CADRE has recently transitioned to new leadership under Ana Pinto-Alexander, as the not-for-profit evolves in its mission to advance design research and evaluation. Ana’s leadership will guide CADRE’s coalition-based projects into 2024, as the organization continues to collaborate with brilliant researchers, student fellows, and industry thought leaders. The following Q&A with the new Board President, Ana Pinto-Alexander, highlights what to expect in the new year.
CADRE’s mission is to advance design research and evaluation, and to do so in a way that benefits communities. What specific initiatives can we look forward to this year?
CADRE’s mission is to advance design research and evaluation to build a world in which all people have pathways to health and well-being—and our research prioritizes people and place.
We are excited to have the following coalitions on the books.
I’ll begin with Enriched Environments to Support Social and Emotional Learning. With funding provided by the AISD Foundation, a coalition team consisting of CADRE and Uplift School District. The team developed a Visual Design Guide that contains 18 evidence-based design strategies to be used by all stakeholders in the design process. The project is ongoing and will continue through 2025.
We also have two exciting projects to look forward to. Dr. Deborah Wingler is the Principal Investigator on Nurse Burnout: A Social Listening Perspective. The study uses social media to investigate the impact of the physical healthcare environment on nurse burnout from the perspective of the nurse’s experience.
I’m excited to say that the Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of Learning Environments (CAUSE) has been formed, including six global and national architecture firms, academic partners, and local school districts, to support the continuous improvement of educational facilities.
How has CADRE’s work evolved in the face of new drivers in the design community? Is this particularly evident in any project on the docket next year?
Our work evolves as the industry itself changes. And right now, we’re responding to new expectations of our clients and colleagues in Education spaces. Leveraging research in practice is more than a competitive advantage, it’s an expectation in the K-12 design approach. But there’s still siloed work streams and varying degrees of academic rigor. We believe that all stakeholders in the design and use of learning spaces would benefit from a shared tool strategically designed for schools—allowing for a broader reach of academic research and meaningful data sharing across design teams and school systems. This is especially important now as multibillion-dollar investments are being made nationwide to upgrade and modernize our aging educational facilities. Through key coalition partners, we’re pursuing multi-year education research, working alongside Perkins & Will, HKS, Austin Independent School District, and MultiStudio.
How does the coalition model lead to innovation?
The coalition model is how we maximize impact in our communities.
Consider how we applied the coalition model at University of California, Davis. We teamed up with HKS and, of course, UC Davis, to study the influence of residence hall architecture on experience and overall environmental satisfaction. We investigated the differences between two residential units and public spaces on the UC Davis campus and how they predicted well-being, belonging, and loneliness. We needed all stakeholders in the study to get to our findings—which are now being used to inform future decision-making and develop best practices for residential hall design and operations.
The coalition model often produces a longer lifespan for research findings. In collaboration with Presbyterian Villages of Michigan, HKS, Mass Design, Salk, Ideas Institute, and Communities First (Sponsored by RRF), we produced prioritized design criteria and metrics for the built environment of affordable independent living communities to achieve resilient access to social connection. Although the project concluded a year ago, the findings are still being presented at conferences like the recent Leading Age Conference, presented by Dr. Margaret Calkins and Dr. Upali Nanda, in October 2023.
As a leader at CADRE, what are you most looking forward to in the coming year? And which partnerships and relationships are we looking to build?
We bring different organizations together to work on a solution that serves a greater purpose.
We also provide students with opportunities to work as fellows on projects. We select the “best of the best” student fellows to participate in research projects. This exposes them to real-life problems, working under some of the best researchers in the country. The changes in these students' lives are well documented in their feedback on how working on a CADRE project gave them additional insights into the practice and helped them accelerate their careers after graduation.
I look forward to working with the brilliant minds of the researchers and the student fellows.
I want to leverage my industry relationships to create opportunities to elevate their missions and bring a stable financial pipeline to support CADRE’s growth.