thinkpublic believes in rigorously testing new ideas and approaches to be sure that they work in the way in which they’re envisioned. An important part of the co-design approach is to set up systems so that feedback can continue after the initial discovery, design, and implementation have taken place.

One initiative saw them launch an app-based co-design tool that captures data from patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals about their experience with healthcare services. Using this tool, they create infographics and reports that identify key issues to be addressed through a further process. Recently this was used to engage stakeholders around Alzheimer’s Disease.

Another initiative, “Relative Friends,” sought to address inner-city loneliness. Based on thinkpublic insights, they developed a service to support people living in cities without family support networks by helping them build family-like relationships within their local area. Relative Friends won the Service Design category at the Design Week Awards, which recognizes the best British design talent of the year.​

More recently, the “Sound Asleep Club” was inspired by the need and desire to help NHS frontline workers and communities deal with the anxiety, stress, and sleepless nights during COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. thinkpublic worked with communities, wellbeing experts, and a sleep scientist to identify the best holistic practices to support relaxation and sleep. The club was officially launched in November 2020, providing a range of live online bedtime classes, on-demand videos, and products designed to appeal to people that may not have experienced holistic practices before. Additionally, for every new member, thinkpublic gave a free subscription to someone struggling with mental health.

The Sound Asleep Club has received support from the National Lottery Community Fund and has partnered with a range of charities and public sector organizations to provide access to bedtime classes and workshops.

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While many of their earlier projects were more piecemeal and experimental, the group has more recently embarked on longer term projects in both Rotterdam and Belgrade.

In 2010, the group was one of the initiators of a long-term initiative in Belgrade called Ko Gradi Grad (Who Builds the City). They began with a community-based process to attempt to include the voices that had been excluded by rampant, profit-driven development. Similarly, in 2014 they co-initiated ‘City in the Making’ in Rotterdam – a project that takes abandoned buildings and attempts to convert them to productive use.

Their process is straightforward: they take buildings off the market, convert them to affordable housing or workspace, designate the common areas free of rent, and democratically organize the administration of the building. Their projects are always self-organized and self-authorized.

The group has been lauded internationally for their progressive and diverse portfolio.

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The group has also focused its work on the plight of refugees and other migrants. In 1999, they began the occupation and transformation of Piazza Boario, formerly a slaughterhouse complex, into Campo Boario, their eventual headquarters. Campo Boario has been the site of innumerable projects, installations and workshops.

The site sits beside the Tiber River in Rome, an area that was steadily becoming a dumping ground. Stalker shares the space with transient Kurdish immigrants, who had been squatting there prior to Stalker’s arrival. Together they have subjected the complex to significant rehabilitation and it now serves as the largest Kurdish cultural institution in Rome, becoming a defined waypoint for all Kurdish refugees traveling through Europe.

Stalker is also well-known for their architectural walks and night-walks of Rome. These ‘walks’ are in fact explorations, and deliberate attempts to reconnect a city with its people. For any urban dweller, we become familiar with the parts of a city that are ‘our’ parts – where we live, where we work, where we play. The other parts cease to exist in our daily experience, but nonetheless affect the health of the city as a whole and our common futures. Stalker’s walks, therefore, aim to reconnect people with the areas, sights, sounds and experiences of the city which they had perhaps forgotten, or never knew existed.

We had a chance to unpack these theories with Lorenzo Romito on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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Usina has participated in the planning and construction of more than 5,000 housing units and additionally, community centers, schools, and preschools in several Brazilian cities and rural land settlements, mostly in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Paraná. The built work serves two functions: first, it provides the schools, homes, and playgrounds that are unaddressed by the market. Second, it assists in the formulation of local advocacy organizations, providing visible, tangible evidence of the people’s power. Usina has also participated in the development of urban planning projects, and slum urbanization, and aided in the formation and organization of cooperatives.

In recent years, Usina has extended its activity to include the visual arts by producing videos, exhibition projects, and popular education workshops — all of them linked directly or indirectly to its work in planning and constructing the inhabited environment. Video production and advocacy are intertwined with the built projects; all are bent on changing conceptions of how and why the built environment exists the way that it does. They seek to move away from an individualistic and profit-driven motivation for construction and attempt to reverse the “logic of capital” to produce a built environment that is more equitable and just.

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Since 2013, after registering the VPUU Non Profit Company (NPC), it has served as an intermediary between the public sector and locally organized citizens, working along with them through participatory methods of engagement, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Their more recent projects include building capacity of local communities through early childhood development programs, introducing technology based solutions to collect data and report lack of services and amenities to local authorities, securing tenancy rights by building community registers and nurturing local talent through social development funds.

We had a chance to speak with Kathryn Ewing and Don Shay of VPUU on our podcast, Social Design Insights. There, they shared with us their strategies for community development, and how to make communities stronger. Listen to the episode below.

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The goal of the Plan Selva program is to empower indigenous children to cultivate their tribal knowledge and live productively in the Amazon, leaving their culture and the forest intact. For instance, today outside scientists travel to the Amazon to tap local knowledge for medicinal cures for diseases such as cancer.  The hope is that by developing quality schools, the indigenous people themselves will become scientists and bring their knowledge of folk medicine to the world.

The Peruvian Amazon has some of the most difficult terrain in the world, and parts of this jungle are hardest to access. To ensure the school buildings would be appropriate to their conditions, a participatory design process was used. For example, each site demands individualized, adaptable design. To address this, the basis of the school designs are modular; replicable and scalable depending on the needs of a specific site. The materials take sustainability into consideration. For example, the buildings are framed in metal rather than wood to protect local resources.  Because of the remoteness of the terrain, many contractors will not work in these areas, so the Plan Selva approach has also been designed to utilize local labor and allow for self-building.

Beyond the building design, the curriculum and staffing are developed to minimize the imposition of Western standards, allowing the culture to remain as intact as possible.  Classes are taught in local languages, of which there are forty-four and government teachers are supplemented with local shaman.

Plan Selva is an example of how to address the challenge of internally neglected communities; national commitment and good design can overcome decades of disinvestment.

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Iconoclasistas’ maps question dominant symbolism and ideologies to help community organizers build strategies of resistance. They are used as tools to lend legitimacy to complaints to local governments and industries. The work of Iconoclasistas falls into three different categories: artistic (production poetics and graphic devices), political (territorial activism and institutional drifts), and academic (critical pedagogies and participatory research). 

A major focus of Iconoclasistas is to inspire and enable others to use their strategies in their own communities. In 2013, the duo published the “Collective Mapping Manual. Critical cartographic resources for territorial processes of collaborative creation,” in which they systematize and share methodologies, resources, and dynamics for the self-organization of workshops, exercises, tables, and interventions of collective mapping and the development of collaborative research processes in the territories.

Iconoclasistas also holds collective mapping workshops and collaborative research in various countries and social, community, cultural and educational institutions. They organize training sessions with mapping tools focused on topics such as gender violence, the plundering of natural resources, urban gentrification, agroecological alternatives, fair trade, and environmental justice. These workshops are carried out with urban, peasant, and indigenous communities.

We had an opportunity to speak with Julia and Pablo about this process on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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The Arquitecturas Colectivas network exists so that participants all over the world can share strategies on how to positively effect change within the built environment. Ideas are discussed, groups convene, and projects are shared in an open-source environment.

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Over several decades, the work of Civic City has been applied to nearly every discipline of design. They have worked on community-based signage for the Paris Metro, examined the visual identities of international aid organizations, and authored a breadth of theoretical work. The team at the institute is widely credited with launching a wave of political activism within the fields of graphic design and its allied professions.

Recently, Vera and Ruedi published Our City to Change, a book that seeks to graphically explain contemporary issues of economics, finance, ecology, nutrition, and immigration. The book positions itself as a ‘visual deciphering’ of the contemporary problems of the world. By partnering with data providers, many of the pressing issues of the day can be rendered more intelligible and therefore more solvable.

We had a chance to speak with Ruedi and Vera Baur on our podcast, Social Design Insights, where we discussed the evolving possibilities of graphic design in the public space, and how the graphic arts can be an agent of political change. Listen to the episode below.

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