First experiences with bad design
I’ll never forget the first time a bad design ruined my day. I ended up covered in pee—and it wasn’t my own.
I was 5, attending kindergarten in the Atlanta suburb of Riverdale. Our classroom, overseen by a matronly Mrs. Ray, looked like any typical kindergarten: a square rug where kids plop down for storytime, folding vinyl mats to sleep on during nap time, a bookshelf stuffed with Smurfs and Curious George, and the glazed ceramic mugs we were making for Mother’s Day. There was also a bathroom attached to the back wall, and one afternoon, I really had to go.
It was a single-occupancy bathroom, but for some reason had two doors, one to my classroom and one to another. The moment I realized this, another full-bladdered boy came bursting through the door, his pants already unbuttoned and falling down his legs. Then he began emptying his bladder. His stream sprayed with complete abandon, landing all over the walls, the floor, and the toilet seat, but for the most part, right on me. I was trapped. The one-person room left me no choice but to maneuver my body out of his stream’s path and wait, desperately, for him to finish.
By the time it was over, I was soaked. The front of my pants was drenched in this boy’s pee, and now I had the humiliating task of rejoining my classmates. I would plead to them that it wasn’t my fault, that the real culprit was another kid, in a different classroom. It was futile. From outside our bathroom, that “other” classroom was worlds away. Fortunately, Mrs. Ray had dealt with her share of soggy-pantsed 5-year-olds, and she handed me the pants she reserved for kids who had accidents. I looked like a dork. Oh well, at least I was dry.
As much as I want to blame that kid, he didn’t know better. He had to pee, and he used the space as it was intended. So did I. The real culprit was the awful design of that bathroom: joining two separate classrooms with one shared lavatory and expecting recent toddlers to navigate it correctly. Where else is that design employed? How was I, a child, supposed to know to lock both doors before handling my business? And what would have happened if I was doing more than peeing?
Thirty years have passed since that incident, and I’ve lost count how many times I’ve run into bad design. It’s little wonder I became an architect and designer who predominantly works in education spaces. (Coincidence? You be the judge.) I’ve had the good fortune of designing schools and classrooms all around the world, from India to Silicon Valley. I’ve worked with Google and Harvard and Khan Academy. And in all my years as a professional designer, I’ve grappled with the nagging sense that our built environments aren’t living up to their full potential.
Actually, let me be clear. Most places suck.
Why design matters
We spend almost every minute of our lives in some kind of design, so it’s easy to miss, but if you look closely, you’ll see bad design nearly everywhere. I don’t mean the world is ugly. I mean, our built environment isn’t living up to its potential to support our health, happiness, and well-being.
This is because design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about the experiences we have in the world. Winston Churchill understood, saying, “First we shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us.” What this means is our spaces aren’t just passive backdrops in our lives; they are active participants, and when designers get things wrong, everyone suffers. Bedrooms with poorly sized vents directly above where we sleep dry out our eyes and give us sore throats. Classrooms with noisy acoustics cause students to lose focus and fall behind. Offices with little privacy make workers feel surveilled and uncomfortable.
That’s just a fraction of the problems for each of these spaces, not to mention all the other spaces we’re users of that have their own problems that negatively affect you, me, and everyone else using them. Measuring the impact of these designs is hard, but when we do, the data that comes back is sobering.
Poor design has minute-by-minute consequences that affect the most vital aspects of life. Poorly designed hospitals can send our health plunging: Hospital patients in darker rooms have been shown to use more painkillers, report more stress, and have higher mortality rates. Poorly designed schools can limit creative and intellectual potential: Schools with ineffective space layouts can stunt a child’s cognitive development by 25%. And poorly designed cities can damage our relationships: One study in Los Angeles uncovered that people stuck in extreme traffic on their way home experienced a 9% increase in nighttime domestic violence.
I realize all of this might sound dramatic. Maybe you love how your bedroom or favorite hangout spot makes you feel. But the truth is, aside from a few beloved spaces, we’re living in a suboptimal world—one that we designed.
On the other hand, with good design, you’ll start to see its effects all around you. In California, for example, a school decided to bring more daylight into their classrooms. Assessments showed students started performing 20% better in math and 26% better in reading because of the change. In Pennsylvania, a hospital started putting surgery patients in recovery rooms with windows that faced nature instead of a brick wall. The patients went on to heal faster and needed less pain medication after surgery. And in Portland, Oregon, the introduction of protected bike lanes reduced the rate of traffic fatalities by 75% over a 20-year period.
So what does this mean? It means that even if the world has been grossly mis-designed, it can always change. It can always be redesigned.
Reclaiming our architectural instinct
In order to appreciate that each of us has a stake in design, we first have to appreciate that design is hard-wired into our DNA. We build shelter intuitively, define space to suit our daily rhythms, and automatically sense when spaces aren’t functioning properly. We can think of this as our “architectural instinct.”
To see this instinct at work, I need to take you back for a moment. Way back. Roughly two million years, in fact, to a defining moment in our evolution from ancient primates to human primates. You see, when ancient primates (and many modern-day monkeys) sleep in a tree, their brains are never fully asleep. The animals have to stay partially alert to maintain their sense of balance; otherwise, a strong gust of wind could send them falling.
Ancient primates lived like this for millennia. Over time, as the Homo genus evolved, and our heavy, upright bodies became better-suited to sleeping on the ground, early humans started building rudimentary shelters that provided both comfort and protection. As it turns out, scientists have been able to determine that this single act—relocating to build a life on the ground—had profound effects.
On solid earth, our ancestors were able to build even more elaborate and sturdier versions of the nests they built in the trees. These nests and shelters, when combined with the social protection of group members standing watch, afforded even deeper sleep and fueled a key evolutionary advantage: higher-order cognitive function.
Think about that for a moment. Our discovery of architecture (shelter) laid the foundation for a cascade of other advantages to form. Our brains morphed from simple pattern-recognition machines into the marvels that eventually figured out how to conduct heart transplants, transmit videos across the globe, and travel into outer space. Architecture made all that possible.
☖ Our discovery of architecture (shelter) laid the foundation for a cascade of other advantages to form. Our brains morphed from simple pattern-recognition machines into the marvels that eventually figured out how to conduct heart transplants, transmit videos across the globe, and travel into outer space.
It wouldn’t be the last time our architectural instinct helped us advance. Approximately 15,000 years ago, in many parts of the world, we began moving away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles in favor of structured settlements. We built fences, contained our cattle and crops, and began erecting structures around these sources of food and income. Economies scaled, and an agricultural revolution led to an industrial one. The architectural instinct served us yet again.
But this architectural instinct also raises a series of challenging questions. If we’re such naturals at building the places we need, how come we don’t live in an architect’s utopia? Why are our airports so stressful? Why are our schools so depressing? Why are our hospitals so terrifying? In between coming down from the trees and finding bad design everywhere, where did we go wrong? In the next section, I’ll show you what two million years of evolution didn’t buy us.
How did design get so bad?
So, we all have an architectural instinct that guides us to make places that are good for us, places that meet our needs and make us happy. But there’s something standing in our way. We also have baser impulses like self-preservation and status-seeking. Without us realizing it, these impulses lead us to make architecture that harms us, because we want to make flashy, trendy things that earn us attention.
The truth is, bad designers usually aren’t acting maliciously. They’re not out to create terrible spaces filled with boobie traps that make our lives worse with every step. Often, designers create bad designs simply because they follow in the footsteps of older designers appealing to the same base impulses.
As I began my career, I worked for “top tier” architects that had grown massive firms and won Pritzker Prizes—true titans of the industry—but what I got was a front-row seat to a design process that put flash over function, style over substance. These architects were supposed to be setting world-class examples for young minds, but instead all I saw was a lame appeal to fleeting trends. Where was the end user? Why didn’t the people using the space have a seat at the table?
For these designers, an ongoing mis-education taught them to make things bold for the sake of publicity, to dial up the curb appeal and not dive deep enough into function. As a result, they create designs that look sexy, for everyone to fawn over online, but are cold, lifeless places to use and occupy. Worse, the spaces might do real damage to human life or the planet. Hell, I still remember one of my architecture professors in undergrad telling me that my project “has to be bold” for no other reason than boldness itself, not that it “has to work well.” A better designed world begins with better design training.
We’ve got poor training, but we’ve also got ignorance. Many decision makers—whether they’re politicians signing off on urban plans, school principals working with architects to add a new building on campus, or a homeowner renovating their kitchen—operate out of ignorance. And we can’t blame them for not knowing any better. What do they see around them?
They see glossy magazine spreads of sparkling kitchens that no chef would actually enjoy cooking in. They see colorfully saturated classrooms with fancy furniture that manufacturers falsely assured them would revolutionize learning. And they see the most popular leaders pledging to transform their cities through bold urban plans, failing to notice that these interventions are often ill-considered and make life worse for residents. It’s hard to make wise decisions when everything you’re seeing around you is hyping up bad design.
In the most insidious cases, we get screwed over with terrible surroundings because the people creating them simply didn’t care enough—or, worse, their agenda actively went against our interests. For example, some real estate developers—not all—rush to spring up entire subdivisions of homes and give little thought to the design beyond what would sell quickly. Their priority is money. They know that most homeowners aren’t experts in architecture and design, so they build places that appeal broadly to what’s in style: the kind of house you might see scrolling through Instagram or being revealed at the end of a HGTV show.
Make no mistake: I’m not faulting anyone for watching or enjoying what they like, but we all need to consider the profound effect poorly trained designers, greedy developers, and mass media have on the spaces that surround us. What they produce is what we consider normal, regardless of whether it makes our lives better. Shiplapped walls and eclectic light fixtures might be fashionable now, but are such trends really the ticket to the perfect space? They may help you sell the home for a tidy profit in 10 years, but what about the way the space makes you feel over that decade of your life? Years of health, wellbeing, and joy are a lot to give up for a little more ROI.
I’ll concede, sometimes a designer or decision maker is trying to do good, but their hands are tied. If that’s you, don’t worry. I feel you. I’ve been there. And I know you can change things.
When I was 21, I worked for a world-renowned architect. But during one project, something about what I was working on didn’t feel right. The modern building we were designing felt out of place in its context, like a spaceship had landed in this foreign environment. I mustered up the courage to walk into my boss’s office and cautiously uttered, “Why are we making a stark white, metal-clad building in this historic context?” And his response, which was fairly infuriating, was, “Because we make white metal buildings.”
Because he was my boss, I was forced to do things his way—which I call the “designer-centric” approach. But I vowed to never run my future design firm that way. My ego or personal style would not drive my decision making when creating architecture. The needs of the users would. By the way, I’m not saying you should never erect a metal-clad building near brick buildings (I’ve done it). But you should have a better reason than “because that’s what we do” and upholding your personal aesthetic.
It’s (surmountable) reasons like this that we end up with bad environments that give us problems in our health, happiness, and quality of life.
Resisting an artificially intelligent dystopia
The problems I’ve described so far have been of our own making. Human minds concocted these terrible designs. But what will happen if we let artificial intelligence take control and do the designing for us?
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT back in November 2022, it seems like the market is getting flooded with new tools every day, including ones meant to help designers and everyday people realize the perfect space. This is fun for homeowners, but I cringe at the idea that serious professionals will outsource their entire design process to AI. Remember: AI is only as good as the knowledge we feed it, and the knowledge we’re using right now is pretty lousy. Unless we take great care to use AI for good, we’re on track to have more bad designs, poorer health, and worse outcomes for all of us—and it will be all our fault.
The most popular AI design software is Midjourney. If you feed Midjourney a prompt, or upload a drawing or image, it will quickly spit out a series of renderings that match your request. It requires some savvy to get the prompts right, but I’ve seen some incredibly detailed designs that look like they took a human hours to make. For now, most people using Midjourney are just messing around. It’s a toy. But my fear is this is a slippery slope, and that there are already designers out there using platforms like Midjourney to do their jobs for them.
The idea that designers and architects are taking these shortcuts to create the world you and I, and all our families live in, makes me seriously worry. But I know it’s happening. In the 3D modeling software Rhino, which is used by many architects especially during university training, there’s a plugin called Grasshopper that takes a set of parameters and produces hundreds of variations of a design within those parameters. It’s been around since the early 2000s, and a precursor to what’s coming with AI. I’ve seen plenty of worn-out designers just grab a Grasshopper variation and run with it, without giving it a second thought. This will only get worse.
To be clear, this is a designer problem—not an AI problem. Our world isn’t poorly designed because we lack the right tools. It’s because we lack the right understanding and desire to do better. AI can actually help designers create a much better world so long as we train it correctly.
For example, in California’s Bay Area, it can take months for building permits to wind their way through municipal bureaucracy and red tape. It takes forever for anything to get built, primarily because humans are slow and inefficient. If this approval process were left to AI, based on agreed-upon standards and codes, we could shrink the process to a matter of days. At the end of the process, a human could still be the one to give the final sign-off.
Or consider another example: Github is the go-to website for software developers and engineers who want to share their work with the broader community of developers around the world. If someone figures out an elegant solution to a tricky coding problem, they can post it on Github for others to use in their own work. The design world needs an AI-powered Github. Whenever an architect solves a tough problem, they can upload the solution so that other architects in the future don’t have to make the same mistakes. They can jump right to the solution. This type of sharing, assisted by AI, can help us make societal progress.
These are just a couple ways that AI can assist design. There are certainly many more, which deserve support and funding. However, as we’ve seen so far, the world doesn’t yet see architecture as a catalyst for progress. It’s judged mostly by how it looks, not how it works—and especially not how it helps. AI has the power to make life infinitely better for all of us, but we’ll never get there if we keep feeding it the same tired design principles.
What we need is something brand new—a smarter, better, universal design philosophy that addresses all of the challenges we’ve been discussing and unlocks the opportunities that await us. The problem is, nobody has created such a philosophy.
Until now.
The Baaham principles
It’s worth designing better spaces because this is what improves our health, happiness, and overall lives. But what do good spaces even look like? Humans have been searching for the answer since the beginning of our species, when we came down from the trees all those years ago.
I’ve also been searching. I’ve studied and been influenced by the great designers and philosophers of our time, figures like the world-renowned architect and theorist Christopher Alexander and philosopher Alain de Botton. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of literature on design and prior movements and philosophies that sought universal truths on how we should design our environments. I’ve also practiced architecture and urban design for two decades.
With all of this as fuel, I’ve homed in on what I see as the central problem of modern design: a lack of consideration given to the way we interact with our spaces, and the ways our spaces interact with us. Design is reciprocal. And in order to design functional spaces that grow and evolve as our needs change over time, we need a framework that pushes us toward that sense of reciprocity. That framework is Baaham.
Baaham(pronounced BAH-hum) is a design philosophy I’ve been cultivating over the past 20 years. The word comes from my native language of Urdu, and it describes two interconnected things working in tandem. To me, Baaham is the perfect way to think about our surroundings: We shape our environment, and it shapes us.
Baaham is a design philosophy that takes into account sociology, human biology, psychology, behavioral economics, and anthropology. For any design decision a person can make, whether for themselves or for others, at the scale of a bedroom or a city block, Baaham can serve as a roadmap.
In particular, Baaham addresses the biggest problems we currently face with design. It makes solving users’ problems and improving their life the main priorities of a space, not creating a place that just reflects their personal tastes. It also guarantees the presence of design elements that align with users’ biological rhythms; counteracts the trend of all designs looking the same (no matter where in the world you are); promotes the desired feelings and emotions; and retains a focus on sustainability.
With that said, to make Baaham as easy to use as possible, I’ve sorted and condensed the various pieces into these core principles.
- Look within
- Solve real problems
- Design for change
- Follow nature
- Build locally
- Detail it
- Zoom out
These principles can help anyone, from a novice college student to a real-estate tycoon, design a physical space that is functional, beautiful, and life-changing. Whatever the design, any person or team, on any budget, can follow the steps from start to finish.
Look within
A space’s primary users are its most important stakeholder in any design project, whether they’re people, or even animals. Put these users at the center of the design—their needs and desired outcomes—and then design outward. Resist the temptation to use current trends or your preferred style as the starting point. Just think about what they need and desire.
Solve real problems
After determining whose needs and aspirations are at the center of your design, begin investigating what will actually improve their well-being. Identify their problems and sources of discomfort. Think practically about what the users need from the space on a daily basis. These problems will naturally guide you to solutions that make the biggest impact. Trust that form will follow function.
Design for change
Spaces are not passive backdrops; they are active participants, affecting how we think, feel, and behave. Keep this fact in mind as you figure out how to use the design to nudge users toward the behaviors and mindsets they want for themselves. Create solutions that make those desired actions the easiest ones to perform—the default behaviors. Second, remember that over time the needs of people change—it’s inevitable. Give your design a way to adapt.
Follow nature
Biology is inescapable, and it plays an essential role in how users respond to environmental cues. Consider how design elements can be used to serve the desired biological needs, such as people’s need for movement, fresh air, sunlight, and mental and physical rest. These elements will work with, not against, users’ physiology and improve energy levels, mood, and well-being at all times they occupy the space. And like nature, refine your designs by collecting feedback from users on what works well and what doesn’t.
Build locally
Using local materials and building traditions has many benefits. It means your building materials do not need to be transported from long distances, reducing your carbon toll. It means your project benefits from generations of thinkers honing in on the most practical building solutions for that geography. And having local materials and local solutions means you’ll build a project that visually reflects the unique character of the area it’s in. This is particularly vital in a world where many places are starting to look the same, lacking local charm and personality.
Detail it
While the big picture in a design is important, the details can dictate whether it’s ultimately a success or not. Don’t skip details. Design them carefully to work. Adding details will also add beauty, which will make people appreciate the design and be more likely to use it.
Zoom out
Physical things are never an island. They relate to and influence other things. If you have a table, consider it within the flow and layout of the entire room. If you have a room, consider how it relates to other parts of the building. If you’re designing a building, think of its role in the neighborhood—and so on at every scale of design to create a larger “design ecosystem.”
To be clear, these principles weren’t pulled from thin air, just because I happen to like them. They are a direct response to the problems each of us face with modern design—problems that hurt our physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being. Baaham is an urgent solution to this growing list of maladies. It is the medicine for a world sick with bad design.
The good news is, the bill for this medicine is up to you. How creative can you be when thinking of solutions? Can you find a way for your space’s layout to fit with the spaces that surround it, or the building it occupies? What about the city block or neighborhood that building is a part of? Baaham solutions aren’t about choosing between a cheap piece of furniture or an expensive one. They’re about using your imagination to question the purpose and function of traditional design, and crafting brand-new solutions that make life better for yourself and others.
Picture a Baaham space
So what would a space look like if it was designed with Baaham? Very different from what you’re used to. To show you how different, I’ll tell you about how I’ve designed a Baaham bedroom for Shawn and Tania, a couple in their 40s with two young kids.
Shawn and Tania spent their 30s in a typical, trendy bedroom: high sleigh bed, large painting mounted above their heads, work desk a few feet from the bed, trendy brass knobs on the dresser, clean white walls with accent pillows and pops of color to match the bright accent chair. This previous bedroom looked just fine, but now that they’re building a new home, Shawn and Tania wonder if we can design them a bedroom that becomes a sanctuary for health—and that means good sleep and good habits.
Knowing what they’re looking for in their bedroom, I can dig deeper and ask: What prevents Shawn and Tania from sleeping well and staying healthy? This is what it looks like to deploy the first two Baaham principles, Look within and Solve real problems. As it turns out, there are several things. For one, Shawn is a light sleeper and sensitive to light and noise. He also has his own business and often works late into the night. Tania has a different schedule and wakes up early in the morning, which tends to disrupt Shawn. With her high-stress job, Tania generally doesn’t have time for exercise and is often checking emails on her phone right before bed and the moment she wakes up.
All this means my challenge is to design a bedroom that can give them a better environment for sleeping well and nudge them toward healthier habits. And while I do that, I’ve got to keep in mind how human nature works (especially in regards to sleep), what kind of emotional vibe will help achieve what they’re after, how each design element fits into the grander plan, and of course using materials that are healthy for the couple, their kids, and don’t harm the planet.
What might all that look like? Let’s step inside their new bedroom.
As we step into the room, do you see how we have to take five steps down? I sunk the bedroom below the level of the hallway for a few reasons. At night, when they’re ready to go to bed, Shawn and Tania have to descend down into the bedroom. It’s like our ancestors crawling into their caves. Every day as Shawn and Tania those few steps down, they’ll feel a sense of relief, like they are releasing themselves from the mental worries of the day and now descending into a slumber. The other benefit of this feature is that every morning as they leave the bedroom, they have to climb five steps. This works their muscles and signals to their body that it’s time to wake up and be active.
Waking the body up properly in the morning is actually key to sleeping well that upcoming night. That’s also why I’ve added a small terrace just outside the bedroom, between the bedroom and the rest of the house, so that every morning Shawn and Tania walk across the terrace, getting sunlight in their eyes, before entering the rest of the house and starting their day. That daylight is critical for them to sleep better. The blue light hitting their eyeballs in the morning signals to their brains “it’s time to wake up,” and by doing that they’ll be rebooting their circadian rhythm and ensuring that their bodies are also ready to sleep at night once it’s dark out.
And just in case they need extra help with light, I’ve painted the walls of the bedroom in a special way. As you look around, you’ll probably think the wall color looks like a typical warm white. It does right now. But the paint shifts color and at night becomes a dark tone. So, when the sun goes down, the bedroom becomes a dark cave inviting sleep. And when the sun rises, the paint shifts the room into a bright space that nudges their bodies awake.
Now look over there, at the wall with doors to the closet and bathroom. Both doors are gone. I’ve moved both rooms outside the bedroom. Since Tania’s up early, it made more sense for her to shower and get dressed away from the light-sleeping Shawn. To dampen the sound even more, I’ve even positioned the closet in between the bedroom and bathroom, so Shawn isn’t woken by any flushes or running water.
If you’re sketching along, that means the order of rooms goes bedroom, closet, bathroom—or, quietest, noisier, noisiest.
There are a couple other cool things you can’t see when looking at that wall. To prevent exterior sounds from coming into the bedroom and waking the couple up at night, I’ve lined the bedroom with two layers of gypsum board (aka drywall) and stuffed extra dense insulation in between the studs. And for safe measure, I also positioned the entire bedroom to face away from the street and towards the back of the house where you can’t hear sounds of loud engines or delivery trucks at night.
As we walk closer to the bed, notice how we didn’t pass a desk. This is not a room for work. And this clear expectation also helps the couple minimize their phone usage (and if they can’t control that, I’ll come back and add a shelf outside the bedroom so they have to leave their phones outside of the room, or maybe go more extreme and turn off the Wifi signal in this room).
Before we go, look at the bed. A lot lower than you’re used to seeing? That’s also by design. Similar to the steps down into the room, the low bed allows the couple to basically fall into sleep. And, because they’ll lower into and rise out of bed daily, they’ll be healthier. With this bedroom design, Shawn and Tania will naturally do some squatting and climbing every day, which keeps their joints and muscles strong and extends their life expectancy too.
There are plenty of other details I want to show you, and some that you’ll even notice on your own, like the blackout shades, but check out this last one before we go. There’s a cool telescopic skylight above Shawn and Tania’s bed, with a retractable shade. After long days they can close it and go right to sleep. But for nights when they can’t get work out of their head and wind down, instead of counting sheep they can stare up at the night sky, let their minds wander, and drift off to sleep. It’s a beautiful thing, made possible with Baaham.
None of these solutions is radical on its own, but together they add up to a space that uniquely suits Shawn and Tania’s needs. And that’s just one room in a single-family home. Imagine if every room in their house were optimized for them to live better—isn’t that something we all deserve?
Baaham creates opportunities
As you see, smarter design can improve your health on a daily basis. But sometimes the benefits extend even further, opening up a path in life you didn’t know was available to you.
In October 2009, a 22-year-old man was shot and killed in the early-morning hours at an Oakland, California train station. His name was Oscar Grant. He was Black, and at 2:15 a.m. he was shot in the back by a police officer who was trying to arrest Grant for a fight that broke out on the Fruitvale train station platform. Since Grant’s murder, Fruitvale Station has become hallowed grounds in Oakland, fueled in part by the 2013 biopic that starred actor Michael B. Jordan as Grant living out his final hours.
It would be easy to say that what happened at Fruitvale Station all those years ago in some ways defines the city of Oakland. It doesn’t. But tragedies of that nature can’t help but live in a city’s DNA. And if a community isn’t careful, its children may also grow up believing that tragedy lives in their DNA, and that they somehow don’t deserve a more hopeful future.
But if you walk out of the Fruitvale Station today, and hang a right on Avenida de la Fuente, within just a few steps you’ll come upon a mixed-use collection of shops and businesses called Fruitvale Village. It’s run by the Fruitvale Unity Council, and it offers free services to local residents, such as career and financial counseling, small business events, and children’s programs. It also serves as the epicenter for a space that’s rewriting the playbook on who gets to create world-changing technology.
Code Next Lab is a partnership between Google and my architecture firm, designed to give historically underrepresented students the best possible experience learning STEM subjects, meaning science, technology, engineering, and math. It opened in 2016 as a way for local high-school students to spend a couple hours after school engaged in projects that most kids never get to encounter in their local public school. At Code Next, they learn to code, practice engineering, take risks, explore new technology, and get their minds blown by what they can create.
I remember visiting the lab one day shortly after it opened, and meeting a student who was overflowing with excitement at everything he was creating. His name was Jovir. He was an outgoing kid with a mouthful of braces, and he was gushing about how he felt there. “You really feel that engineering feeling going through your body,” Jovir told me, in between focused sessions at his computer. A little bit later, when we were chatting, he said the experience in the lab had inspired him. He said, “it really helped me understand what I want to pursue in the future.”
Code Next isn’t your typical computer lab. For starters, it was designed with input from the staff as well as the students. For any space I design, this is an essential first step. But for some reason, it’s still a rarity in the architecture world. I’m always shocked to see a building’s final design and learn that nobody who will actually use the space was consulted beforehand. How crazy is that?
What I heard from the people at Code Next was a desire for five things:
- Connect kids to resources by building a place-based program in their neighborhood
- Assure students of color, primarily Black and Hispanic teens, that they belong in tech
- Increase the appeal of computer science professions
- Build student confidence and risk-taking
- Get students in a maker mindset
Do you notice how these five goals have nothing to do with what’s in style or what would enhance the look of the space? Instead, they reflect specific outcomes that Code Next staff and students wanted to see. This inclusive approach bakes in a sense of equity—meaning, shared ownership and belonging—from the start. When we start designing with a focus on outcomes, it changes how we think about what’s important. For example, for any given design choice we can ask questions like, “Does this detail move us closer or further away from our desired outcome?” If it’s not moving you closer, come up with more ideas that do.
What emerged as the final design is a space that’s uniquely suited to meet people’s immediate and long-term needs. I’ll give you a handful of examples.
On the walls, we surrounded students with stories of inventors and scientists of color, so they would see people who look like them making significant contributions to science and feel like they, too, belonged in the field. As you walk through the space, you’ll also notice the exposed beams, pipes, and wires. This helps kids get in a maker mindset by showing them how things are made.
Similarly, we designed the makerspaces with taller ceilings and the coding areas with lower ceilings, based on research showing people are up to 25% more creative in rooms with high ceilings. Lastly, to boost student confidence and encourage them to take risks, an Iteration Station showcases students’ work. This station allows them to proudly display all iterations of their inventions, not just the final product.
What did students think of their new lab? During one of my visits after it opened, the lab community manager, Gracie, told me the space “really kind of changes the way students think about learning.” She said, “it’s fun, it’s creative, and there’s a lot of design incorporated into that.”
In fact, Gracie said she had an Aha! moment one day watching the students learn and tinker. “I saw so many different creations, things from a programmable robot to a laser cut airplane to a laser cut jewelry box, that some of the students were creating,” she said. “That’s when I felt that the design of this lab and space was really worth it. It was a space that they felt they could express their creativity and take risks, and just create things that were really meaningful to them and they really liked.”
These are the kinds of benefits students deserve from their schools every single day.
I’m also pleased to report the first freshman class at Code Next has since graduated and gone onto college. The data that has come back is downright inspiring. National averages show college acceptance rates for Black and Hispanic students hover in the 30-40% range. But at the Code Next Lab, 92% of the graduates were accepted to college, and 88% are majoring in a STEM field. That’s a nearly threefold increase.
The success of that initial location has led to another one, a larger space, nearby. Within months of opening, 93% of students said being in the new Code Next space makes them feel like an inventor; and 87% said they feel more creative in this Baaham space compared to their traditional classrooms at school. To date, more than 2,500 students have passed through the two Code Next spaces.
Now, how much of that success comes from enterprising students choosing to enroll in Code Next in the first place? I’m sure it’s part of it. But I also wonder how many students would have gone on to find such success without Code Next. I heard April Alvarez, the Google team leader at Code Next, talk about this impact on behalf of local residents.
“When you come in here on a Saturday and you see 25 Black and brown kids huddled around computers and making things, it’s something very special,” April said. “I think that it will become a real hub of innovation. And it’s become a community asset. People walk by and see what’s happening and get really excited and they want to walk in.”
Within five short months of being in the lab, four out of five students felt confident pursuing a career in STEM. This is the power of design when it’s focused on functional outcomes. We didn’t care about the look of Code Next or what style it fit. We cared about making it a great space—because even if good spaces may change our mood, great spaces change our life.
The world that awaits
It’s true that our environments can become more Baaham at every scale.
More Baaham bedrooms mask sleep-disrupting noise and light from outside our homes and ensure adequate ventilation so we can breathe more easily. More Baaham office buildings are designed around the dynamic the team wants to create, and they allow for a good mix of comfort, collaboration, and focus. More Baaham city streets promote walking and bike riding, thus easing congestion on major roads, reducing stress, and increasing the joy we feel moment to moment. By creating more Baaham spaces, we’re able to improve well-being across a lifetime.
Another upside: Baaham spaces aren’t more expensive than poorly designed spaces. All you need is a small down payment of time and energy, which ought to be the price of admission to start designing anything. Whenever we make something—from a stuffed animal to a car to a skyscraper—we should be mentally prepared for it to be in the world for our entire lives, and many years after. That’s how carefully we must approach design, whether you’re the architect in charge of a project or the builders who will never see the final design again.
With Baaham, there are no excuses anymore. The instructions are staring us in the face. To be aware of Baaham principles and look the other way would be like a doctor withholding treatment from a patient even if it would dramatically improve their quality of life. It’s malpractice.
What makes poor design so dangerous is that we don’t always see the consequences in time to act. In his book, “The Architecture of Happiness,” Alain de Botton observed: “A development which spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. Yet, in a few weeks, they can put in motion plans which will substantially ruin a landscape for 300 years or more. The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outer space. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large.”
The hallmark of Baaham is its optimism: It reminds us that these frozen mistakes can, over time, be thawed. It may take time to undo the mistakes on the scale of buildings or public spaces, but each person holds the power to walk through life with a Baaham mindset. I was certainly aware of the impact of poor design in that kindergarten bathroom. But it wouldn’t be the last time. It happened again when I was 32.
My mother was admitted to Emory Hospital, in Atlanta, for in-patient surgery. She was having terrible pains, and the doctors wanted to perform a hysterectomy. From the start, I could tell the experience was set to be a hellish one. All I wanted was for my mom to be comfortable during one of the scariest, most uncertain moments a person can experience, and at every turn the hospital stay was misery.
In the noisy room before surgery, I struggled to hear vital information about my mother’s upcoming procedure. There were paper-thin curtains between the six patients who shared the room, but they did nothing to quiet the din of a busy hospital. After the surgery, which went routinely, we learned my mom would need to be transferred to a post-op wing on the other side of the hospital. This meant hospital staff would need to wheel her gurney across a rocky skybridge, whose floor was striped with metal joints every few feet. As I walked beside her, I could see the pain on her face, each bump of the floor causing terrible discomfort. My heart broke for her.
Once the staff had delivered my mother to the recovery room, I tried to settle in on the hard vinyl couch. It was the kind of institutional furniture you find in just about every healthcare facility. It does a good impression of a couch, but really it’s designed to be durable and easy to clean. For the next two nights, as I kept my mother company during her recovery, it doubled as my bed.
Even when we managed to get some sleep, it was frequently interrupted by a blinding fluorescent light. We rubbed our eyes and saw a worn-out nurse doing her rounds. This went on for two days and nights. I prayed for a dimmer switch the entire time.
By the time my mom was released, we were so sleep-deprived and miserable, it was cold comfort that she was actually in good health. What should have been a celebration had become a harsh reminder that we were not the priority. No one was, really. Not the patients, not the nurses, not even the doctors. We were all forced to cope with the kind of thinking that puts maximizing occupancy over delivering real care. And because of that, we all suffered.
We can do so much better.
As the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote, “You don’t get to new places by following established tracks.” We need a new track, desperately.
Design holds the power to change our lives. And our parents’ lives. And the lives of our children, who sometimes need to use the bathroom. We all have a part to play in appreciating that power, noticing when it’s working well and also when it’s harming us. But we can’t expect everyone to join this movement of greater thoughtfulness if we don’t have a practical and timeless framework to guide our decisions.
Will you join me?
This manifesto is my attempt at gathering timeless design principles that can help humanity. It’s not final and will continue to evolve, especially as society advances and the world changes. In the meantime, I invite you to start using Baaham as a trusted way to get on track. With good design, you’ll start to see effects like Shawn and Tania saw in their bedroom, and Code Next saw with its students.
Wouldn’t it be nice if each of us could tell a similar story about our own spaces? Architecture is what allows us to build the kind of world we want to live in. Great architecture takes into account what people need, how they like to live, and what will keep them happy and healthy in the long-run.
Because I design Baaham spaces, I’m confident I could improve a couple’s relationship just by redesigning their house. The same goes for improving health outcomes by redesigning grocery stores, boosting intelligence and creativity by redesigning classrooms, and much more. With Baaham, we can actually bring people joy and solve their problems, rather than distract them with aesthetics.
So what do you need to remember? Our environments are not idle bystanders. They are quiet actors, guiding our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. When we use Baaham to make our surroundings, every design decision becomes an investment in a happier, healthier, more prosperous life.
The anthropologist David Graeber has said, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” It’s time we make the world differently. It’s time we make it Baaham.
Will you join me?
Thank you to the intelligent and caring people who helped make this better: Chris Weller, Noorin Bhanji, Ethan Clatterbaugh, Emi Day, Ari Hock, Nafisa Dhanani Jiwani, Hassan Karimi, Errol King, Alykhan Mohammad, Sarosh Nandwani, Hristiyan Petrov, Saad Rajan, Michael Schein, Anum Shah.
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