This was a really cool project that Kristyn and I stumbled upon the other day. Instead of working to create art for museums and galleries, these designers are using their artistic talents to improve the look and feel of certain human environments. In other words, they look to transform rundown areas of certain cities and neighborhoods into beautiful and vibrant public spaces.
Check out some of their work at http://rebargroup.org/portfolio. It’s pretty neat!
From Rebar website:
The Rebar studio is a cross-disciplinary practice for solving the design problems of the commons.
We believe that the human environment—public space in particular—should be infused with ecological knowledge, resilient to changing social conditions, responsive to creative impulses, and filled with opportunities for benevolence, conviviality and delight. We design to make that happen.
Our process is hands-on. We work with ideas, drawings, models and full scale prototypes to keep the loop between ideas and objects as short as possible. Our prototyping and fabrication workshop allows us to quickly test ideas physically, enriching the design development process.