“I’m really focused on trying to bring design and all that it has to offer into the spaces I grew up in, so that people have a better sense of what they can be,” says Michael Bennett, who runs Studio Kër in Hawaii. His furniture, which draws inspiration from the African diaspora and goes hand in hand with his philanthropic work, embodies an original design language. Our conversation with Bennett is one of five with global practitioners who are using design to create positive impact in the places where they work and live.
The notion that design can be a conduit for social change is not new. But to truly make a difference, it needs to form meaningful dialogue — and to be directly intertwined — with communities. This idea also drives the work of Berlin studio Bplus.xyz, which formed a democratic campaign around advancing an EU law to make adaptive re-use the default for buildings that face demolition. While the movement is bolstered by the firm’s imaginative architecture — from the so-called Antivilla to its own offices in what the architects have dubbed San Gimignano Lichtenberg — the true innovation at the heart of its project is the “advent of an idea into the language.”
And that same spirit is at the core of a new program run out of Toronto’s University Health Network. Under the rubric of “social medicine,” it is prescribing shelter as a public health measure to treat the chronically unhoused. The main innovator here is a doctor: Andrew Boozary, who runs the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine. He is working in tandem with architects at home and around the world to envision housing connected to the health system as an alternative model for a permanent solution.
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