Getaway, our effort out of the Millennial Housing Lab to build and share tiny houses in the woods, has been in the news these past few weeks:
CNN: “Sure, living in a tiny house full-time may sound daunting, but renting a wee retreat for a couple of days is an easy way to get a taste of the downsized life.”
Yahoo: “Hilary and Shane Lentz were hooked on the idea of a tiny house, but they weren’t sure the reality would be so appealing.Their curiosity led them to the hills of New Hampshire, where a business that started at Harvard University rents out tiny houses for $99 a night.”
L.A. Times: “Ten designers, adventurers, campers and doers put their heads and brute strength together to build three homes on wheels. The results seem to have jumped from the pages of Dwell magazine. Get out of the city and leave its distractions; play a board game or grab the marshmallow stick that’s waiting for you. If you are OK with using a compost toilet and paying a nominal amount for the stocked provisions, you’ll be all set to enjoy the peaceful wooded surroundings and, of course, see if you could live tiny long-term.”
Associated Press: “Getaway is the first project at Harvard’s Millennial Housing Lab, a group of business, law and design students exploring new housing ideas. Staff, a graduate student in business, said his stints living on a boat and in an Airstream trailer inspired him to help spread the tiny house movement. “Small spaces force you out into the world, and I think that’s a good thing,” he said.”
Plus, Zipcar recently released a video about Getaway:
The Harvard Law Record just published my open letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow regarding Harvard Law School’s failure to mainstream civic-minded career building and what Professor Cass Sunstein’s theories of choice architecture can teach us about how to turn the tide:
Harvard Law School’s stated mission is ‘to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well being of society.’ Implicit in this mission is the policy objective of increasing the number of Harvard Law School students who choose to pursue civic-minded careers serving the public interest. We, as a community, are seriously failing to meet this objective. For every Class of 2014 graduate who immediately pursued public interest work in organizations designed to contribute to “the advancement of justice and the well being of society,” five graduates pursued monied interest work with a corporation or law firm. Sunstein’s ideas about choice architecture and default options can help explain this failure.
As one would predict after reading Sunstein’s work, the setting of corporate interest careerism as the default option for Harvard Law students allows subtle deference, loss aversion and inertia biases to nudge us into corporate-minded careers: we subconsciously interpret corporate interest employment as the institutionally endorsed option; we feel that opting out of corporate interest work is a loss of a loan repayment option (high starting salaries) that we have been endowed; and the extra effort needed to opt into the special, public interest path dissuades us from doing so.
Read the full letter — Change HLS’ Default Option to Civic-Minded Career Building — here at TheHarvard Law Record.
Ideas & Projects for Deepening American Democracy & Solidarity