Liz Ogbu

Liz Ogbu is an American architect, designer and urbanist whose work focuses on issues related to community building and spatial justice. She is the founder and principal of the design consulting firm Studio O.

Early life and education Ogbu was raised in Oakland, California, by parents who had both immigrated from Nigeria. Her first architecture project was designing a second home for her family in her father's village in Nigeria when she was in high school.

Career

Ogbu is the principal of the design consulting firm Studio O, which she founded in 2012. Prior to launching her firm, Ogbu served as design director at Public Architecture, Innovator-in-Residence at the nonprofit wing of the design firm IDEO, and Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. She also taught courses in design at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and California College of the Arts. According to Ogbu, spatial justice means that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of access, services, and outcomes is a basic human right: "A lack of spatial justice isn’t just about the deprivation of physical resources like housing or parks, but also the wide range of devastating interrelated social, economic, and health repercussions."

Ogbu has published research papers on various topics, one of which is "Reframing Practice: Identifying a Framework for Social Impact Design."

Ogbu is the 2009 recipient of the Global Innovation Prize from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, a 2013 member of Public Interest Design 's Top 100, and a 2014 Aspen Ideas Scholar. In 2016 she was the Droga Architect in Residence at the Australian Institute of Architects. She is the 2019 recipient of the International Interior Design Association's Titan Award for "service to the interior design profession," In 2021 she received a Michael Rubinger Community Fellowship award from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation for her work advancing "the development of the Social Impact Protocol for affordable housing, a tool for evaluating and setting up accountability for the social impacts of housing redevelopment."

According to John Cary, author of Design for Good, "Liz Ogbu uniquely and bravely uses design to do the hard work of community healing, by acknowledging buried pain and trauma that is too often overlooked."

In order to garner input from the community, Ogbu worked with StoryCorps to create a "listening station" where local people could record their stories.

Since 2013, the site has been used as a venue for public art and performance, for providing community services, and as space for recreation. In it, the character Rick is depicted taking cues from the community he seeks to serve, and as a result his design meets the needs of that community and is widely used. Dick, on the other hand, though well intentioned, fails to adequately incorporate community knowledge and agency into his design process, and as a result his design ends up underutilized. The moral of the story is summed up in the humorous slogan, "Don't be a Dick".

Both Dick and Rick are portrayed as white males, while most of the people in the community they serve are people of color. This was an intentional choice by the creators to reflect the reality of what a typical social impact design project looks like.