How can design address the world’s most critical issues?
The design professions are changing dramatically. New community-based approaches to architecture, engineering, and urban planning are helping to remake our neighborhoods and cities. 'Design for Good' is being embraced by the new generation of designers—they're applying their 'design thinking', optimism, and DIY skills to create positive change in communities in need across the country, and around the world. The Shelter Media Project tells the story of this change worldwide.
The design for good movement has been inspired by architects like Samuel Mockbee whose Rural Studio in Alabama influenced a generation of American designers. It’s been carried on by organizations like Architecture for Humanity, which taps an online network of more than 50,000 professionals to help create structures that have benefitted more than 100,000 people each year throughout the world, and Build Change, which has built safer homes for 70,000 people in China and Indonesia. Grassroots architecture and design organizations are springing up in cities such as Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans in response to pressing urban needs.
The Shelter Media Project highlights the social change-making role of designers, architects and engineers who are part of this movement. Passionate about making the world a better place, they’re using their design skills to make a difference in disaster zones, in urban neighborhoods, and in rural communities across the country and the world. By telling their stories, we hope to inspire others to design for good. Shelter: connect conducts digital storytelling workshops for students and design professionals, giving them the skills they need to effectively create and communicate their own stories. Click to learn more about Shelter: connect.
The Shelter mission.
· Inspire undergraduate and graduate students to become involved in public interest architecture and design
· Share storytelling and filmmaking skills with students and design professionals in the U.S, and abroad to help them join the larger conversation about ‘design for good’
· Create a broader awareness of the role of public interest design in helping create resilience in communities across America, and inspire people to donate time and/or money to organizations like Public Architecture, Architecture for Humanity, Habitat for Humanity, and Build Change.
