Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now

Edited with text by Cynthia E. Smith. Preface by Darren Walker. Foreword by Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar. Poem by John Paul Lederach.

How design can help foster the conditions for global peace: an intersectional visual conversation between activists, designers, architects and theorists.

How might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in and take action to create it now? Designing Peace is an intersectional snapshot of the actions—culturally diverse and wide-ranging in scale—that are currently in play around the world.

Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars and architects to policymakers and graphic, game and landscape designers, Designing Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity.

Designers engage with individuals, communities and organizations to create a more sustainable peace—from creative confrontations that challenge existing structures to designs that demand embracing justice and truth in a search for reconciliation. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.

Contributors include: Michael Adlerstein, Pablo Ares and Julia Risler, Merve Bedir, Everisto Benyera, Nadine Bloch and Andrew Boyd, Lee Davis, Toni L. Griffin, Kristian Hoelscher, Dillon Horwitz, Michael Kenwick, Jason Miklian, Michael Murphy, Binalakshmi Nepram, Caroline O'Connell, Chelina Odbert, Tone Selmer-Olsen and Håvard Breivik, Beth Simmons and others.