Designers and Mental Health Pros to Collaborate

I am very excited to announce a new pilot project being created in Austin, Texas that will soon allow us to apply some of the "human centered" design techniques we use at Truehome to support the lives of people in low-income housing.

The project is being done in collaboration with the Community Partnership for the Homeless, a non-profit developer of low-income housing that works in Central Texas.

My oldest son, builder Shiloh Travis and I will be leading the on-site aspects of the project that are related to construction and design.

A website created by Real Community, an intiative for community revitalization in Austin, is hosting several such projects, including ours which is called Healing Homes.

That group is working with the Design Voice initiative of the Austin AIA chapter to empower the work of community revitalization and other sustainable and low-income housing initiatives in Austin.

My friend, behavioral psychologist Sam Gosling, is gathering together a group of academics at the University of Texas at Austin to see if a research project related to Truehome's "human centered" design techniques can be inspired associated with the project.

I will be offering free seminars and training related to our programming techniques to volunteers of that project - so if you are an architect, interior designer, social worker, therapist, psychologist or a student of same in the Austin environs - and you want to make a real difference in people lives, check it out.

Truehome is a method that allows designers and mental health professionals to collaborate to create living spaces that fit the psychology, lifestyle and values of their inhabitants.