get here in a second) but I don’t feel like a video journalist or essayist either. I love making videos and...