Humanitarian Design: Catapult Design, a non-profit firm

Catapult Design is an interdisciplinary design practice that brings engineering, technology, and products to resource-limited settings. They are engineers, designers, implementers, and educators. They design products, introduce technologies, and foster trends that are appropriate, self-sustaining, socially responsible and culturally sensitive. "The majority of our world’s population lacks access to life’s basic needs. We develop and implement human-centered products to help them thrive". Catapult Design focuses on delivering culturally sensitive, environmentally friendly, location-appropriate solutions for communities in need. Technology can empower and liberate. A single, effective product has more potential for worldwide impact...

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Enabling Urban Progress - Financial Times and Citi call for entries for 2013 FT/Citi Ingenuity Awards

In the last two days we talked about winners, today we talk of a premium, unique in its kind. The 2013 FT/Citi Ingenuity Awards: Urban Ideas in Action are all about recognizing the freshest, brightest, most innovative ideas, wherever they come from that help ensure cities remain centres of creativity and progress. With more than half the world’s population lives in cities, their leaders, and inhabitants will have to find new ways to thrive. The explosive growth of urban communities is one of the most significant demographic trends of the 21st century. The competitiveness and vitality of the world’s cities depends on the decisions and innovations of all urban stakeholders, from citizens and communities to organizations, corporations and...

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Tania Bruguera and Nadia Sirota receive the Meadows Prize

SouthernMethodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts annoucend last week that artist Tania Bruguera and violist Nadia Sirota will receive its annual Meadows Prize. Inaugurated in October 2009, the Meadows Prize is presented each fall to up to two pioneering artists. It includes support for a residency in Dallas at the Meadows School, in addition to a $25,000 stipend.  But what makes the prize both unique and efficacious is the extent to which past winners have led projects while at SMU that have had a wider impact on the city's inhabitants. The winners have to leave a lasting legacy in Dallas, such as a work of art that remains in the community, a composition or piece of dramatic writing that would be performed locally, or...

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Liberos, the community of readers of Sardinia

Liberos is a social network built by some writers, publishers, booksellers, libraries, cultural institutions, festivals and other publishing professionals in Sardinia. Liberos won yesterday, January 29, the "Prize cheFare" The jury, after studying the proposals of the six finalists, decided to award the victory to the network that enhances the value chain of the book, and the protagonist of cultural projects. The reasons are: • recognizes the reading value economic, cultural and social, individual and collective; • involves an original way all the actors in the chain of the book; • develop a model capable of balancing instances commercial and cultural; • Balance physical and virtual network in the process of building community; •...

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Synoikia, a communal lighting installation from donated fixtures

Located in the heart of Athens, Ittaki is a small street in Monastiraki area, one of the most characteristic quarters with narrow and winding lanes and small buildings that date back to Byzantine and Ottoman period. This street hosts only few small shops, very few residents and an amazing lighting installation. Beforelight, a Greek based creative Studio that experiment with the use of light, in collaboration with Imagine the city, a cluster for city branding and urban renovation, has invited and mobilized the residents to donate their old luminaires, fixtures and lamp shades in order to transform the abandoned street of old central Athens into a homely space, with the site-specific installation "Synoikia", that means neighborhood. An empty...

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The Green Bike project, Fuori Salone - Milan Design Week 2013

From the desire to increase the use of bicycle Claudia Zanfi, founder of aMAZElab, a non-profit cultural lab which works for the diffusion and knowledge of contemporary cultures active since 2000, created in collaboration with the Embassy and the Consulate General of theKingdom of the Netherlands in Milan on project THE GREEN BIKE. The event will be realized in April at the next edition of the Fuori Salone - Milan Design Week 2013. The project idea - new in its kind - comes by the urgency of extend the city of Milan and practices sustainable lifestyles, the need to take concrete action within the urban reality and offer incentives able to engage the public and targeting it towards virtuous models of urban mobility, following the example...

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Sunday's Tale - The new concept of the city: the city-container Over het IJ festival in Amsterdam.

Sunday's Tale: a post from the past. Last summer for the twentieth anniversary of Amsterdam’s Over het IJtheatre Festival, local architecture studio O+A created a gigantic recycled shipping container "stage city" made from locally sourced materials, in North Amsterdam’s huge NDSM shipyard. Lasting only two weeks, the structures provoked theatrical artists in exploring the disused shipyard for site-specific theatre performances. The festival have been held at the NDSM shipyard, an amzing venue, for over two decades. Theatrical artists, both young and experienced, are challenged to employ, interact and investigate the disused shipyard for unique and context-specific performances. In the fall of 2011, artistic director Lode...

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