AIGA and ARTBOOK Present: Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now

Join AIGA’s Lee-Sean Huang in conversation with Cynthia Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, about a new Cooper Hewitt exhibition and book.

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.