The DESIGN 21: Social Design Network brings together designers to inspire social activism and find solutions to social and global issues. Partnered with UNESCO it is based on the premise that education, science, technology, culture and communication are tools to spread knowledge and information, build awareness and foster dialogue. It runs a series of competitions, and at the moment you can view and vote for 3 design competitions- 1) Heated Issue: Awareness campaigns to educate the public on the issue of global warming; 2) Child’s Play: Objects that encourages children to cultivate their own imagination and creativity and 3) ShelterMe: Temporary emergency shelter for deployment in a natural disaster
All the competitions are great but ShelterMe is particularly interesting to me. Emergency shelter has always been a creative area of planning and architectural exploration, and more recently there has been an exceptional amount of professional work and debate following Hurricane Katrina etc. The 246 entries in ShelterMe explores a diverse range of ideas about form, materials, construction techniques, and modular design. Emergency shelter is an interesting and highly complex area of work in itself, and it also can’t help but raise some broader questions about our cities and urban development – it certainly questions ideas about how we live, our conventional housing products, how infrastructure is provided and the ability of our cities to adapt.
