Public Interest Design — Global is an opportunity to discuss the emerging practice of designing for social impact and how best to radically increase the value of design for the public good. Governments and corporations have begun to recognize that design can be a tool for democratic decision making, empowerment and engagement. While inclusive design practices worldwide are beginning to help communities use design to address their most critical issues and define resilient futures as they see fit, built environment professionals still remain at the margins of these lively debates and initiatives.
The two-day symposium on April 18+19, 2014 at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, France will provide participants from a wide range of international expertise–architects, agronomists, conservation ecologists, business, economists, public health officials, members of government–with a chance to study how design can add value and momentum as communities tackle myriad problems. Design can help defend equity by bringing creative solutions to real priorities, but only if we work in extraordinary interdisciplinary teams and across networks.
Projects Overview
Six projects have been selected through a competitive jury process and to present at Public Interest Design–Global. The applications covered 28 countries and were very competitive with jury deliberations digging deeply into all six selection criteria: Effectiveness, Excellence, Inclusiveness, Impactful, and Systemic and Participatory.
Can City Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil Issues: Local Identity, Employment, Environmental Sustainability Summary: Can City is a mobile aluminum foundry that melts cans collected on the streets of Sao Paulo to cast new products. The project has been initiated in the largest city in Brazil as a self sustaining system that creates employment and additional income for Catadores- waste collectors who pull carts by hand collecting waste materials to sell at scrap yards. Over 80% of recycling in Brazil is done by independent waste collectors Catadores. |
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Comunidad Ecologica Saludable Location: Location: Puenta Piedra, Lima, Peru Issues: Empowerment, Green Gardening, Health and Wellbeing, Food and Water Security, Access to Nature Summary: Over 3 million people in Lima live in informal urban ‘slums’. Lomas de Zapallal (LdZ) is one such settlement in Northern Lima. It has a population of 27,000 and is divided into 19 neighborhoods. The Comunidad Ecologica Saludable (CES) (Healthy Ecological Community) program is providing residents of Eliseo Collazos (EC). The project involves the design and implementation of 29 home gardens in EC. The FC project involves the investigation of fog water as an alternative water resource for drinking, household use and the irrigation of home gardens, community parks and reforestation. |
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Joler Jonno Utshob – A Dug Well Pavilion Location: Tetulia, Sapahar, Naogaon, Bangladesh Issues: Gathering Spaces, Water, Water Access, Sanitation Summary: Joler Jonno Utshob – A Dug Well Pavilion provides an integral community space for gathering, shelter from the strong sun, access to potable water and a bathing facility for women. Constructed of mud, bamboo, corrugated iron sheet, broken clay tiles, lime and brick shurki, the project takes into consideration the ecologically fragile ecosystem of the site. |
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TAEQ Green Building Headquarters Location: Sakhnin, Israel Issues: Cultural Heritage, Local Identity, Job Training, Environmental Education, Green Energy Summary: The Towns Association for Environmental Quality (TAEQ) Green Building, located in Sakhnin, is home to the first environmental organization to arise out of Israel’s minority Arab sector, which comprises 20% of the total population of the country. TAEQ is a municipal collaborative that organizes funds and resources from the six participating Arab municipalities for social, environmental, and economic development. |
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Umusozi Ukiza “Healing Hill” Location: Butaro, Burera District, Rwanda Issues: Health, Local Sources, Job Training, Economic Development Summary: Located on an adjacent site to the Butaro Hospital, the Butaro Doctors’ Housing is designed to attract and retain skilled physicians at the new hospital. The construction process provided invaluable opportunities to further implement and scale MASS’s on-site job training in sustainable construction for members of the community. The project is a second phase in a campus for world health, a new initiative of the Rwandan national government. |
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Walk [Your City] Location: Started in Raleigh, NC Issues: Civic Engagement, Health, Mobility, Smart Growth Summary: Started as Walk Raleigh, now Walk [Your City] is an open-sourced “guerrilla wayfinding” project focused on helping anyone create safe and healthy walkable environments. Raleigh, NC is a rapidly growing city, older families are beginning to be displaced from downtown and new construction is forcing people to live closer together, however, there is still a prevalent driving culture. Walk Raleigh was directly targeting both citizens and municipal leaders who were overlooking the importance of establishing a culture of walkability. |
Moderators
Cindy Cooper Co-founder and Director, Impact Entrepreneurs, Portland State University Co-founder and Advisor, Speak Shop Cindy Cooper is Co-founder and Director of Portland State University’s Impact Entrepreneurs, a suite of educational, incubation and training programs that are unleashing the power of business for social impact locally and globally. An Ashoka U Change Leader, Cindy led the effort to garner PSU’s prestigious designation as an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus. Cindy founded Impact Entrepreneurs’ Social Innovation Incubator, named by Fast Company Magazine as one of “America’s 51 bold and brilliant ideas to enrich our cities and our lives” and teaches entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship at undergraduate and graduate levels. She received a Global MBA from Thunderbird Graduate School of Business with distinguished honors and a BA in Psychology/Spanish summa cum laude from Claremont McKenna College. |
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Salma Samar Damluji Professor, American University of Beirut Chief Architect & Founder, DAW‘AN MUD BRICK ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION Salma is the Chief Architect and Founder of The Daw‘an Mud Brick Architecture Foundation working on an architectural rehabilitation site at Masna‘at ‘Urah in Daw‘an, Yemen. She is the reciepent of the Global Award For Sustainable Architecture 2012, Paris The Locus. Prior to this she was Director of the Technical Office of The Chairman of The Works Department in Abu Dhabi when she invited international architects and artists (including Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, Paul Andreu, Marc Quinn and Dale Chihuly amongst many others) to work on key projects she was in charge of, including the Abu Dhabi Grand Mosque. She received her PhD from the Royal College of Art in Architecture in 1987 and her undergraduate degree from AA School of Architecture in 1977. She began her career working with Egyptian Architect Hasan Fathy in Cairo and then worked as a Human Settlement Officer with the UN ESCWA and was involved in Bahrain, Yemen and Hadramut: the cities of Shibam and Tarim. |
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Raul Pantaleo Architect, studio tamassociati Raul is an Italian architect, born in Milan, he lives and works in Venice and Trieste. Graduated from the IUAV University of Venice. Holds an international certificate in Human Ecology attained through post-graduate studies at the University of Padua. Raul is project designer and consultant in the sectors of bio-architecture and urban re-qualification; he is currently involved in conducting laboratories in the processes of participatory and communicatory project development. In addition, he is involved with the practice of social communications and graphic design for various Public Administrations and non-profit organizations. Raul Pantaleo is one of the co-founder of “studio tamassociati”, a practice which specializes in socially oriented projects in critical areas. Some of the current and completed projects include: The Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery for the Emergency NGO in Sudan; Banca Etica (Ethic Bank)Headquarters in Padua (Italy); healthcare buildings for theEmergency NGO in Darfur, Sudan; also projects in the Central African Republic, Sierra Leon, Afghanistan and Uganda. |
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Jonathan Kuniholm President and Founder of the Open Prosthetics Project Captain Jonathan Kuniholm is the President and Founder of the Open Prosthetics Project, and the Founder of StumpworX, Inc., a prosthetic arm manufacturing company. Captain Kuniholm served in the United States Marine Corps from 1997 to 2006. He served as a combat engineer officer and platoon commander for the 1st Marine Division in Operation Iraqi Freedom II. In 2006, he was honorably discharged after being wounded in combat and losing his right forearm. He is a Member of the Board of the Given Limb Foundation, and is an advisor and past Chair of the Board of Able Flight. In 2009, he received the DESIGNsmith award from North Carolina State University, and received a fellowship from the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program in 2003. Mr. Kuniholm received an A.B. from Dartmouth College, and a B.S., M.S., and M.I.D. NCSU. |
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Maggie Stephenson Maggie Stephenson is senior technical advisor for Haiti at UN-HABITAT. From 2005 to 2011 she was based in Pakistan, where she worked with UN-HABITAT and the National Disaster Management Authority, supporting response and mitigation, based on people-centered approaches, to help the millions of people affected by natural disaster and conflict there. For the last twenty years, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, she has worked in architecture and planning education, urban government, housing and development, and post-disaster reconstruction for governments, the United Nations, nonprofits, and in the private sector. |
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Deanna VanBuren Founder and Director, FORUM Design Studio Deanna is Founder and Director of Design Studio, in Oakland, California. At Forum, she is exploring how designing environments for the electronic gaming industry can have an impact on the public’s appreciation of good design and on its demand for better quality in physical places. She is also applying design to alternative systems to incarceration, in order to create new spaces for justice that are reparative and support innovative policies in probation, incarceration and adjudication. She is a 2013 Harvard Loeb Fellow researching the impacts of art and design within the public realm. Prior to founding Forum, she was a Project Designer at Perkins+Will as well as a Project Team Leader at SMWM Architects. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia University and B.S. from UVA. |
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Vinay Venkatraman CEO of Leapcraft Leapcraft is a big data + design driven innovation company based in Denmark. He is trained as a product and interaction designer in India and Italy. In the past he has co-founded the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design and the Big Data Viz academy in collaboration with Danish government agencies. He currently spends his time between creating new education curriculums, shaping policy initiatives for the Danish government and consulting large global companies on innovation around new product experiences and design strategy. He has helped shape product strategy for companies like Nokia, Intel, Novo Nordisk, Maersk line, Lufthansa Technik, Philips lighting etc. His passion lies in incubating new technology ideas, finding new models of sustainable socio-economic development using appropriate technologies. As part of this ethos he has initiated a research unit called Frugal digital (http://frugaldigital.org/) which strives to appropriate technology for developing economies. |
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Marie AquilinoProfessor of Architectural History, Ecole Spéciale de l’Architecture (ESA)Marie is a specialist in contemporary urban redevelopment and risk mitigation. For the past eight years she has been giving seminars on the architect’s role in disaster prevention, mitigation and sustainable recovery as a means of talking with students and professionals about architecture and social justice. Marie is the author and editor of Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity (Metropolis Press), which aims to inform, educate, and sensitize architects to the best practices of reducing disaster risk worldwide. Marie was recently honored by the French government with a Competences and Talents Visa to develop a program at ESA that will educate and train architecture students to work in the contexts of extreme need and crisis in the developing world. She is currently part of an international working group on the reconstruction of Haiti and is Associate Program Director of BaSiC Initiative, Europe. Marie recently helped found Future City Lab, an international consortium of twelve schools of architecture and design concerned the future of urban environments. She is also one of twelve laureates of the Partner University Fund for 2011. Marie holds a Ph.D from Brown University in art and architectural history and is bilingual in French and English. | |
Bryan Bell,Founder of Design Corps, Founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED.Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic. Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design. Other speakers will be national leaders of this emerging field. |
Schedule
Friday, April 18, 2014
Morning session: Design for Social Enterprise
Location: Main Building – Amphi C (on 3rd floor to the right of the stairs) Building map: here
9:00-9:30 Coffee and Final Registration
9:30-9h45 Welcome to Public Interest Design, Global, Dr. Marie Aquilino and Bryan Bell
9h45-10h30 TEAQ Green Building, Dr. Hussein Tarabeih, Sakhnin, Israel, moderated by Salma Samar Damluji
10h30-11h15 Michael Murphy, UMUSOZI UKIZA, “The Healing Hill,” Mass Design, Butaro Doctor’s Living Quarters, Rwanda, moderated by Raul Pantaleo
11h15-11h30 Coffee Break – located on Mezzanine in the Main Building
11h30-12h15 Can City, Studio Swine, Sao Paolo, Brazil, moderated by Cindy Cooper
12h15-12h45 Open Discussion with the audience
12h45 -14h00 Lunch Break
Afternoon workshop: LOCAL BUSINESS, GLOBAL NETWORKS 14h00–18h00
Location: Camondo Building – 4th Floor
14h00-14h30 Introducing the SEED principals, Bryan Bell, Design Corps
14h30-14h45 Introduction to the working Group, Dr. Marie Aquilino
14:45-16h15 Working session
16h15-16h30 Coffee break — located on Mezzanine in the Main Building
16h30-17h30 Final Presentations from working groups
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Morning session: Designing Together Toward Social Justice
Location: Amphi Cinema in the Main Building (on the ground floor) Building Map: here
9:00-9:30 Coffee and Final Registration
9:30-9h45 Welcome to Public Interest Design, Global, Dr. Marie Aquilino and Bryan Bell
9h45-10h30 Joler Jonno Utshob: A Dug-Well Pavillon, Ahmad Muhaymin, Bangladesh, moderated by Deanna Van Buren
10h30-11h15 Communidad Ecologica Saludable, Informal Urban Communities Initiative, Ben Spencer, Susan Bolton, Joachim Voss, moderated by Vinay Venkatarmen
11h15-11h30 Coffee Break – located on Mezzanine in the Main Building
11h30-12h15 Citizen Powered Pedestrians, Matt Tomasulo, Walk Your City, Raleigh, moderated by Maggie Stephenson
12h15-12h45 Open Discussion with the audience
12h45 -14h00 Lunch Break
Afternoon workshop: Working Together: The Complexities of Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Partnering, and Funding 14h00-18h00
Location: Amphi Cinema in the Main Building (on the ground floor) Building Map: here
14h00-14h30 Jonathan Kuniholm, Plenary Speaker, President and Founder of the Open Prosthetics Project
14h30-14h45 Introduction to the Working Group, Dr. Marie Aquilino
14:45-16h15 Working sessions
16h15-16h30 Coffee break – located on Mezzanine in the Main Building
16h30-17h30 Final Presentations from Working Groups
17h30 Cocktail Hour – located on Mezzanine in the Main Building
Funding for the convening is provided by the Surdna Foundation and by the Fetzer Institute, whose mission it is to foster awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in the emerging global community.
Read the full Public Interest Design Global Project Winner Press Release here.