via coolhunting.com

- from candychang.com

Connection from United Visual Artists on Vimeo.

- from thepolisblog.org

- from foreignpolicy.com

“It’s easy to build a house, much harder to build a community,” as Cynthia E. Smith, the show’s curator, told me. “Cities are very complex, and what the best designers illustrate is how to give form to sometimes very simple ideas. Good design involves bringing not just a fresh eye to problems but, most of all, listening to the people who live in those communities. We’re talking about a billion people living in informal settlements today,” she added. “You can see them as a billion problems or a billion solutions.”

Exhibition on now at the UN in NYC. Article on the show in NYT.

The interesting thing about the strategic design unit (SDU) is that it takes this approach to matters of public policy. In particular, it watches the massive social and economic changes that governments, including our own, are struggling to cope with. When the welfare system is straining because there’s less tax revenue to go round and an ageing population demanding greater care, how do you make it deliver? The answer lies partly in the minutiae of, say, how you deliver food to the elderly, but also at the macro scale. The SDU has found itself rethinking the social contract. Do you allow people to work less and contribute to society in other ways, such as part-time volunteering? It sounds something like David Cameron’s big society, but in the UK there was no detail about how that would work, just the unrealistic expectation that we would all do more.

- from guardian.co.uk

Studios, workshops, cinema space, bars and more. On Westerpark.
http://www.westergasfabriek.nl/