Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now

Description

Designing Peace asks, 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? This book 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, graphic, game, and landcape designers, Desiging 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 multi-dimensional 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.

Cyntia E. Smith is an author and editor. John Paul Lederach is a senior fellow at Humanity United and professor emeritus of international peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the co-founder and first director of the Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In 2019 he won the Niwano Peace Foundation Peace Prize. Dr. Lederach is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in the field of conciliation and conflict mediation. He has provided consultation for peacebuilding efforts in Somalia, Northern Ireland, Colombia, the Basque Country, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Nepal and in East and West Africa. He has also helped develop and lead hundreds of training programs in conflict transformation, mediation and international peacebuilding in 35 countries around the world.

An intersectional visual conversation between activists, designers, architects and theorists ... Profusely illustrated, thought-provokingly informative.-- "Midwest Book Review" As the war in Ukraine rages on, it's hard to imagine a more timely summer show than "Designing Peace," at the Cooper Hewitt.--Andrea K. Scott "New Yorker" Building playgrounds on the border wall and serving cuisine from North Korea, designers and artists are creatively engaging the challenges of world peace in ways that surpass static emblems such as the peace symbol.--Jonathon Keats "Forbes: Media" Designing Peace implicates design in processes for mitigating, if not expunging, conflict ... How can design preserve community safety? How can design be used to root out the causes of a conflict? How might design contribute in smoothing the transition to peace in unstable contexts? And more curiously, can design engage "creative confrontation"? Given the sad state of geopolitics, the findings and solutions presented in Designing Peace are as urgent as ever.-- "The Architect's Newspapaer" Highlights how design can help resolve conflicts, promote justice, and pave the way for peace.--Elissaveta M. Brandon "Fast Company"