Buildings shape our lives: let’s make sure that is a positive experience.
When faced with the pressing social, health and ecological problems of our time, we rarely consider the common material basis that underlies each and every one of them. Loneliness is now a health risk on par with smoking and obesity—but have we asked how the design of our homes and cities have created the conditions that exacerbate loneliness or even make it inevitable? What happens to civic engagement and social cooperation if people do not have safe and inviting places to gather?
How can we reconnect to nature if it has been banished from the places in which we dwell? Our everyday lives are structured by the built environments we inhabit, yet we fail to consider how our buildings influence our thoughts, behaviors and social interactions—and our very possibilities of being in the world. This is the very first film to consider design not as a luxury afforded to the wealthy few, but as an active agent capable of helping us to heal faster, learn better and connect across social divides, demonstrating how interdisciplinary research informs life-promoting design. Directed by Mary McDonagh Murphy, written and produced by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Sarah Robinson.
What Design Can Do
The Film
Released in 2023, this award-winning film embarks on a visionary journey through the world of architecture, aiming to educate its audience on the profound impact that buildings have on society and the environment. With a mission to inspire and inform, What Design Can Do reveals the transformative power of thoughtful design in shaping our lives.
“To start a grass-roots movement to raise awareness of the power of buildings to improve our human existence”
As a collective of architects, design professionals and scientists, we are on a mission to educate, advocate and design a built environment that supports human flourishing and ecological well being.
Our Mission:
WDCD Team
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Mary McDonagh Murphy
DIRECTOR
Mary is an award-winning director, writer, television producer, independent filmmaker and New York Times bestselling author. She produced Becoming Helen Keller, Prairie to Page: Laura Ingall’s Wilder, and directed Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman, all broadcast on PBS American Masters. Her documentary television credits include The Making of the Wiz Live (NBC, 2015), David Letterman: A Life on Television (CBS, 2015), The Making of Peter Pan Live (NBC, 2014), Live From Space (National Geographic, March 2014) and The Making of the Sound of Music Live, (NBC, 2013). She has written and produced a variety of primetime hour-long programs and magazine stories for NBC and CBS News, where she won six Emmy Awards.
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Sarah Robinson
ARCHITECT, WRITER
Sarah is an architect, writer and educator. Her books, Nesting: Body, Dwelling Mind (2011), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design with Juhani Pallasmaa (2015) and Architecture is Verb, (2021) are among the first works to engage the dialogue between architecture and the cognitive sciences. She was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture board of governors. She is adjunct professor in Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark, teaches and is a member of the scientific board of NAAD, Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design at IUAV, Venice. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, and is the Architecture chair of the Moving Boundaries Collaborative.
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen
WRITER, EDUCATOR
the author of the prizewinning Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, (2017), writes and speaks internationally about human experience in architecture and landscapes, cities and urban design, infrastructure and public art. The opening night keynote speaker for the 2018 AIA National Convention, she is on the faculty of the Moving Boundaries Collaborative, a Board Member of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), and Advisory Committee member of the Johns Hopkins Medical School’s International Arts + Mind Lab. She was the New Republic’s architecture critic, and taught for a decade at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
“There’s no such thing as a neutral space”
— Sarah Williams Goldhagen