Amy Peterson, a Detroit lawyer, envisioned Rebel Nell—an enterprise that creates unique jewelry from scrap pieces of graffiti—after moving next to one of Detroit’s shelters. While walking her dog, she began talking to women she met, and after listening to their stories and challenges, Peterson started a social enterprise with a vision to help women...
Responding to migrant deaths along the Arizona-Mexico border due to dehydration, minister Robin Hoover (along with former Navy engineer Tim Holt) designed a system for placing water in the desert. Their project, Humane Borders Water Stations and Warning Posters, is featured in the exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America, curated by Cynthia Smith, Curator...
Cooper Hewitt collaborated with Pratt Institute students, who created socially-responsible designs based on experiences they had at two New York nonprofit organizations.
In 2012, math professor Laurie Rubel developed, with support from the National Science Foundation, the City Digits project to help high school students learn math by examining urban injustices in their own New York City neighborhood. Partnering with civic designer Sarah Williams, the team designed a set of place-based learning tools to integrate richer data...
Excerpt from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s essay “Where is the Public Today? Design for a New Civic Imagination” from By the People: Designing a Better America exhibition publication. Border Crossing Design by the people begins with re-energizing a public culture and building the capacity of divided communities for mutual recognition and coexistence. The San...
In 2013, architectural designer Deanna Van Buren and social scientist Barb Toews established Designing Justice+Designing Spaces (DJ+DS) to facilitate the design of more restorative and healing criminal-justice environments through community engagement in jails and prisons. Their work is featured in the exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America, curated by Cynthia Smith, Curator of...
From the Object of the Day archives, the Trans...Armchair designed by the Campana Brothers and installed in Esperanza Spalding Selects.
I read Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path” early in my studies and was always struck by how his formative education and life circumstances informed his work over the years. Failure confronted Fuller after he left the Navy, heading him on his “lifelong experiment” with an aim of finding out “what, if anything,” one individual could do...
From the archives, an Object of the Day blog post on Rockwood Pottery, one of the manufacturers featured in the exhibition Passion for the Exotic: Japonism.
