Design and Communities Conference
March 28, 2022 – March 29, 2022
About the event
Our second in-situ event took place in Jerusalem in March 2022 and focused on local communities and design. The first day was dedicated to future planning and upcoming events in the SDN. The second day focused on an international conference centered around the topic of social design and communities through featuring various case studies. Themes included co-designing with Roma communities in Hungary; vernacular design between global trends and local design among Druz and Arab communities; a service design digital platform aimed to help socially-oriented design projects; working with ultra-Orthodox Jewish women to help early identification of breast cancer and much more. During the third and last day of the event, we started by visiting an urban agriculture and greed roofs project called Muslala, located at the heart of Jerusalem. Building their platform on the roof of a semi-abandoned monumental complex – a typically white elephant project – these social entrepreneurs built a community of like-minded creators focused on sustainability and re-shifting the focus of urban design to the city’s residents. Afterward, we met with a sub-project of Muslala called Sinsila, focusing on working with Palestinian women in Eastern Jerusalem to build and maintain beehives on their roofs. We finished with a tour and visited communities in Eastern Jerusalem.