When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology, then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community, and often the community socially is broken.

Many feel that sitting at a screen sweating over the design of handrail details for the next cute downtown boutique hotel just doesn’t make sense when more than 150,000 people have lost their lives, more than five million people have been made homeless and whole towns have been swept away.

When your focus is social change and not financial change, why wouldn’t you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it’s shared.

Ego gets you inches but it doesn’t get you impact.

A career is a job you love, right? That’s what a career should be. If you’re in a job that you hate, you should quit. That’s the way I look at it. I’m in a job that I love, so I’m going to make it my career.

So this is really trying to get designers to think very differently about how you create structures to help people.

We have this wealth of knowledge and talent as designers to come up with innovative ideas. And essentially what we do is problem solve.

Most of the emails were from students and, particularly, young architects who want to do something to help, but have no idea what they can contribute.

If you focus on design, you can call yourself a designer. If you focus on the implementation of your design, you can call yourself an architect.

After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.