Redefining Responsibility: Insights from the Design for Freedom Summit
Aida Ayuk,
our 2023-2024 Research Fellow attended a summit, where she learned about how the building materials supply chain directly impacts forced labor of workers around the world.
On March 26, 2024, I attended the 3rd annual Design for Freedom Summit in New Canaan, Connecticut. The purpose of the summit each year is to “reimagine architecture by raising awareness and inspiring responses to disrupt forced labor in the building materials supply chain.” That day, I gained valuable insights into the industry, and I was excited to relay what I had learned during my time in Connecticut to the rest of the firm.
Design For Freedom Summit at Grace Farms, New Canaan, Connecticut. Photo credit to Design for Freedom.
To start, the leaders of the event made it clear that the choice to call it a summit (not a conference) was purposeful, as summit implies action.
The River Building at Grace Farms, designed by SANAA Architects. Photo credit to Grace Farms.
The following quote from the summit resonated with me:
“If you can't solve the problem, make it bigger.”
Consider this: An estimated 50 million people are living in modern slavery. If you're not familiar with the term, modern slavery, it means exploitation by others for some kind of personal or commercial gain, and a significant portion of those 50 million is attributed to the building industry. Within the industry, there is a new concept called the slavery discount that refers to the hidden human cost behind certain products and services, and, in this industry, we are all benefiting in some way from its existence.
Lisa Kristine, humanitarian photographer, attended and shared her own work on modern slavery to show the human faces of the issue and remind viewers of their potential connection. She has witnessed the number of enslaved people increase from 40 million to over 50 million in the past eight years.
Girl-Carrying-Stone-Nepal by Lisa Kristine. Photo is available for purchase here.
Ascending the Shaft- Gold Mining by Lisa Kristine. Photo available to purchase here.
While we may be sourcing materials from the US or areas that we're seemingly familiar with the labor practices or where forced labor is illegal, primary materials do not carry the sole burden. We must look at the raw material, what makes up our composites and who supplies our suppliers. We need to know the origin of the extraction process, and part of the problem is that we might not even know where to look for that sort of information. A lot of materials remain untraceable due to incomplete records and complex global sourcing networks. There are resources, though, and effort can really make a difference in choice. In this chart below, you can see just 12 materials that are at the highest risk of embedded slavery.
Materials inspection chart provided by Design For Freedom.
Our practice isn't about stuff, it's about people. In the grand scheme of a project scope, it feels like a logistical question of “Where do I find the time?” or “With what money?” or “Will the clients buy in?” but ultimately, it's a decision that designers make every day to either 1) play a part in responsible and ethical material sourcing or 2) not.
Each of the decisions that we make may be one for those who can't make the decision for themselves. And while you may not have signed up for this when you dreamed of becoming a designer or working on buildings, this is the harsh reality of the built environment and its role in modern slavery. Every material with an unknown source could be tied to these scenarios of exploitation, forced labor, child labor, and death.
Now that we know that we may be complicit, what can we do about it?
For one, don't settle only for decarbonization but, instead, embrace ethical decarbonization. As important as these conversations are around climate and carbon, they can sometimes leave little room for other issues. In other words, what does it mean to have a carbon-neutral building if it is still strapped in petrochemicals and tied to slave labor?
We are not starting from scratch in this pursuit. We have tools that are available to us, so let’s use them! We have to conduct thorough due diligence on our supply chains, and we have tools like Sourcemap and the Mindful Materials Common Material Framework, which are now working in Design for Freedom principles.
We can start to scale down the problem. Consider doing a forensic analysis on ten or five materials per project, so that we can confidently say we're abiding by the law, which says we can't source materials impacted by forced labor. This effort could allow us to start cutting materials without the transparency that we need to ensure we're following the law, slowly reducing use of that product.
This practice connects us directly to our clients. By educating clients on the issues, we can start to encourage expanded scopes, leaving room for transparent and traceable supply chains within the design process. We can educate clients not only on the ethical implications of unethical sourcing practices, but also the legal implications and issues that they might face if they stop us from fulfilling our own legal obligations.
We could tackle the problem through Design for Freedom by creating a pilot project. In a pilot project under Design for Freedom guideline, designers must select a specific number of materials that will be traced end-to-end in the material supply chain. This process could allow designers or a firm to create, test, and share their own process with others.
Lastly, we could support the Grace Farms Foundation in their pursuit of transparency by purchasing coffee and tea from Grace Farms Foods which sells products “exclusively from women-led co-ops in Ethiopia, Colombia, and Indonesia.” Firms can support the mission by purchasing coffee and tea from Grace Farms, which donates back 100% of its profits to ending forced labor and child labor worldwide.
Grace Foods Farms sources all products from women-led co-ops. Photo credit to Grace Foods Farms.