As I write this 2009 hasn't even started, yet collectively we are living there.  We now look to the future for comfort in a new year in which things can (hopefully) not get much worse.  2008 will be remembered as the year when we flirted with a depression that our weakened global and national institutions did not foresee and seemingly could do nothing about.  Yet even today we are holding our collective breath and putting our hopes on the day that President-elect Obama takes the oath of office.

The stakes are high and Obama is already planning major increases in federal power and spending, much of it on the built environment.  Furthermore, Obama is matching the new power of the USA's federal government with the return of knowledgeable professionals to decision-making positions.  With that in mind, among the latest announcements from Obama's office is that trained architect and housing expert Shaun Donovan will be the next secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 

The return of a powerful government and an architect to the halls of power coincides with a renewed interest by design practices of inserting themselves into political and legal processes.  This trend can be seen from Teddy Cruz's evolving discourse on ownership and building codes, to BIG rethinking relationships in practice, to Alejandro Zaera-Polo's call for architects to adopt new 'sub-political' roles in the world's peripheries, to Ed Mazria lobbying city and state governments across the country to change the way they build.  In different scales each one of these architects and many others are actively and critically putting themselves in the middle of political processes expanding the role of design and the designer. 

I do not like to make predictions; however, I see a trend in society towards a renewed interest in active political discourse and stronger collective institutions — and design professionals are looking at this trend with interest. The reason this trend is beginning to seep into design becomes clearer once one looks at the challenges the built environment faces, including: climate change, sprawling suburbs, crumbling infrastructures, growing urban slums, and an economic collapse caused by the ownership of homes.  In dull economic times, in which designers are looking for work, these issues offer them challenges that can be best met by critical involvement with political structures and expanded design processes.


Oh, and beards will probably go out of style.  This statement does not go without controversy, fellow archinecter AP contends that: "beards will take the world by storm.  Just beards.  Not the faces of bodies they're attached to.  Beards."  Let the great beard debate rage on.


More media on this trend:
-Verb Crisis boogazine: book review
-Did Someone Say Participate?
-"Obama: HUD pick central part of economic blueprint"
-Archinect Op-Ed: The Academy Transformed?