An interview with Jeffry Corbin : Press : Corbin Design

Elevating Expectations

An interview with Jeffry Corbin

Design and the Municipal Client

In the interview which follows, graphic designer and architect Jeffry Corbin discusses how municipalities can become better design clients and foster more responsible planning and management, economic development, and socially inclusive community environments.

“Design is a strategic process whereby a city can envision, manage and monitor the dynamics of change and continuity in a responsible way.” Jeffry Corbin

What social and cultural responsibilities do municipal governments have?

Speaking as a longtime design consultant to municipal governments, I think it is important to distinguish between responsibilities they have and responsibilities they recognize they have. It seems today that what matters most to governments in general, be they local, state or national, is no new taxes, and either simplifying or getting rid of many programs.

However, municipal governments, if they are to serve their citizens well, need to manage change effectively without forgetting the real identity of their respective communities. They need to provide informed leadership. They need to balance the needs of, and empower, different community constituencies and stakeholders, and they need to use their resources thoughtfully and creatively.

Let’s take these one at a time. What do you mean when you claim that municipal governments forget the real identity of their communities?

At the local level in the cities and towns we work for, I am seeing a troubling change. In the Sixties and Seventies it was build everything new, rip down everything old. In the Seventies and Eighties, it was to preserve some of the things that we have and who we are. But in the Nineties, I am seeing the onset of homogenized America where everything and every place is growing to look alike. That began in the Seventies and Eighties with franchise restaurants and hotels, but I am now seeing communities with whom we are working who might have a specific heritage, beginning to question the value of that heritage. These are communities with strong identities that have been developed through the years who are desiring to be something else, often due to misconceived notions of what’s marketable (particularly to tourists).

I think the communities that will be the most successful ten to twenty years from now are the ones who establish a clear vision and maintain it over time, but that requires direction and leadership. A design firm can help provide direction to a community by bringing experience that people in the community might not have. We frequently advance ideas which have more than just design implications; they have implications for a community’s (or corporation’s) economic well-being, and they have social implications. Many communities, for instance, want to become tourist destinations, so we’re helping them open up and cater to visitors. We’re also at a point where land is becoming much harder to find and thus more valuable. There are new ways to develop land which are much different than we did fifteen or twenty years ago and yet those new methods require municipalities to be responsible in new ways as well.

Can you give an example of responsible community leadership?

Yes. Our local Chamber of Commerce retained a professional to help develop a Regional Guide Book for land development. It was modeled after the Connecticut Valley study, and the result was a guide book which has been sold to Realtors, land developers, neighborhood associations, fast food restaurants, and anybody else who will be developing land. It has a long title, The Grand Traverse Bay Regional Development Guide Book, and it provides guidelines on how to develop land carefully so that you consider other people as well as yourself when doing so.

What kinds of material does it cover?

In addition to providing basic planning guidelines, it illustrates specific examples such as the benefit of parking cars in back of a building instead of in front; creating an access road instead of six driveways within three-tenths of a mile on the main road, and so forth. It talks about how to develop land in harmony with nature. The Chamber has taken a leadership position by making certain that anytime a piece of property is sold for development that the buyer gets that guide book.

In all of your examples, design in some form plays a role. Do you think design is related to how a municipality both perceives and executes its various responsibilities?

Yes. Design is a strategic process whereby a city can envision, manage, and monitor the dynamics of change and continuity in a responsible way. Or to put it differently, design is a method by which a city can effectively manage its various resources in a coordinated fashion to obtain the maximum benefit for its citizens.

What are the different kinds of design and how can each benefit the community and its citizens?

There are three broad areas of design: environmental design, communications design, and object design. These include urban design and landscape architecture, architecture and interior design, graphic design for municipal publications and signage, and the design of objects ranging from street furniture to fixtures in city buildings. In many of the projects in which we have been involved, we have been a part of a team comprised of such professionals as urban planners, landscape architects, civil engineers, graphic designers, lighting consultants, and historic preservation consultants, all working together to restore, renovate or rebuild downtown areas.

What’s interesting is that the more disciplines that are involved, the smarter the city or the community gets. They begin to understand the synergistic effects of a significant renovation to the downtown, so that, for example, when a developer decides to build a mall outside of town he might want to have the lighting look like the lighting downtown. Many of these projects become demonstrations to the community at large. Time and again with wayfinding projects not only does the community benefit by visitors knowing where things are, but their own citizens suddenly discover that there is a library or a visitor center or a park down a road. Also, quite often the resulting increase in civic pride creates a domino effect where other improvements start happening throughout the community. We’ve seen, for example, that because of a signage or streetscape project, city maintenance stepped up its service in other, often ignored, parts of the community.

Are there other municipal issues or responsibilities that design can speak to?

There is a lot of debate today as to what “age” our society is in; the information age, the technological age, what have you. I think we’re in the age of access. Because of the Internet and electronic communications and the general media explosion there is just too much information, so the key issue is how to teach people to access the information they need to achieve their goals. As people get used to that idea, we’re finding they become very frustrated when they encounter a part of their life where information isn’t as readily available. My wife and I recently built a house and one of the hardest things that we had to do was deal with the utility companies and governmental agencies involved. They couldn’t tell me what I needed to know to get a phone line hooked up, and I didn’t know how to effectively access these overly structured organizations.

It’s difficult for municipalities to make themselves accessible because once they do make the information about the service you need available, they tend to get a lot of feedback that they don’t always want. With greater communication comes accountability and, hopefully, responsiveness, which has to be good for the community. Sometimes access to information can have immense benefits. We have worked with a number of university hospitals, where as a result of instituting a comprehensive wayfinding program, patient retention significantly increased. And when patients were polled as to why they kept coming back to this particular hospital a third of them said, “because it’s easy to find my way around.” I can tell you that the bottom line of that organization was improved because of a simple thing like providing needed information to help people find their way.

You’re talking about environmental accessibility as well as accessibility to information?

Right. Take the IUPUI campus, (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis), which has for years been isolated from downtown Indianapolis because of rivers and bridges and wide city streets. The State of Indiana and the City of Indianapolis improved the White River State Park, constructing a river walk along which you can travel from downtown all the way out to this campus. Well, guess what? Enrollment is up because suddenly people are aware that there is a university out there.

Do you have other examples which show the social and cultural benefits of improved access made possible by design?

In Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan one part of the downtown was particularly busy because it was located by the famous locks, but nobody turned the corner to visit the rest of the downtown. By introducing signage which invited visitors to turn the corner, business is now up all over town.

In Columbus, Indiana, we are introducing a program that requires us to first move people to five different areas of the city before we can direct them to specific destinations in each of those areas. One of those regions is an industrial, blue collar area, which traditionally has not been quite as well developed as other parts of town. Now, simply by identifying that area as one of our five zones, by making it visible and giving it a visual symbol that is of equal importance to the other four areas, the people who live there are experiencing a new sense of pride and belonging. This has elevated the spirits of this part of town, and may have paved the way for more equitable treatment of that area in terms of city improvements.

So, the client went through a little learning curve?

Yes, they did. They also learned how good design integrates social and economic benefits, and that bottom line thinking needn’t exclude the human benefit. Time and again when we implement a signage program in a community, one of the things we say is that when all is said and done, providing physical and psychological access to city resources is an important responsibility municipalities need to fulfill. The new wayfinding system of signs for Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, home of the Soo Locks, uses a framing structure which mimics the shape of the buoys used by freighters to navigate the Great Lakes. This particular sign is a directory to downtown stores which guides shoppers. There will be fewer signs in the environment than there are presently. Because if placed properly, fewer signs will do the job. This helps us in negotiating with state highway departments, and it helps us with community groups and maintenance departments as well.

Earlier you gave some examples of the use of professional consultants; one in which a planning commission ignored the consultant’s advice, the other where a Chamber of Commerce assumed a leadership position by using a consultant intelligently. Do you find that municipalities have trouble being responsible clients?

Experience with both corporate and municipal clients has been instructive in terms of recognizing the unique challenges municipal clients face. Like most designers, we have worked for for-profit corporations where there is bottom line responsibility where, in most cases, you can measure the success of good design by that bottom line. We have numerous examples where our projects have improved the company’s performance. Although governments like to talk about the bottom line, they don’t really have the ability to control that to the extent that corporations do. Political factors get in the way much more in a governmental situation than they do in a corporation. In a corporation, you have a clearly established organization chart of authority from the top down, but with governmental structures you have elected officials and government paid officials and quasi-government officials and so on. Very often it’s the person with the loudest voice who prevails.

Another problem we find with governments is working with people who have responsibility without authority. I would suggest that when a municipality undertakes a project that the people put in charge of working with a design firm or a contractor have authority to make decisions so that the project can move ahead.

In addition, municipalities have great difficulty in understanding their needs, what’s possible in a project, and then accurately defining what they want. There’s no long range planning. Within a corporation that doesn’t happen because a corporation has budgets, goals, and objective expectations. They have it all written down and you can design to it. Governments don’t have that. They want a wayfinding system, they want a streetscape downtown, they want a new bridge over the freeway, they want a river walk, and on and on. So, because municipal projects are often only generally defined, one of the strategies that we use as designers to find out exactly what they really want is to suggest more ideas than they can implement and then guide them in making choices.

If municipalities aren’t very good at defining the scope and nature of a project, how do they know when they have the right consultant?

Well, take streetscapes as an example. I drive all over Michigan and I see a tremendous number of mediocre streetscape projects. So the answer to your question is that they probably don’t know if they have the right consultant.

But that’s an important client responsibility. The municipal client represents all the people in the community, so it really behooves them to become more educated and discriminating clients.

Certain clients are, but it comes down to who is the on the committee and who is their leader. If the motivation is strictly political, or economic, the client group probably lacks a greater understanding of the benefits of design for the entire city and thus will settle for underqualified consultants. The most effective programs we’ve done are ones where there is a representation from many different organizations and levels, all of whom have high expectations and an understanding of what the project can achieve.

So even if you aren’t as educated as you need to be, involving the various organizational stakeholders to make sure you’re not leaving something out is important.

And I think, too, that people can self-educate. If they are about to do a streetscape project, they can search for other communities of the same size and the same region that have done that sort of thing. They can visit and see how it turned out and talk to whoever implemented it, the Downtown Development Authority, or the city, or the county. The more educated they are going in, the better off they are.

Are there any other suggestions you would have for municipal clients before we close?

Well, Bill Johnson, a founder of the landscape architecture firm of Johnson, Johnson and Roy, is today an “honorary consultant” to a number of communities. He makes periodic visits to a community spending two or three days in total, and he talks with the community about things ranging from land use, to utilities, to the downtown, to transportation. And in the communities he works with in this casual but pro-active way, we see interesting things happening: giving over state highways that come through town in exchange for a route that goes around town so the trucks don’t come through town any more; landscape statements that tend to separate residential areas from high speed roads; subtle things that make a big difference to the livability of a community.

I think communities of substance will have someone with a design sense consult with them on a regular basis to bring to that community the benefit of experiences in other communities. So rather than confine design to a specific project they use it strategically. It’s been done in some major corporations with phenomenal success. Eliot Noyes, with whom I worked very early in my career, did this for Westinghouse and IBM. Westinghouse had their own design studio and Eliot would go in once every quarter and they would parade all the toasters and irons out before him, and Eliot would critique them from his perspective. It was an ongoing educational investment, because he brought a different eye and a different view point; it stimulated a positive creative climate within the company.

Present-day gurus will tell you that the companies who can add value for their customers will be those that succeed. Adding value is what designers do: whether it’s helping people find their way, improving a company’s products, or making information more accessible. Producing order in today’s chaotic world is a tall “order,” but designers are doing it every day. Municipalities that recognize the value designers can provide will see myriad benefits, from improved living environments to increased tax revenues. Design today is truly a bottom-line issue.


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