This integrated, publicly confrontational approach is a recurring theme in Lacy’s work, drawing focus onto previously marginalized issues. In addition to rape, she has also tackled sexual violence, racism, aging, and class inequalities. Several of her projects, including Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, and its sequel, The Crystal Quilt, feature dramatic public performances involving hundreds of older women, focusing on the roles, needs, and inequities of gender and aging. More recent work in the United Kingdom has focused on bringing together Muslim and Christian communities in an abandoned mill to create a performance, resulting in a multiscreen video installation. 

Lacy’s work has been displayed at multiple major institutions. In 2019, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts held her first major retrospective. In addition to her work as an artist, Lacy has also inspired generations through her writing and her educational positions including serving as the Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts from 1987 to 1997, and previously as the Arts Commissioner of Oakland, CA. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design. 

Listen to the episode below.

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Slow/d uses a variety of means to disrupt this paradigm. They work with artisans to design supply chains from scratch. They will also organize training sessions, workshops, and ‘moments of confrontation’ between design professionals and the allied professions which eventually utilize design services. Fundamentally, they are trying to ‘de-corporatize’ design – returning the authorship of design back to the people who really matter: the designer and the user.

From the Slow/d manifesto: “the blinding need to generate profits has created a system of production and distribution based on the exploitation of the weak. The environmental impacts of the global logistics system are unsustainable. We have to produce what people need, when people need it and where people need it. This means supporting local economies, networks of small producers of high quality goods, once again gathering people and processes in support of the culture of know-how.”

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MVD’s work is extensive and appears in lectures, workshops, exhibitions and built works. More recently, the group has published The Vienna Model: Housing for the Twenty-First-Century City – a comprehensive examination of 100 years of social housing in Vienna. The project examined dozens of prototypical projects that chart the evolving idea of public space and social housing in Vienna.

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The platform has given rise to many forms, including The Cairo Urban Research Library (CURL), a free, open access research library with a focus on art, urban studies and architecture, available in English and Arabic. Another initiative, Cairo Downtown Passageways, is an urban design and art project that reimagines the city’s historic passageways and promotes more diverse, inclusive and accessible areas.

CLUSTER helped to organize the Street Vendors Initiative, in which the research team worked to help street vendors unionize and understand how public space is shared. The team brought together shop owners, residents, developers, drivers, women’s right groups, traffic and municipal authorities and created a common space for discussion. 

CLUSTER also created a mapping publication, Cairo Downtown Passageways: Walking Tour, that maps the city’s back alleys, side streets and in-between spaces, creating an alternative way to imagine the development and revitalization of the city. The platform has published over half a dozen books, one of which, Housing Cairo: The Informal Response, was awarded both the 2016 DAM Architectural Book Award and the 2017 National Urban Design Book Award. 

More recently, CLUSTER has focused on the project, “Informality as Creativity.” Over 70% of housing stock in Cairo is produced informally, posing questions about the role of architects and designers in shaping their city. In response, the project aims to bring together architects, designers and art students with local craftspeople and artisans, providing a direct exchange of formal training alongside practical and grounded knowledge. Further, the project aims to promote small businesses and enhance the visual and environmental qualities in informal areas through direct dialogues with local stakeholders.

We had a chance to speak with Beth and Omar about the role that design can play during a moment of instability on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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The first major project of Assemble Studio was the Cineroleum, an abandoned petrol station turned into a temporary cinema through the use of inexpensive, reclaimed, and donated materials. 

One of Assemble’s most notable works is Granby Four Streets, an ongoing community project in Liverpool. The collective worked with Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust and Steinbeck Studios to study a section of Toxteth, Liverpool, 80 to 90 percent of which was abandoned following riots in 1981. They came up with ideas to encourage renewed habitation for the derelict houses in the neighborhood, including gardens planted in the shells of ruined homes. To cut costs, its members implemented the “enrichment program,” in which they craft missing hardware such as doorknobs. They are also training neighbors in the skills necessary to continue refurbishing housing in the area, hoping to perpetuate a self-sustaining project of urban rehabilitation.

Recent projects make use of design and the built environment to bring communities together. In 2021, Assemble worked with the local skateboarding community in Folkestone, South England, to develop a skating spot that celebrates an informal, pre-existing one by transforming it into a permanent, dedicated space for skating. The resulting “skateable artwork” can be enjoyed by anyone. In the same year, Assemble worked with Hayatsu Architects and Stinsensqueeze on a series of interventions to revitalize the Blue, Bermondsey’s historic market and town center.

Currently, the studio is working with BC Architects and Materials to design a new workspace for the Luma Atelier in Arles.  Based in the south of France, the Luma Atelier is a think tank, production workshop, and learning network. The Atelier seeks to co-develop new ways of producing and caring for the city and landscape, using design as a tool for transition.

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Braddock, a former industrial town, known for being the site of Andrew Carnegie‘s first steel mill was a robust city that was once a center of commerce for Western Pennsylvania. However, it was hit hard by the decline of the U.S. steel industry. The town lost 90% of its population compared to its peak in the 1920s and by 1988, it had no supermarkets, gas stations or ATMs. With the loss of economic opportunity, Braddock, declared a financially distressed municipality, was beset by problems common in the post-industrial landscape: unemployment, drugs, disinvestment, and crime. 

Fetterman’s approach was aggressive but fundamentally simple: he looked for opportunities to bring back hope and pride, beginning with a small, do-it-yourself approach, such as planting fruit trees, or making an outdoor pizza oven out of reclaimed bricks from an abandoned factory. He also offered up free studio space to artists in order to welcome in the ‘creative’ class.

His work in Braddock is an ongoing experiment; people, especially homesteaders attracted by the availability of low cost housing ripe for renovation, are moving back to Braddock. Crime has decreased. While challenges remain, the arc of Braddock represents fundamental lessons about how to reinvent place, and meet the challenges brought on by globalization, even in the first world.

In 2021, Fetterman announced his candidacy in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Senate election. He won the Democratic nomination with 59% of the vote and will face Republican Mehmet Oz in the general election. Generally described as a progressive, Fetterman advocates for health care as a right, criminal justice reform, strengthening the U.S.–Israel relationship, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and legalizing marijuana.

We had an opportunity to speak with John Fetterman about his thoughts on how to imagine a new future in a post-industrial landscape on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

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Kéré’s process included the entire community, gathering together different participants in both the design and construction phases and subsequently allowing a synthesis between traditional building techniques and modern construction. The techniques that the community learned in erecting the building have allowed them to practice elsewhere, stimulating the proliferation of better building. Construction of a secondary school designed by Kéré began in May 2011. The new building complex was designed to accommodate approximately 1000 students. 

Another of Kéré’s projects, “Opera House for Africa” was initiated by German film and theatre director Christoph Schlingensief. Kéré designed a festival theatre, workshops, a medical center, guest houses, solar panels, a well, and a school for 500 children and teenagers offering music and film classes. The village comprised of simple basic modules, which vary in quality and function depending on the equipment they house. Members of the local community were employed to build the modules. Local materials such as clay, laterite, cement bricks, gum wood and loam rendering were used for construction. Due to the massive walls and large overhang of the roofs, air conditioning could be discounted in most buildings. The theatre hall was conceived as a place of encounter and exchange for people of different cultural and family backgrounds.

In 2022, Kéré became the first African to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

We had a chance to speak with Mr. Kéré on our podcast, Social Design Insights, about his philosophy of inclusion, and his advice for young designers in a two-part interview. Listen to the episodes below.

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In the game, players are presented with a 3D model of a protein that they can manipulate by clicking and dragging its sections. The amino acid chains that make up proteins naturally want to fold into the lowest-energy shape, so the goal of a Foldit puzzle is to make the protein’s structure as compact as possible, while still keeping the chains intact and respecting the basic properties of proteins. The winning designs help researchers learn more about the shapes of proteins. The more we understand about these structures, the easier it is to design new proteins with desired functions, leading to the development of vaccines and disease-curing drugs. 

Crowdsourcing is the basis of Foldit’s success: it uses the creative problem-solving of thousands of people to refine computation. By taking complex biomedical problems and crowd-sourcing their possible solutions, FoldIt has democratized a design process typically isolated in a lab and innovated a way for amateur players and designers to help solve the world’s toughest medical questions. 

Foldit players are already solving biochemical problems that were stumbling blocks to scientific research. For example, in 2010, players determined the structure of a key protease, or protein-cutting enzyme, of the Mason-Pfizer Monkey Virus (M-PMV), a retrovirus that leads to AIDS in rhesus monkeys. It took Foldit three weeks to complete a task that biochemists had struggled with for over a decade.

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The Center first gained international attention in 2003 with its “Million Dollar Blocks” project. Working in collaboration with the Justice Mapping Center, it documented, mapped and created visualization strategies that showed the neighborhoods where the majority of incarcerated people in New York City came from. Unsurprisingly, they covered very few, mostly poor, urban neighborhoods. The costs of incarcerating people from single city blocks are in the millions of dollars; money that could be pro-actively invested in the communities themselves.

Other projects have included data mapping social media in China to examine the intersection of censorship and activism. In 2016, out of an interest in how conflict makes, unmakes and remakes urban spaces, they created a very high resolution, interactive map of the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo.  Data for the maps is taken from satellite images over a number of years, from before the war in 2012, then again in 2014 and 2016. Their most recent project is around mapping historical New York using maps and census data of Manhattan and Brooklyn between 1850 and 1920, to show how immigration transformed different neighborhoods. The web-based interactive maps will reconstruct the demographic and structural shifts to help understand the magnitude of changes that took place across time.

By harnessing data to create new forms of visualization, the Center hopes to encourage new lines of thinking about urban issues, inequality and conflict. Listen to the episode below.

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The College has applied rural traditional knowledge and skills to build homes for the homeless, collect rainwater in schools and communities where potable water sources are scarce, and spread socio-economic messages at the grassroots level through puppetry. Only technologies that can be understood and controlled by the rural communities have been introduced to improve the quality of life of the poor.

The Barefoot College trains women in areas traditionally dominated by men. Since 1972, over 6,525 housewives, mothers & grandmothers, midwives, farmers, laborers, and small shopkeepers have been trained as Barefoot midwives, handpump mechanics, artisans, weavers, parabolic solar cooker engineers, FM radio operators and fabricators, dentists, and school teachers. 

Women who are single mothers, middle-aged, divorced, physically challenged, or illiterate are prioritized for training because they need the opportunity and income the most. The organization has identified more than 7,000 women with leadership qualities and empowered them with skills and in processes of democratic participation.

In one of its most innovative programs, the College trains women to be solar engineers, addressing issues of rural poverty as well as access to energy. As part of a program with the Indian Government, the College operates an exchange program where uneducated women are selected from rural villages and brought to Tilonia for a six-month fellowship. Because many of the women are illiterate, they learn through memorization and color-coded charts. They return with the skills necessary to electrify their village with sustainable solar technologies. The woman is then paid a monthly retainer to fix and maintain the solar equipment. 

The Barefoot College Tilonia has trained 1,708 illiterate or semi-literate rural women from 96 countries and has electrified over 75,000 households, saving about 45 million liters of kerosene from polluting the environment. One of the greatest impacts of the program is the increased confidence of women from marginalized backgrounds who are now valued as changemakers in their communities.

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