Design for the Common Good International Exhibitions

The Design for the Common Good International Exhibitions assert the value of public interest design, an emerging practice that envisions a community-centered approach in the design of buildings, environments, products, and systems. It is a practice that champions growing knowledge, evolving processes, and activating participation while tackling complex issues. The direct involvement of people—communities, stakeholders, designers, as well as educators and their students—is the heart of this work.

Established by the Design for the Common Good Network in Denver, Colorado (2022) with the parent exhibition, today the exhibition travels with added peer-reviewed and/or curator-invited projects that build the collection. See the exhibition hosted by Budapest Metropolitan University Faculty of Art and Creative Industries (2023) in Budapest, Hungary. Together, the work featured in these exhibitions exemplifies the ways communities, organizations, and design teams are creating positive change from the ground up. Often localized and scale-appropriate, these efforts are transformative in the places where they matter most—settings where there is a distinct call to action and a needed response to critical issues affecting people in their ability to live life at its fullest.

The exhibition refers to the term public interest design as a practice that champions community-driven approaches to the design of buildings, environments, products, and systems. It is a practice that promotes growing knowledge, evolving processes, and activating meaningful engagement while tackling complex, multi-layered issues. Prioritizing community vision and supported by a range of diverse stakeholders, it advocates for mutual inclusivity where understanding and growth is achieved through education, research, and evaluation of design outcomes. As a result, these projects respond to mutually persistent social, economic, and environmental challenges at a variety of local-to-global scales providing valuable lessons and best practices.

Integral to the review process, project teams who are included in this exhibition provided documentation detailing their community collaborations and participation methods, project goals and impacts, issues addressed, results, and post-project outcomes among others. Evidence of this depth is found throughout the exhibition in photography, plans, videos, and narrative responses that acknowledge the inclusive process each project team has pursued.

In order to tell each project’s story exhibition narratives speak to the following prompts: Cause: the social, economic, and/or environmental basis for the project originates from within the community; Method: inclusive participatory design practices respond to the unique context of people and place; Impact: the project reveals evidence of positive change in the lives of the community it operates within; and, Takeaways: scholarship, new learning, and knowledge-sharing are documented and transferrable. Together these stories of participatory design amplify the urgency for public interest design practitioners today more than ever.

While each project is unique in its methods, the fundamental philosophy of working to achieve community-derived and -driven goals are found throughout. To further realize this, exhibition projects are grouped according to key issues addressed. These serve as a framework for understanding how public interest design operates to maximize social, economic, and environmental impacts within communities across the globe.

Together the Denver and Budapest exhibitions feature six thematic issue groups or “galleries” along with accompanying narratives:

Community

A fundamental feature of the broader exhibition is the importance of community as driver for solutions developed mutually with stakeholders, communities, and design teams. The projects presented in the Community gallery show a commitment to design process as a generator of community beneficial results. With distinct project goals, these projects illustrate how differentiated needs are relatable across a global spectrum; they demonstrate a range of possibilities in addressing shared, yet highly individualized issues defined by social, economic, and environmental conditions while mapping connections across community-centered design practices. These design interventions subsequently offer concrete transferable lessons about capacity building, community- building and awareness, as well as urban and rural community development.

Cultural Heritage

The projects presented in the Cultural Heritage gallery uphold and preserve the legacies and traditions of people through their values, assets, and practices. Design solutions can address the tangible and/or intangible aspects of culture and are critical to understanding the past, present, and the future. While projects in this gallery are multifaceted, the solutions share a common thread in acknowledging people and their needs through their cultural identities. This group of projects and practices demonstrate the importance of responsiveness where preservation of knowledge, techniques, histories, and the people honored by these, are critical. Evidence of culturally sensitive design decision-making runs through this work as socio-cultural and environmental conditions define project goals, outcomes, and results.

Education

The projects shown in the Education gallery reinforce the needs and requirements of teaching and learning within the unique cultural contexts defined by community. These projects illustrate the power of access, knowledge acquisition, and sharing as transformative to the growth of values, belief systems, and skills that evolve individuals and societies in their collective potential. Supported by primary and secondary issues, project results emphasize the tangible and often urgent requirements for social infrastructure, namely, youth empowerment, access to arts and culture, the role of academic education, and education as generator of rural community development. Presenting solutions from across countries and continents, these projects offer methods and approaches to problems that champion the complex issue of Education.

Equity

Projects featured in the Equity gallery uphold the principles of justice in the built and natural environments. Active in the acknowledgement and dismantling of imbalance, these projects present solutions to systemic inequities that meet individuals, communities, and environments where they are. They show that quality of life may be achieved across a broad range of contexts and even practices of design. Project outcomes reinforce the meaning of equity by increasing human and ecological health through environmental justice interventions and measuring the impacts of restorative justice and restorative economics. Other projects are focused on increasing awareness and access in designing with and for people with disabilities, ensuring universal accessibility, and fostering dignity through healthy and safe working spaces.

Sustainability

The Sustainability gallery confronts a gamut of issues beyond those supporting environmental impacts alone. Instead, these solutions blend environmental, social, and economic development concerns supporting the betterment of people and place. Where one project creates sustainable livelihood opportunities, another offers a framework for urban agriculture in an economically and culturally diverse neighborhood. Other projects seek to: empower communities with open-source solutions for discarded recyclable materials; educate students about resource-positive, sustainable architecture and construction; and activate literacy in library community centers that use passive climatic and timber construction strategies. This range of practices in architecture, planning, and design are shown to support communities through engagement and an issue-based approach.

Urban Resilience

The Urban Resilience gallery showcases solutions defined by distinct issues that unite to provide the collective evidence of resilience. These include responsiveness to emergency during the COVID-19 pandemic, access to affordable housing through a socio-spatial system of support, access to temporary transitional housing, and capacity building that addresses the crisis of houselessness. As such it is hard to describe these projects without recognition of the social human condition embedded within each where health and well-being, social infrastructure, community engagement and empowerment impacts are evident. These projects speak to the spectrum of human productivity empowered through the built environment, infrastructure, and policy and they illustrate best practices supporting healthy productive outcomes.