By using our lived experiences as a driver for design, we can create and build diverse spaces for our communities.

Food Space

MOCA Teens x Archeffect

The MOCA Teens workshop “Food Space” was created to focus the work on ‘reflection, research and the act of reclaiming’ something lost or forgotten. By choosing a dish or meal of significance to each individual, we can unearth rituals, traditions and stories of past times. It also offers us the opportunity to question how these cultural norms and stories align or no longer correspond with who we are.

The idea of reclaim I found as really appropriate for 2023 as we are reflecting and looking back at our cultural identities, to place make with our individual lived experiences- us - as community to transform the built world, to create for our futures through a community lens.

What It Takes to Design Diverse Spaces

To replace the surface level diversity, equity and inclusion committees and performative work most architects and designers subscribe to, we must go deeper and make design education accessible. This is but a start to dismantle the visible, and at times, invisible borders that keep our BIPOC communities oppressed from creative fields.

By allowing the designer to emerge from our communities and uplift the observations and needs of the people, we will craft a shifted and autonomous system for a new architecture which does not seek to save us, but rather is generated and maintained by us as we need.

For the community by the community.