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 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 in [...]
Daniel Drennan 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 the [...]
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 [...]
Images and text by Scott Poulter Department of Refugee Affairs, Nairobi Looking at the popular images of the African continent in the media today, one gets a distinctly different impression from what’s actually going on at ground level. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the parody news website The Onion might remember a story in which [...]
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 [...]