The National Organization for Minority Architects (NOMA) recently published its magazine for Spring 2010. The issue focuses on African architecture and they published separate articles by DK and I (Quilian). DOWNLOAD THE NOMA MAGAZINE SP 2010  Dk’s article is titled AfricentriCITY:How to Use Existing System to Improve Livelihoods. Based in part on this blog post in his blog. The article I wrote details a project a group of Harvard GSD students worked on in South Africa’s Khayelitsha township. The article was first published in Archinect. The article included a variety of interviews... Read The Rest →

A few weeks ago Robert Cowherd, a colleague at Wentworth Institute of Technology, invited me to participate on a forum discussion for his Design for Life seminar along with Manuel Delgado, Bill Boehm, Oscar Grauer,  Jota (Jose Jaime) Samper, and Patrick Haughey (MIT HTC and Wentworth faculty). We discussed the essays that Robert and his students produced and put together into the following book: Design For Life: Informality and Reflexivity in a Second Modernity Edited by Robert Cowherd Student/authors: Geoffrey Hackett, Michael Modoono, Ian Downing, Rebecca Connors, Julie Beach Scheel, Michael Holmquist, Aidan Lindh, Benjamin... Read The Rest →

BUT, TODAY ADS COLLECT US Mass-production advertising is establishing our whole pattern of life – principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard of living. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own. But Today We Collect Ads – Allison and Peter Smithson, 1956  Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956 The Smithsons and Richard Hamilton collected ads. They went to their magazine stands, took their scissors, and began to... Read The Rest →

Welcome to DSGN AGNC, a design and research collaboration that seeks to address the global problem of spatial, social, economic, and political inequality in the world’s urban peripheries through design praxis.  We offer as operational platform the concept of critical activism–that folding activism into the discourse of critical practice opens up new possibilities to rethink the structure and scope of design process. Critical activism postulates that no product is ever final; recognizing that design can only optimize products by calibrating process and performance over time. As a critical activist practice... Read The Rest →