Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes.

Recorded on November 3, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. The discussion bridged diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments.

The panel featured You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, moderated.

The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Anthropology.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).

Podcast and Transcript

(upbeat music)

[MARION FOURCADE]
Thank you for joining us today for our Matrix On Point discussion. My name is Marion Fourcade, and I’m the director of Social Science Matrix. So, and I want to say before I introduce the panel, I want to say we have to thank Sarah, because I think, I believe you came up with this idea of doing a panel on Spaces for Thriving. And my predecessor as interim director last semester also really worked in putting together this panel with Sarah.

So, we know that physical space shapes well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging, planning, and policy to foster human flourishing.

And so today’s panel brings together scholars and experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities and create conditions where all can thrive. So the discussion will bring diverse perspectives on this topic, from environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies, to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments. Now, before I introduce our moderator today, let me just give you a preview of coming attractions the last few weeks of the semester.

So next week we have another Matrix On Point on the twin crisis of climate and insurance, specifically in California. On the 17th, we will have something that we are introducing now, which is a series called The Matrix Teach-ins, where we bring, sort of favorite teachers from across the social sciences division to teach their favorite lecture. So come listen to Seth Lunine talk about Oakland and how to how to study and engage with the city.

On December 2nd, we have a talk by Maximilian Kasy, an economist at Oxford, who is also a former PhD from here, on his new book, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works and Who Benefits. And finally, our Matrix lecturer on December 4 is Alexis Madrigal, known to many of you from KQED Forum, and he will talk about To Know a Place, also about, I believe about Oakland. So let me now introduce our moderator, Meredith Sadin.

Sadin?

[MEREDITH SADIN]
That sounds so much better. It’s Sadin. Yeah.

[MARION FOURCADE]
Sadin. Meredith is an assistant research professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy. She’s a trained political scientist, and her work focuses on political access, community engagement, and inequality.

She has extensive experience collaborating with practitioners, policymakers, and government agencies on projects designed to evaluate, implement, scale, and improve public policies and programs, as well as access to the democratic process. She currently serves as the director of the Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement, I love this name, as well as a faculty research affiliate at the Possibility Lab. Also, a great name.

So you’re the perfect person to moderate this panel. I’ll turn it over to you. Thank you.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

(clapping)

I’m going to stand, just so you have some, you know, visual variation, which I think is helpful in a space. Thank you so much. It’s really great to be here and to see all of you, and I’m really looking forward to this discussion.

You know, I am a political scientist. And a few years ago, I had the privilege of working on something called Assembly Civic Design Guidelines. And so it was kind of a playbook for creating well-designed and maintained public spaces as a force for building trust and healing divisions in local communities.

And the guidelines actually took four years to write. They were pretty painstaking with respect to collaboration, experimentation. I got to do some very fun pre and post-experiments across the country.

And really kind of drawing insights from over 50 participating cities, years of research, and collaboration. And the goal was really to identify evidence-based design strategies for creating spaces where people trust one another and trust one another to the point where they want to civically engage and are able to. So practitioners now use the guidelines in all sorts of ways.

They apply checklists to public space projects. They spark dialogue with respect to civic challenges. They test low-cost design interventions.

And they guide decisions around capital investments. And what I love about this work though it is a little bit of a, I wouldn’t say a right angle to my scholarly work but what I like about it is that it really bridges the civic and the spatial, right? I often live in the land of the civic as a political scientist.

We often have a set of outcomes of interest we’re really interested in looking at. And civic space is messy. And so I love that.

It makes tangible this idea that how we design and maintain our shared spaces really influences how we relate to one another and how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to a higher story and conception of our community, right? Um, public space, and I encourage you to disagree, but I would say public space is never neutral. Every design choice, right, where a bench is placed, how lighting is used, greenery maintained, carries signals about belonging, about safety and they can really invite connection or reinforce division.

So I think of space as another form of power. Who gets to gather, who gets to speak, who gets to rest, who gets to protest. And when we consider that especially in this moment of polarization, of inequity, it becomes clear that public space is itself one of our greatest civic tools.

So today’s panel is really important. It comes at an important time and we’re gonna be talking a lot about how planning policy space can shift power toward communities, how we can create spaces that foster safety, connection, and the conditions for people to thrive. So I invite you to think about the spaces that you move through every day how they make you feel, what they make possible, what they might say about who belongs and those are the questions I think at the heart of both good design and good democracy.

And so I’m excited. Let’s dive in with our first speaker. You-tien Hsing is a professor of geography and the Pamela P. Fong Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies.

Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China. She’s interested in the question of power and space. And for her research, she draws inspiration from ethnographic work, including in-depth interviews and participatory observation with a reflexive perspective.

She believes that theorizing starts from the muddy realities and is a process of open dialogues and self-reflections of which the historical and the geographical, the institutional and the emotional are all indispensable parts. So let’s please welcome You-tien.

(audience applauds)

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
Thank you, Meredith. And thank you, Sarah, and thank you, Marion for the invitation. This is my talk today.

I take cue in the Space for Thriving and then think, “What could a geographer say anything about thriving?” So I will draw some stories from my research on Dryland Conservation Politics in Inner Mongolia just as a case study, as a starting point for our discussion. And just a little bit of a propaganda this is drawing from my forthcoming book, Conserving China’s Northwest Frontier, Nature, Culture, and Future, will be coming out in digital format in two weeks.

(laughs)

And it will be another month before the print version comes out. Well, okay, so that’s the end of my propaganda.

(laughs)

This research happens in three sites. Inner Mongolia is a northern border region of China. It’s bordering with Mongolia as a country, but Inner Mongolia is a Autonomous Region of China.

So I just want to clarify that. Um, so I– my research is in, this story today is from Ejinag in western Inner Mongolia. Yeah.

It’s a dry place. Okay. And then with all the policy concerns conservation in the drylands, I will be focusing on policies on combating desertification.

Desertification happens throughout many different parts of the world on North Africa, Northern India Central Eurasia so th– this is a universal concern and then it’s a universal industry as well. Um, so but then in Inner Mongolia it’s been leading uh, conservation uh policy concerns since the early 2000s and this is, believe it or not, the picture shoes– shows a former lake. It dries up in 10 years, and so by early 2000s, this is the bottom of a lake that was more than 20 meter alone in the ’90s.

So over space of 10 years, it becomes like that. So it’s a real thing, you know, desertification, sandification of lands, and this is a village that’s been abandoned because the sand basically bury the entire village. Only the rooftop is left visible.

So you can walk here. Um, okay, so it’s, it’s real, and then not to mention, the sand uh, storms bring all the sands to Beijing. So the policymakers, the leaders actually feel it.

It’s not just remote rural desert, but also in the urban areas and all the way to South Korea and North Korea and Japan as well. Uh, so it’s it’s a big concern for sure, and Chinese Government since the 2000s have been devoted a lot of resources trying to combat this problem. And then to turn the problem into a policy solution you need to identify the roots and the actors who are responsible for the desertification.

So we have two type of actors that are identify as the roots of the problem. One is the herder. They are too greedy.

They feed too many animals, you know, they raise too many animals, and the animals themselves, they chew up all the grass, and, you know, you must have heard this, you know, they eat the roots and then so the grass, you know, die. Okay. So these are the commonly identified culprit, you know problems.

So if we have identified roots of the problem and then we come up with a policy solution to address these problems, and so in terms of the animal as a problem, they say, “Well, no more grazing.” So there’s lot of area being fenced up. This is a wire fence that would designate large area of grazing land for grazing ban and, you know, for years or for certain seasons until, hopefully, the grass grow back.

And then for others, there are many areas reducing the size of the stock and also stop open grazing and put animals in the shelter and feed them with fodder. So this is a commonly, commonly used a policy solution to address desertification problem the world over, and China has been also very important part of this But it’s far from being the sole practicion, you know practitioner of this, this set of policy.

And then in terms of people who are responsible for desertification these herders, they are relocated from the pasture to the government-built resettlement like this. Okay. So people in Berkeley immediately will come will ask the question, “Is this fair?”

Is this workable?” And this is, “Where is the how fair is this?” And then so there is a, the debate in the policy world, you know, because when these relocation projects are built, animals are put in the shelter, it’s actually all framed in the language of development.

It’s really providing different mode of income-making opportunities under the climate change threat and, you know, people need to adapt. This is a way of adapting, adapting to the climate change, to the deterioration of the grassland. So, and then to provide new job opportunity, to introduce new animal species that’s more productive producing more milk, more meat, and better marketable high-quality animal products and so on and so forth.

So it’s all about thriving. Yeah. And then on the other hand, you can imagine this is, you know, getting lot of criticism.

(laughing)

Relocation, you know, these herders into these resettlements only, for these social critics, invites forced, involuntary sanitarization. So they can no longer just do open grazing. They got stuck in these concrete boxes.

So it’s instead of calling them ‘space for thriving,’ and this is truly a space of deprivation. So this is a major policy debate, not again, not just in China, but also in many other ranch land management community, and development study community, and dry land conservation community. This is the debate, right?

Whether, you know, and how we can relocate and we can recover the grassland and save it from encroaching deserts. But my question is, is this all there is about this story? I think the story on the ground has to be more complicated than the either/or picture that we have been reading about.

And then, sure enough, when I visit, you know, these places under grazing ban, I saw these hungry sheep actually crossing, you know, the fence into this, you know, forbidden zone and graze their heart out. And then, so this is how they just all go in there. No prohibition or anything.

And then the herder follow them and saying, ‘Well, my sheep go there. I have to follow them.’ So everybody’s, yeah.

So this is, and then there are a lot of patrol and, of course, fines and violence fighting over this kind of grazing ban. I’m not saying this is easy. This is not a, you know, sail, smooth sail.

But, you know, they have to do that at night when the patrol is not there and so on and so forth. Okay. But then nevertheless I ask, how effective and how real is this kind of either/or picture and thriving or no thriving?

And also, when I visited these relocation settlements, I thought I probably will meet mostly miserable herders feeling stuck, or some, you know, more resourceful, entrepreneurial ones probably are, you know, taking advantage of this and thriving. The thing is during my first few visits, I met none, neither. There is all empty.

These housing projects had no residents.

[BACKGROUND]
Mm-hmm.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
And it’s not just this village but this one, too. And I visited six in my first two years of visits to these resettlements. I met two families in about, total more than 400 units.

So where are they? Some of them I saw in the restaurant, at home, tourism. These are the beautiful young and skilled ones.

They sing these Mongolian long songs and the soul singing. And very beautiful. Or they will be in the tourist spots riding the horses, performing like a Mongolian princes and for the tourists to take pictures and so on.

But these are beautiful young and skilled ones. Well, what about the majority of relocated herders? Where are they?

And then only after several visits did I realize I was barking on the wrong tree. And so I visited not just in summer but in different seasons and different type of desert, dry lands. And so in the spring where the sandstorms is on its peak, I found them, I actually went with them to hunt this wild congrong.

It’s a herbal medicinal herbs that is grown in the field of suosuo. It’s a desert shrub. So they spent long days from dawn to dusk in the sandstorming spring, so that’s why the mask, and all well-sealed and riding these different vehicle to hunt for this.

This is a very valuable plant that parasitizes on suosuo’s shrubs roots and is good for male potency. So the longer, the fatter, the better, and more valuable, especially the wild ones. And so the good one can fetch $500 a piece.

Of course, this is after many markup in, but still this makes, if you work hard enough for three months in the spring out in the desert this can contribute about one-third of your annual income. And it’s because it’s sandy. And then so it’s actually doesn’t really require too much of a tool.

And they sell this congrong to a wholesaler.

[BACKGROUND]
Mm.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
And then so this is their home. That’s why I didn’t find them in the resettlement homes because they are actually out in the desert for the three months in the spring hunting for congrong. And this is another family’s home during the spring season.

Okay. In the summer, where are they? I still cannot find them, right?

In the resettlement home. They are in the gravel Gobi lands and digging semi-precious gemstone. This is called, you know, they actually use, and this is they need to use earth mover to dig the hole and then, gather these semi-precious gemstone, and some of them can be as big as two meters high.

It’s called desert rose. It’s also hap-, you can find them in Arizona as well, so different versions, different types. And so they sell it to collectors, to museums, to big hotels for these big ones, and small ones they sell it to tourists.

And in the fall the site I study has this brilliant a poplar tree forest cons-, you know, protected forest area. So tourists swam in, and then lot of moneys can be made. And one of the ways to take advantage of ecotourism is turning their relocation home into youth hostel

(audience laughing)

for ecotourists.

(audience laughing)

So I stay in one of them during my fall visit, and so this is my room.

[BACKGROUND]
Aw.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
And because hotels are overbooked and there are just way too many, and it’s way too expensive and this is much cheaper. And then, so they, everybody in the relocation settlements especially those well-located ones more accessible ones, everybody rent out their home. So where do they stay?

They stay in internet cafe. Overnight, this, you know. So this is where they work.

And then so they sell these, you know, trinkets and stones on the tourist site in the fall. And over the winter, long and harsh Mongolia winter, then they return to their resettlement homes because it’s solar heated And it’s wonderful if they, again, they have this kind of facility.

Okay. So what I would conclude from this story is that whether it’s designed for thriving or imposed to deprive or both, space is only the beginning of this. This design is only the beginning, not the end of a story.

Relocation housing, in lot of the stories whether you praise it or whether you criticize it, always starts and ends in the relocation in saying they are stuck or they are thriving. But that’s only the part of the story. When you look at how they move around and they don’t you know it’s not about resistance.

It’s not about sanitization or automatically being sanitized by relocation. Instead, herders strategize to incorporate the relocation housing into a new mode of mobility, just that their strategies to survive conservation policies. Did not necessarily align with the intention of the policymaker.

And so I think there is a theoretical benefit to gain from this kind of geographer’s specialized social analysis. One, it helps us to avoid the binary story of authoritarianism versus resistance. They didn’t resist.

They didn’t run away. They just actively incorporate this housing into their overall grand scheme of surviving conservation. It’s not surviving environmental deterioration.

It’s surviving environmental policies. All right. Another thing that I think we can benefit of theoretically from this approach of looking at specialized social analysis is to avoid nostalgic story but end up nomadism.

You know people say, ‘Well, relocation housing just sanitize these herders. They have nowhere to go.’ But they do have many places to go.

It just it’s not about whether market or the state has end, end nomadism is really of different mode of mobility in the new rural economy in pastoral in Mongolia today. Again, last but not the least, this is another apology, which is for the policymakers. ‘Oh, it looks like a rosy picture.’

In my chapter, which I welcome you to visit,

(You-tien chuckles)

I’ve spent two-thirds of that chapter on nomadism, so-called nomadism today. And all the failure, you know, and all the increasing disparity between those well-endowed pastoralists and those poorly-equipped pastoralists under pastoral reform and conservation, those who has the capacity to aspire and those who do not have capacity to aspire under the new conservation politics. But what I want to do today is really just to show victims are not made automatically, and herders, relocated herder, still needs to be treated as someone with agency.

Okay, I will end here. Thank you very much for your attention.

(audience applauding)

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Thank you so much, You-tien. That was really, really such a fantastic way to kick off our discussion. And think about unanticipated uses of space and consequences of shifting space.

I think, as we get ready for our next presenter, who will be joining us remotely, I will introduce her. Sally Augustine is a practicing environmental and design psychologist. She’s the principal at Design with Science, and a researcher with the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces.

She has extensive experience integrating science-based insights to develop recommendations for the design of places, objects, and services that support desired cognitive, emotional, and physical experiences. Let’s welcome Sally.

(audience applauding)

[SALLY AUGUSTIN]
Thank you for the opportunity to join you today. I’m gonna be speaking about places that flourish from a slightly different, where people flourish from a slightly different perspective. First, I wanted to take a moment to introduce my field.

I am an applied environmental psychologist, and that means I bridge the science and design practitioner worlds. And so what I do on a daily basis is I work with people who are creating places, or objects, or services, and I make design-related neuroscience-informed recommendations to them so that it increases the likelihood that the spaces, objects, services that they’re developing, you know, reach their desired goals, you know, the outcomes that are planned for them. So, I’ll talk to people about things like surface color, lighting, patterns, seen and heard textures that people feel on surfaces with their fingers or underfoot, scents that people will smell as they’re having one sort of experience or another acoustic experiences.

And, you know, because life is complicated, I don’t just think about, and people like me don’t just think about sensory experiences, but we also layer in psychosocial factors like making sure people have a comfortable level of control over their environmental experiences. You know, personalities need to align with the design of spaces for people to thrive, you know, so do national cultures and organizational cultures. So, you know, I bring this, you know, science and practice perspective to our conversation today, and I really wanna drive home the fact that the material I’m working with, what I do is science-based.

Sometimes people think I actually practice some sort of like feng shui or something like that, and that’s not the case. Environmental psychology is a division of the American Psychological Association, you know, we have journals, peer-reviewed journals, et cetera. We’re among the smallest divisions in the American Psychological Association, but we’re there, you know, and we’re as a group, very interested in enhancing lived experiences.

So when I think about flourishing, I think about spaces that enable people to achieve the primary motivations that are laid out by self-determination theory. And as I speak today, I wanna make sure I don’t sound too deterministic. Place, design, makes it more or less likely that people will satisfy one of these core human goals, et cetera, but it’s not the only thing that comes into play.

So when we think about self-determination theory, and the motivations it lays out, one of the first that always comes to my mind is competence or the feeling that you’re going to be able to effectively execute some sort of activity. And this is something that environmental psychologists have spent a lot of time thinking about in a number of different contexts. There’s so much research out there about things like how lighting, color, and intensity, and placement, on a tabletop, overhead, et cetera, how that influences how people think and behave.

There’s all sorts of research that relates to the sorts of soundscapes that can fill an area and how those soundscapes have repercussions for cognitive performance and wellbeing, et cetera. So, design definitely can contribute to whether people feel competent in a space. The second primary motivation outlined by self-determination theory is autonomy.

And that, in this case, would be the feeling that you’re choosing a particular behavior rather than having it imposed upon you. And something that environmental psychologists have been thinking about for a long time is providing people with a comfortable level of control over the worlds in which they live. People can be overburdened by an excessive number of choices and that leads to stress, which is not a good thing if you care about what happens in people’s heads and subsequently to their bodies.

But you know, there are a number of ways that people can affect their environment, control their experiences in a space. And the third primary motivation laid out by self-determination theory is relatedness or, you know, and really what it boils down to is spending time with the people you wish to spend time with when you choose to do so. And, you know, in related research, well, environmental psychologists have been all over this for years.

We’re really sociable, a lot among ourselves and encouraging people to mingle, if you will pleasantly with others is you know, something that’s been at top of many research agendas. So we think about things like furniture, you know, how important it is that anybody who’s participating in a conversation be in roughly the same sort of chair so that all the contributions that they make are equally valued. Not surprisingly, when we’re looking down at someone because they’re sitting on the floor and we’re sitting in a chair or up at someone in the reverse situation, well, that influences how we value what the other party is saying.

You know, and we’ve even got, gone so far as to learn about how colors influence how sociable people are. And since temperature, color temperature, physical temperature, and perceptions of social warmth are all processed in the same parts of our brains we’ve learned, for example, that when people are in an area with, where warm colors predominate, they’re apt to be more sociable. So when you combine this uh, research that relates to self-determination theory and put it in the context of environmental psych generally, you find that a place where people flourish actually uh, supports human lives in five different ways that I call the five Cs.

First of all, a place where people flourish supports communication, and that can be, you know, verbal discussions among people, but it also involves non-verbal messaging. This is probably actually more powerful than any of the other things that I’ll talk about in, in terms of leading to a situation where people flourish. So in places where people flourish, they can communicate, they’re challenged, which means they have the opportunity to develop in ways that are personally meaningful to them.

Places where people flourish continue in use over time. Particularly when individuals are stressed, it’s very important that they understand how to use the design that they encounter. And, you know, this all relates to a space continuing in form over time.

Something doesn’t have to be, a space doesn’t need to be exactly the same as other spaces, but it needs to be understandable based on previous experience. A space where people flourish, where they thrive is also comfortable. And this gets into things like biophilic design, which is incorporating natural elements, whether they’re natural materials, plants, natural light, curving forms, et cetera, into spaces.

So we’ve learned that a place where people flourish will communicate, challenge, continue, and comfort. And finally, a place where people will flourish will coordinate with the tasks at hand. If people need to focus, they’re not distracted.

You know, if people are in the process of healing, the art on the walls, et cetera, supports that healing. You get the general idea. So when I think about places where people flourish, I think about how design can create psychological experiences, and particularly psychological experiences that create positive, life-enhancing experiences.

So I’m looking forward to talking with you more later about my world and participating in the discussion. So, thank you for your time.

(applause)

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Um, thank you so much, Sally. Um, and now I’d like to introduce our last speaker for the day. Um, Karen Nakamura is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and is the director of the Disability Studies Lab.

Professor Nakamura’s research focuses on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan. Her books, films, and articles have resulted in numerous prizes, including the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the SVA Short Film Award, and the David Plath Media Award. She’s currently finishing a project on trans movements as disability in Japan while launching a new project on robotics, augmentation, and prosthetic technology.

So please welcome Karen Nakamura.

(applause)

[KAREN NAKAMURA]
Thanks so much I thought at first that I would talk about my lab and show photos, but it, it’s difficult. And one of the reasons is every time I come back to my lab, it’s a bit different. And so I thought instead I would talk about design for some types of bodies.

And to think of the privilege that allows us, or at least to think of the work of others that have allowed us to be present in this space. We’re on the eighth floor of a building and so most of us, there are some in this room who maybe if there were no stairs and elevators, could have free climbed the eight stories. If there was no elevators, there’s a good chunk of you who could have walked up the stairs.

But then there’d be still a few that couldn’t use the elevator. And so it’s because of the work of previous generations who have thought of how do we create these spaces so that people can come, that we are here. We exist in a space that has lighting that seems to be suitable for us.

The temperature kind of works for many of us and so forth. But I wanna take also, and I do this in my classes and my talks, is to take um, some language from Margaret Price who’s at um, Ohio State University who really invites people at her talks to really hack the space to be like, “You know, we exist in spaces that are often don’t quite match what we need. And so if you need to lie down, please lie down.

If you need to stim, go ahead and stim. You know, if you need to get a glass of water, get a glass of water. If you need to stretch, if you need to fuss with the thermostat and turn it up, you know, we can turn it up and so forth.”

And to really take ownership of this space and to feel like you have that privilege to be able to change the environment that you’re in so that it better accommodates you. And I like how she is thinking, right? I there is this notion often in design spaces you hear it as called things such as universal design.

And I often have an allergic reaction to that, especially when it gets applied to campus environments. I don’t like the term universal design ’cause it imagines that we can envision a space that everyone can come and mingle as they are. And I think those spaces are very difficult to create.

There’s another concept from disabilities studies called conflicting accommodation. So I had invited, you know, you to change the temperature, but it’s gonna be very difficult for us to find a temperature that works for everyone. We all know the anecdote of walking into office spaces and all the women are wearing cardigans and have little space heaters underneath their desks because the temperature that’s been set for HVAC systems in North America is based on studies of young men doing light exercise and not on women doing office work.

And so finding universal things is difficult. I invited adjusting the lights. I find these lights to be somewhat painful in terms of it’s either the flicker or the CRI is painful.

I’d prefer it if they were shut down. But that would affect others who need the light to take notes. And so it’s very difficult to create a singular space where everyone can get accommodated at the same time.

And I had mentioned my lab is in this constant state of flux And I really want that. I encourage my students to think that they have ownership

And so every time there’s a break And I come back, they’ve changed the configuration of the lab and things have shifted. And I like that idea.

There’s this notion within the disability community, and I think this really works well with Yochain’s talk about that we are all hackers. That disabled people are the original hackers because we exist in spaces that don’t quite fit us. We have to make adjustments to things.

We have to, you know change the height of our countertops. We have to change the type of lighting to different lighting forms that won’t give us migraines. We have to widen hallways or get, pull up the carpeting or other things and so that the spaces can be changed to accommodate.

Within the disability community, we are pushing for design standards that allow for that type of hacking to say, “Okay, let’s get the classroom and make it very easy for the lighting to be shut off in one-half and to be bright on the other half.” Or let’s make, this is an ideal classroom, it’s very hackable, right? We don’t have fixed seating and so if people are coming in with scooters, we can easily move out some of the chairs so that they can accommodate.

But we’ve all been in classrooms on the Cal campus or other places where there is this predetermined notion of the type of bodies that will occupy it. Whether it’s that, okay, we’re only going to expect five percent of the population will be left-handed, so we’re only gonna have five tables that accommodate left-handed people. Or that people are not going to, are always going to be able to fit into these seats, and we know Americans are growing both taller and wider, and so we don’t fit into many of the seats that we used to fit in.

And so my invitation is to recognize that we need to invest more in hackable spaces and need to be more flexible about how we think about how spaces can be used. You know, I always think of the sadness about public spaces that suddenly be got turned into skateboard parks by kids, right? And so and then the efforts to make them hostile to skateboarders, right?

So they put those little pegs on, on surfaces so that they can no longer grind, I think is the term, I’m not a skateboarder, on them and so forth. And to think, you know, this was a public space and it was always an invitation to the public, but when the public starts using it in ways that we don’t envision and again, you know, kids are great hackers of spaces too, right? They’re constantly conceiving of new ways to use space.

The owners don’t like that. They’re like, “We don’t think that your use of this public space is appropriate.” And so we are going to make things designed in a particularly hostile way to make sure that you cannot be part of the public that we envisioned.

And we see that in many other areas of our world as well. This constant tussle between the people who make things and the people who use things. And part of what my group is trying to do is to say, we need to be better hackers.

We need to recognize that we hack and we need to demand legislation, recognition within design spaces, that once you make something and release it into the world, it’s no longer truly yours. It becomes all of ours and that this group ownership. This notion that, we will use it in ways that you might never envision and that’ll be fantastic.

Is something that you should celebrate and wrap into your design process. That’s what I think will allow us all as communities to thrive. So, thank you.

(audience applauding)

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Thank you so much, Karen. I’d like to invite You-Tien to come back up and join us. And we can also circle around so we can include Sally in our discussion.

I have so many questions for all of you. I’m going to start with just a quick question to each of you based on what you shared today. And let’s go in reverse order.

Since Karen your talk is fresh, as you were talking of inviting us to potentially lie down, I thought that invitation felt so radical, and trying to think through why. And what I came up with was, okay, there are norms of who is in charge and they aren’t necessarily the norm, the people who built or constructed the space, but they are based on some construction of power. And so I’m curious about how power has entered into your work with respect to hacking the norms.

You brought up the example of skateboarding. But I’m curious, specific to either the disability rights movement or–

[KAREN NAKAMURA]
Yeah, I think, you know, the disability rights movement was, was born in Berkeley, and part of that was this notion that the space just doesn’t work. But also against this notion that UC Berkeley’s claim to be inclusive, but it wasn’t and there’s that mismatch that got people really riled up. How can you claim to be a public university when you’re not?

And got them into hacking different spaces on campus, famously the Rolling Quads went out with hammers and other tools of destruction, and started making their own curb cuts, right? Charm, making it so that wheelchairs could go from street level to sidewalk level. And because the city of Berkeley was dragging its feet or rethinking about how the public bus system isn’t properly including folks.

And I think, they had certain amounts of privilege going in, right? To certain amounts of claim as students, as citizens of California, that they could claim the space in particular ways. And also shame the university or shame the city or shame the state, and then eventually shamed the nation after the 504 movement, including them.

But it’s still a constant process, but it is that notion of power, right? And we see power operating, especially against folks who are unhoused, in ways that equally make them feel very much as if they are non-citizens, non-community members, do not have a right to public space, to use the public space in ways that other people, right? If I can just rest at a bus stop and just go, ‘Okay, just I need to take a breath,’ they are not allowed to just rest, they have to move along.

And so yes, it is very much contextualized in this notion of power. Right now, we are in this particular political movement where people who look like undocumented immigrants feel very much like they do not be in the public anymore, and we are creating these apparatuses to make them feel unwelcome. And I think we need to recognize the ways that people are othered and felt to be excluded, as well as ways of inviting them in and saying, “Hey, this is your space.

Hack it, own it.” And it is small things, like a call in the talk for people to use the spaces as they need to see fit. Another one often in class is eating.

It’s like, eat in class. We all know that Berkeley students are food impoverished. And insecure.

If you need to eat because you have three jobs, you need to eat. And if you need food, let us know, and we’ll try to figure out food. And so I think there are these various ways that you can do to give people that sense of ownership.

But this also involved me having to let go for my lab. It’s like, “Okay, you did that.”

(laughs)

Not what I was thinking, but, you know, I think that’s great. And that’s also a much more difficult step, and sometimes very difficult. Ed Roberts Campus is a building complex above Ashby BART.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
I live right next door to it.

[KAREN NAKAMURA]
Yeah. It’s a fantastic building that’s designed around the principles of universal design, but and to be very open to the public. But they found that they do not have the resources to be open to the public, and over the years, it has become more and more closed until now they have gates, and a barrier, and a guard, and the public has difficulty accessing a space that was originally designed to be very open.

And that boils down to that they cannot live up to their principles because they don’t have the funds to live up to those principles. And I think what we’re seeing a lot these days is this funding agencies aren’t giving money. The state isn’t giving money.

And so people are being feeling very squeezed, and that is what’s making those very hard decisions which I think breaks their heart. So yeah, great question.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Absolutely. Yeah, I remember years ago, I wrote an op-ed about the importance of maintenance.

[KAREN NAKAMURA]
Yeah.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Because I think I was like, I love a good headline, and it was “You Can Build It, But They May Not Come,” because you can build it, and then if you have the funding for a year in some of my survey work, we found actually one of the kind of biggest illustrations of civic life is a like well-maintained vibrant playground, and then one of the biggest illustrations of the kind of deterioration of civic life is a poorly maintained playground. Right? And so you can go from one end of the spectrum to the other really quickly without a maintenance budget.

So, thank you. Okay, Sally I have a question because you must see the insides of a lot of people’s workspaces.

[SALLY AUGUSTIN]
I sure do.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
And yeah, I am so fascinated. Is there a case that you could share with us that just flies in the face of your, kind of tenets of, you know, competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and you know, how and why? You know, what would you change?

And it can be a public space or it can be a private space, but I’m just kind of curious to anchor some of your expertise in some real example.

[SALLY AUGUSTIN]
I think things start to go awry pretty quickly when designers of various sorts make assumptions about how the product that they’re creating, the space, an object, whatever, will be used. And, you know, I see this, I used to see it more, now I see it less, which is great, which mean, you know, we’re making progress, in moving the world forward. But, I’ve seen instances where designers even argue with the people who will ultimately be using a space.

For example, you know, people are asked something that boils down to, “What do you need to do in your workplace, to perform to your full potential?” You know, “What sorts of behaviors, outcomes, whatever, “are rewarded in your world at the end of the year with bonuses and things like that?” So, I’ve seen people asked something that boils down to, “What do you have to really do well in this area?”

And designers listen, and then I’ve seen them argue. Like, “No, you know, that isn’t actually what you need to do to be successful here.” What you need to do to be successful here is this other thing, which is how I intend to design your space.

And it depends on economic conditions, and specific professions, how much power users will have in a workplace, for example, to continue the workplace example. But even if they don’t officially have a lot of power, they’ll take whatever is built and use it in the way that they need. So you can see spaces that ugly up fast.

If whatever people are doing really requires no visual distractions in a workplace, to continue with the example has visual distractions. People will build little walls around themselves with whatever they can come up with. And it’s really ugly.

And it also sends a really awful silent message, like, the people who run this place, don’t really care what I need to do to be successful. But I’m not taking this lying down and I’m seizing control of the situation myself. So, I do see inside a lot of workplaces.

I see ones that are sometimes not designed to align with what people need to do there. But I also see lots of users who take matters into their own hands and make the changes in an area they need in order to be successful as they define success.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
I imagine also, this notion of workspaces being designed to maximize productivity relative to thriving. And when those things may be at odds–

[SALLY AUGUSTIN]
Well, they should align because our professional performance is such a key component of our self-concept, the way we think about ourselves, et cetera. But it’s important to keep that top of mind because when you start to drift away from design that supports what humans need to achieve in an area. No, well, don’t waste the resources, don’t build it.

You know just do something else.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Speaking of don’t build it, Yutian. I was really struck by the empty relocation housing. And I’m curious because I think your presentation really, it really did not take a normative approach.

I am curious, given that desertification is happening. From your perspective, are there things that can be done to maybe better inform environmental policy? Or do you see a counterfactual where, I mean, in some ways, it doesn’t necessarily seem like a disadvantage that this housing was built, but it just wasn’t designed to actually serve the purpose that it’s now serving for ecotourism.

So it’s, yeah, I’m curious what you think about the way that policy is evolving.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
You know, I was in planning school. That’s where my PhD is.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Yeah.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
But then I am now in geography for a reason. I’m very bad at thinking about what to do.

(laughing)

What is there to be done? I think that before we get to that point, it’s more, at least intellectually, I feel, I like to know more about what is going on. Yeah, and then policymakers the same, but then because of time pressure and everything else, you need to go to that conclusion about what to do faster.

But I enjoy the luxury of not having to go there. So it’s, first of all apology. But at the same time, one of the many things that I feel that can, that policymakers and thinkers can benefit from is really to understand this is, I learned the hard way, that desert and desertification are two entirely different things.

But they are so productively mixing and morphing, you know, morphing into one another in the policy thinking and doing, meaning that all desert is bad to begin with. And then all desert is considered as being desertified. And therefore needs to be fixed.

Not knowing two thirds of all the, of, on the Earth, face of our planet covered by various sandy soil is not desertified. It’s been there for millions of years. But then they are all being seen as evil, as, you know, deterioration.

There was a good old time when all the deserts were forest before. But that which is not true. And this idea is actually inherited from the colonial period in the 18, 19th century when the French colonialists went to, you know, Asia and Africa and see all the desert, and the, because local people’s naivety, ignorance, and greed.

And they destroy it. We have to recover the desert. The desert, is actually a very stable ecological system.

Just like your rainforest before it’s been destroyed, you know, snowy mountain, it’s a complete, comprehensive, very complex ecosystem. And it’s really the edge of the desert where, you know, farming, mining, you know, you know, deforestation happen when desert, you know, these very fixed, immobile sand dunes become mobile. And that’s when the problems happen, at the edge, but not in the heart of most of the desert we know of today.

But then all these development projects, relocation, you know, new production projects go all the way deep into the desert that does not need to be fixed. But they are all considered and perceived by policy makers, thinkers, as, you know, so that’s why turning the brown color desert into green color forest is considered the way to go. But desert theory does not benefit from growing too many trees.

Imagine you grow trees that suck up all the groundwater and in the name of protecting it. And not to mention you need to build a lot of roads in order to transport labor and water into the desert to grow your little seedlings. But it’s a very productive thing because imagine in this how big the money is to be made with this green money, green investment.

So that’s one thing I feel most fundamental in our policy thinking is really where is the desert and where is the area that needs to be fixed as being desertified. But even, you know, UN Convention of Combating Desertification is a big international organization, the most prestigious one, also confuses these two.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
Wow, yeah. That’s really interesting. And also in examining which of these spaces needs to be fixed, you know, who needs support and what kind. And then, as you pointed to, who is to blame?

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
Right.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
And who are the victims if we want to kind of label in that way.

[YOU-TIEN HSING]
It’s always the local people, even if the problem comes from somewhere else.

(laughing)

You live in a deteriorated area, it must be your fault. Right? But it’s not. It’s some, you know, from far away.

[MEREDITH SADIN]
All right. Thank you so much for such a fantastic conversation. To each of our panelists, thank you very much.

(upbeat music)