Afterward

Dr. Stephen Mainzer

Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture

E+D (Ecology Plus Design)

PI, One Health Scholars Program

Pennsylvania State University

Eighty years ago, Kurt Lewin was among the first advocates that “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.” To do better requires that researchers engage with the people affected by the problem. We have learned much since that call. Gaps in knowledge between those affected and the so-called experts, mixed values, and divergent perspectives have resulted in the most challenging environmental problems with dramatic and immediate threats to human health. Transdisciplinary education is a way forward in preparing students to engage in such challenges. Yet from early education to undergraduate and graduate degree-granting programs, such calls for change have largely gone unheeded.

The Design Activism Studio: Designing for One Health in the Amphibious Informal Community of Claverito, Iquitos, Peru , led by Dr. Leann Andrews and the One Health Scholars, is a model of transdisciplinary education. Her team of undergraduate designers engaged with experts from outside of their field, testing early ideas in the safe spaces of their studio, before evolving their understandings alongside local knowledge experts while living in the affected place. In my experience, such immersive experiences are not common in undergraduate or even graduate design education. During a debrief of the studio, a One Health Scholar shared that at the beginning of the course, they rightly assumed their role was to lead by sharing their expertise with the designers. By the end of the course, they felt that they had shifted roles to supporting an unfamiliar design process. Within the shared space and time of the studio, the student was both an expert and a novice. A social science researcher and a designer. A creator of public health policy and built environments. That transition was a powerful learning moment. I imagine each student could have shared their own transformational moment of ceasing to see themselves as or, toward the pluralistic possibilities of and.

The studio could not have happened without the countless hours of thought, organization, and coordination of Dr. Andrews, the One Health Scholars, and the students. Or without the administrative support and funding of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, the Hamer Center for Community Design, and the Department of Landscape Architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State.

The irony of including this afterword in a book is not lost on me. The ideas developed in concert with the people of Iquitos and captured here are valuable ways forward for the community of Claverito and likely many others. However, the book is also an artifact of a process: a proof-of-concept for undergraduate and graduate transdisciplinary design education. I suspect as this model serves as the new standard for studio learning in our program or elsewhere, then it has produced something that more than suffices.