Initially, the studio rose to international prominence as a part of the vanguard behind “Medellin Miracle,” a program and period of extensive urban renewal in Medellin, Colombia between 2002-2007. The program championed a unique approach: put the best buildings in the worst neighborhoods, then tie the city together with culture and infrastructure. The movement transformed the city away from its violent and segmented past into a model for contemporary urban development.

One of Mazzanti’s most famous buildings is the Medellin “Parque Biblioteca Espana.” Situated on a hilltop in what was once the most violent and stigmatized part of the city, the library/park offers a gathering space and community resource and is a symbol of pride for the neighborhood. Open 24 hours, the building includes a theater, library, and learning workshops. This ‘multiplication of use’ principle is found throughout Mazzanti’s portfolio; the more functions one can draw out of a building, the more diverse the building’s appeal. If all different segments of a community or city are using the building, it gives rise to social cohesion and cooperation.

Recent projects include the Torres Atrio Complex Convention Center, which is a point of reference in the city of Bogotá. Another project, the Control and Operations Center building, links a rural community with infrastructure. Located in the area of La Pintada, the building contains a covered plaza where events can take place, providing visibility to the small community. 

Founder Mazzanti now gives seminars and classes at universities across Europe, sharing his vision of architecture as social action. We had an opportunity to speak with Giancarlo Mazzanti about his thoughts on transforming Medellin on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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Public Architecture’s flagship program is called The One Percent. It began with an audacious but scalable goal: ask architecture firms to formally pledge at least 1% of their billable time to pro bono service. By asking for this commitment, Public Architecture aspires to not only provide needy social projects with design services and change the way firms do the other 99% of their work. To ensure these firms can find appropriate pro-bono projects to work on, Public Architecture acts as a match-maker, connecting architecture firms that wish to donate their time with non-profits in need of design services. 

Peterson is the current curator of the Loeb Fellowship. His work has appeared in several books and publications, including The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong, The New York Times, Architectural Record, Architect, Metropolis, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He has contributed to books such as Expanding Design, Urban Interventions, and The Power of Pro Bono.

We spoke with John Peterson, along with Emily Pilloton of Project H Design, on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

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Originally, the non-profit operated as a social design firm embedded in a public school district in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. The program, which ran until 2019 in North Carolina and then continued at REALM Charter School in Berkeley, CA, reconnected students with a sense of craft and engaged them directly in socially meaningful projects. In 2013, Pilloton began working with all-female groups in the form of a design/build summer camp program called Girls Garage. What began as an experiment teaching pre-teen girls to build and weld has grown into a total evolution of the organization into a robust year-round program for girls and gender-expansive youth ages 9-18. The organization has since formally changed its name to Girls Garage.

Girls Garage is a physical workspace and year-round program teaching carpentry, welding, architecture, engineering, and activist art through community-focused projects. The program aims to instill confidence in young people by providing them with the skills and tools to build whatever they can imagine. Students attend at no cost, and over two-thirds of them return for 3 or more years. Projects built by students include a greenhouse for a local community garden, a 500-square-foot chicken pavilion for an urban farm, sandboxes for nearby preschools, and a public parklet. Girls Garage has also published a book authored by Pilloton-Lam that includes a tool encyclopedia, stories of builder women, and project guides, and invites girls everywhere to join a movement of fearless builder girls.

We had a chance to speak with Emily and get her thoughts on how design can challenge inequality. Listen to the episodes below.

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The rainwater harvesting kits utilize the roof area of existing structures to catch the water and take advantage of the fact that many homes in Mexico City have storage cisterns, despite not being connected to formal water systems. The ecotechnology includes some innovative solutions, like Isla Urbana’s first-flush device, the Tlaloque, as well as other techniques to filter the water. 

When used and maintained correctly, the systems provide users with, on average, 5 to 8 months of water autonomy per year. To date, Isla Urbana has installed more than 21,000 systems that capture a rough total of 871 million liters of water per year, benefitting around 130,000 people throughout Mexico. The solution increases the beneficiaries’ health and sanitation and saves time, effort, and money that can instead be dedicated to productive, educational, and recreational activities. From an ecological point of view, each liter of rainwater harvested means relief for Mexico City’s dwindling water supply. 

The organization does not, however, merely install rainwater harvesting systems; in order to ensure full adoption of the systems, Isla Urbana teams carry out educational workshops and organize events that inspire consciousness around water conservation. In many communities, encouraging the conservation of water is a social change as much as a technological one. From interactive meetings and do-it-yourself pamphlets, to murals and instructional videos, Isla Urbana uses a variety of content to promote the importance of water consciousness, providing a model for how future cities will eventually deal with water crises.

One can get in touch with them at requests@islaurbana.org

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Their first product, Brilliance Pro, came from an investigation into under-treatment of jaundice in low-resourced areas. While newborn treatment is straightforward, a dose of phototherapy under blue light, 95% of all phototherapy devices evaluated in India and Nigeria did not meet American Academy of Pediatrics standards, often due to power failures or burned-out bulbs. 

The solution was simple: a lamp with LEDs instead of fluorescents, eliminating the broken bulb problem and lasting sixty times longer for half the power of fluorescent bulbs. Since power is inconsistent in developing environments, Equalize Health designed Brilliance to be run off of a car battery for up to eight hours in the event of outages. Brilliance has now treated over 1.5 million babies in more than 65 countries.

The $80 US ReMotion Knee addresses the cost of fitting and maintaining prosthetic limbs. Not only are prosthetics expensive, but they also need frequent adjustment and can rust and swell, exacerbating the need for ongoing maintenance. The ReMotion Knee was conceived to be as simple and flexible as a natural knee, with minimum parts and using a single hinge so that it swings naturally.

In 2019, Equalize Health expanded ReMotion to ROMP (Range of Motion Project) so they could focus on addressing the health inequities impacting maternal and newborn health. They have used their expertise to address the leading causes of maternal and premature newborn death globally: postpartum hemorrhage and newborn respiratory distress. 

To ensure its products are broadly available at sustainable market terms, Equalize Health utilizes partnerships with distributors. Distribution agreements are structured so that for-profit distributors receive higher margins when they sell to hospitals with greater need. The distributors are free to sell to high-end hospitals too, granting Equalize Health a larger percentage.  

Recently, Equalize Health has started “Equalize Health 2030.” They partner with local healthcare workers and innovators to codesign health solutions, applying expertise in user-centered design, strategy, marketing and ecosystem building to scale them for global impact. Ultimately, they aim to accelerate the historically slow product development process to reach patients faster and save lives.

We had a chance to catch up with Equalize Health (then D-Rev) CEO Krista Donaldson about all the new directions at the organisation, as well as the future of technology in the social design movement. Have a listen.

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ASA takes care to explore locally sourced materials and the most appropriate environmental approach. Once the best materials and methods have been selected, the practice utilizes craftsmanship and innovative compositions to ensure that each project delivers a positive experience to users. 

With over 150 projects, ASA is a master in the design of educational and health facilities where each building’s structure itself is viewed as an “added tool” contributing to a child’s growth and stimulation or facilitating the patients’ healing. 

In 2019 the current partners founded ASAreacts, a social enterprise that develops non-profit projects in contexts of very limited means. One such project is Ubugingo (or “well-being” in Kinyarwanda), developed to help the Government of Rwanda to achieve the SDG 2050 by tackling the smallest chain of the health system, the Health Post (HP). 

The Health Post is the most diffused health facility in the territory. It provides first aid, sanitation, and health assistance to the local communities. The current number of HPs in the Country is only 500. In order to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals, the Government of Rwanda will need to provide 1600 Health Posts by 2050.​ 

ASA designed three different sizes of HPs: Small, Medium, and Large, with a modular system that allows the developer to choose the most suitable size to implement according to its financial capacity, the social context, the needs of the health services in the area, and the land size. 

Through this kind of project, ASA reacts to the local constraints and the social needs of health, sanitation, and education improvement through projects that work to reverse decades of structural inequality that denied rural Rwandans opportunities more readily available to their urban counterparts.

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The specific tasks of ARC include designing/redesigning biomass stoves to achieve improved heat transfer and combustion efficiency while working in the field with users to assure the effectiveness and market viability of the new stove, manufacturing and selling the Laboratory Emissions Monitoring System (LEMS) to measure harmful emissions from biomass stoves, training laboratory and field staff to set up and operate the LEMS, and working with factories to build a new generation of clean-burning stoves. 

In 1980, Larry Winiarski, Technical Director of Aprovecho, began developing the rocket stove and rediscovered the principles of the systems developed by the Romans in hypocaust heating and cooking systems. A number of variations on these stoves have been created over the years, often designed specifically to suit the country in which they are being used, as they are now sold worldwide. In field tests in India, rocket stoves used 18 to 35 percent less fuel than traditional stoves, and reduced fuel used by 39-47 percent compared to traditional open three-stone fire stoves.

Currently, ARC is learning how the use of carbon-neutral biomass energy can heat more homes and generate more electricity. Residential and commercial energy use make up 13% of USA greenhouse emissions. Electricity creation produces 25%. ARC is investigating how to design (and manufacture) clean-burning pellet and log-burning heating stoves, hoping to generate clean combustion with forced draft and optimized heat transfer efficiency.

In addition, as recent research has found that biomass-heating stoves can result in health problems in densely populated areas, ARC is working with the EPA to explore ways to define PM2.5 emission rates for residential biomass heating stoves that would protect health in densely populated cities. 

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The project, which was named “Escuela Nueva Esperanza, or “New Hope School,” proved the importance of participatory planning and collaboration. As is common in social design, solutions successful in some contexts could not necessarily be applied to this one. For example, when planning the construction, the team considered the use of recycled materials. However, while recycled materials may be an option in urban settings with excessive waste, in the small beach village where the school was to be built, waste was scarce. As a result, there were no materials to be recycled. Instead, through an investigative process founded on community engagement, the team was able to develop a keen understanding of the resources locally available for the project. 

Beginning with Escuela Nueva Esperranza, Al Borde continued on to develop three “Hope Projects” with the community, leading to an ongoing relationship. The process itself was catalytic, turning an entire village into designers and builders. Over time, members of the community started integrating the discovered materials and design strategies into their own self-built structures. The work of Al Borde elegantly illustrates how in the world of social design, constraint leads to creativity.

Al Borde’s now expanded work, including projects like the Culunco house, a semi-buried family home, and the House of the Flying Beds, a renovated historic property in the city of Ibarra, has continued to garner global attention. The studio has been featured in landmark exhibitions, including “Reporting from the Front” at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennial, and was shortlisted for the Swiss Architectural Award in 2018. 

More recently, the studio has been working on projects in emergency contexts. For instance, their Post-Earthquake Prototype was developed following the earthquake that shook the coast of Ecuador in April 2016.                                 

We had an opportunity to speak with David Barragán about how design can empower a community to become their own designers and builders on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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Active Social Architecture is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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David Barragán of Al Borde discusses how design can empower a community to become their own designers & builders.

Al Borde is a Curry Stone Foundation Social Design Circle Honoree. Read more about it here.

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