Daniel Drennan ElAwar “Believe in stone and survive.” Framework From the Declaration of the Palestinian People during the first intifada in 1987: We will no longer be a subject people. If you order us to our camps, we will roam the countryside. Dig up our soil and bury us alive in it if you will. […]
An Xiao Mina In "The Texting Culture of the Philippines," a recent article for Design Observer, I explored some of the design strategies centered around mobile phone culture in the Philippines. It’s a well-known fact to anyone who’s visited the country–with upwards of 600 text messages per month per user in 2010, the Philippines is […]
An Xiao Mina They’re a colorful, familiar sight all across the Philippines. Converted from old US army vehicles and personally decorated by the drivers, jeepneys have been transformed into viable public transportation vehicles. They zip through dense traffic much more easily than a bus but they can still fit at least a dozen people. In […]
Ed. note— This interview of Daniel Drennan ElAwar was conducted by Nabil Chehade at American University of Beirut, where Mr. Drennan has been teaching. Series of four posters for the Return to Palestine March, May 15, 2011. Artist: Jamaa Al-Yad NC: Have you been involved in any projects that lean directly towards more political issues […]
Daniel Drennan ElAwar In April 2010 I found myself in Montreal for an academic conference. It was my first time there, and as I am wont to do in such a new place, I looked up used bookstores and otherwise roamed around the city. In one such English-language bookstore in the city center I asked […]
Scott Gerald Shall Introductions We sat on the floor in the cramped offices of Espasio Cultural Creativo. The group was an eclectic mix: staff and volunteers from Espasio Cultural Creativo (or ECC, a Bolivian non-profit that runs arts education initiatives on the streets of La Paz and the chief reason we were in Bolivia), the […]
David Gunn Twenty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia still bears the scars of this time. Some of its effects are obvious – related to the decimated infrastructure, the depopulation of cities and displacement of peoples. But some of its effects are more complex.
Raymond Prucher When I initiated this piece, I had expectations of culling out what was at the core of my own altruistic mission, to help put a face on the people who are today’s enemies of choice, namely Arabs and Persians. So, I turned to the culture-makers—artists, designers, writers and dancers, both native and ex-patriot—to […]
Joyce Epolito For us, it’s been all about relationship and listening. This year, a group of friends and I had the opportunity to inject design into the context in which we lived. It all started when we met several Burmese (Karen) refugee families in our neighborhood in Chicago (Rogers Park), one of the most diverse […]
Editor’s Note: With this article we celebrate the third anniversary of the Design-Altruism-Project. Always intended as an outlet for the unheralded young who are doing good work for the unknown and forgotten, it is appropriate that we enter our fourth year with the following account by a Ugandan-born designer, now working in America, who is […]
Raymond Prucher “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” – Desiderius Erasmus Images taken at the Qalandia checkpoint inside the West Bank, well beyond the ‘Green Line’ that was set up by the 1949 Armistice. I became a designer in Palestine. In 2003, three years after we’d met during our graduate […]
Jonathon Russell My experience in the United Arab Emirates started with a trip to visit my in-laws in Dubai for spring break in 2003. It was a fun trip with my wife and our 7-month old daughter Emma and included visits to 3 of the 7 emirates, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharja. One trip consisted […]
Jesse Miller Outside “Casa Rosenda” Monterrey, Mexico The Architectural Masters Thesis. High expectations and the culmination of one’s educational career are commonly used to describe this thing that looms as the end of graduate school approaches. It is a thing that has much implied importance and historical baggage. Though all these factors that initially seem […]
Arden Stern’s research in Zambia
Fred Quillin It’s impossible for me to tell students to “stop playing around on the computer with Photoshop” and get back to their note taking. As I walked into the classroom recently, my class was busy quietly taking notes for the other professor and one student stood up to ask me a question about Photoshop. […]
Fred Quillin So the director of the FDNC, Justin Silbaugh, is American and had some friends come in for a visit recently from San Fransisco and L.A. I had heard of how one of them works for Sony and does motion graphics for movies such as the Spiderman movies and I was excited to talk […]
Fred Quillin The most wonderful aspect about the medium of Printmaking is that, unlike most other fine art mediums, it’s a community act, for the most part. Painters own their own brushes and paint. Sculptors own their own clay. Digital artists own their own computer workstations. But generally speaking, most printmakers do not own their […]
Being the story of DWBs first student volunteer in Africa
Sydnee MacKay observes a donation to FDNC Uganda