How to Design Physical Environments that Promote Healing, Justice, and Peace

Architect Deanna Van Buren will speak about how interdisciplinary approaches to design with social workers, game designers, artists and more can play in healing and repair as it relates to supporting inner and outer peace. Her talk will cover research and its associative spatial applications for spaces for survivors of violence to artistic practices that support personal and interpersonal healing and transformation.

Van Buren is the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. An architecture and real estate nonprofit working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions, DJDS builds infrastructure that address its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. She is also a socially engaged artist working across media platforms including public art, film and video games.

Van Buren has been profiled by The New York Times and has written op-eds on the intersection of design, architecture, mass incarceration and video games in outlets such as Politico, Architectural Record and Gamasutra. Her TEDWomen talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than one million times.