A Generation of Emerging Designers Who Design With Purpose

Michael Murphy
Architecture student and cofounder,
Mass Design Group
Boston

When patients enter a hospital with a broken leg and emerge with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, something is not right. This is the problem Michael Murphy, a 30-year-old student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, addressed in his design for Butaro Hospital in Rwanda. His solution, conceived in partnership with the Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health, incorporates local climate, culture, and economic conditions. It eliminates the hallways where patients would gather -- "actually incubating disease," he says -- and encourages them to use the landscaped grounds instead. Inside, a ventilation system moves air from high- to low-pressure areas, industrial fans improve air circulation, and UV lights help kill tuberculosis particulates. "It's not brain science to recognize the initial problem, but it takes dedication to learn about the community's needs," Murphy says. And not just medical needs. The project trained and employed local construction workers. "We can get a bulldozer for $10,000 a month, or we can hire 300 people to hand-chisel out a mountainside," he says. "We'll do the latter. This commitment to artisanal-craft creation is an educational laboratory." --Stephanie Schomer

Christien Meindertsma
Product designer, Flocks
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Consider your plastic chair, your coffee mug, your lamp. Where did they come from? What were they made from? Who made them? Modern mass production makes these questions nearly impossible to answer. For Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, 30, that's what's wrong with design. "The products are blank except for some marketing story," she says. "I wanted to tell real stories." Meindertsma's rugs -- woven with 6-foot needles from woolen yarn as thick as telephone cables -- and her coiled-rope furniture often have a rough-hewn finish that plainly displays their origins, which she details with documentary precision and poetic photography. Her most ambitious work so far is PIG 05049, a book that details the industrial uses of pig. (Pig gelatin, for example, is an ingredient in ice cream, but it's also used to clarify cloudy beer and jam gunpowder into bullet casings.) The book won her the 2009 Index award and a $130,000 prize. Coming up: an exhibition based on a recent visit to an Inuit village in Canada. "Few people can live only on what the land gives them, and the Inuit have for centuries," she says. "That's a powerful thing to see in real life." --Cliff Kuang

Candy Chang
Urban planner and graphic designer, Civic Center
New Orleans

Candy Chang already had degrees in architecture and graphic design when a documentary about Jane Jacobs's fight to protect New York's Greenwich Village from planning czar Robert Moses led her to Columbia University to study urban planning. "That's when I learned there's a lot of talk about participatory planning but no vision to excite people to participate," she says. Chang, 33, has taken it upon herself to provide that vision through design projects -- among them a public art installation of Post-it Notes on which passersby recorded (and compared) what they paid in rent and a brochure that translates the city's legalese for street vendors. Now settled in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, Chang is developing a project called Neighborland to help residents bring the services they need to their communities and working on a graphic novel about the Jacobs-Moses war. "Every day, citizens are trying to navigate their rights as an apartment renter, a taxpayer, a small business owner, a public-transportation user," she says. "There's a real need for designers to help make civic information more accessible and engaging, so we can make great places to live, work, and play." --Alissa Walker