Despite a growing movement for corporate diversity and bias trainings, many employees still experience the dehumanizing and daily impacts of bias and discrimination. We’ve become more informed, but not necessarily transformed.

As experience designers, the team believed that addressing bias in our own workplaces and culture required a new approach—to shift these trainings from intellectual understanding to emotional awakening. Make Some Room is an immersive workshop that marries storytelling and space to change hearts, not just minds.

Interventions that attract attention and reveal what might live there are connecting people to place at Hobsonville Point—a medium-density suburb designed with the infrastructure necessary to generate a socially successful and sustainable community. Without explanation or instruction, these architectural objects create a unique and memorable user experience. Solving the client’s desire for inhabitants of Hobsonville to come to know the natural community that they live among in addition to the human one.

In 2018, after a two-year renovation, the landmark building reopened as the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice; more than a headquarters, the center is a vibrant, accessible hub for champions of social justice. The engaging brand expression program draws inspiration from the building’s 1960s period while visually complementing the organization’s evocative art collection. The design concept “A Bold Whisper” expresses the Foundation’s quiet confidence in its mission and key international initiatives.

Museums are places for community education, yet they are seldom accessible to everyone nor equitable in their presentation of content. Acknowledging the unfortunate truth that visually impaired people struggle to enjoy museum experiences, “Senses: Design Beyond Vision” invited visitors of all abilities to actively engage in the exhibition in ways surpassing conventional “universal design” considerations.