Using Design to End Mass Imprisonment

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Bicentenary Medal Lecture

Using Design and Real Estate Development to End Mass Imprisonment

The 2018 Bicentenary Medal is awarded to Deanna Van Buren for transforming justice through design.

Deanna Van Buren is the design director and co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJ+DS), an architecture and real estate development firm that works across disciplines to attack the root causes of mass incarceration.
In her Bicentenary Medal lecture, Deanna Van Buren will explore the societal inequities that manifest in traditional justice architecture such as courthouses and prisons, and she will reveal how her company is redefining the infrastructure of justice with peacemaking and restorative justice centers, mobile classrooms, and re-entry housing for people coming out of incarceration.

The talk will spotlight the power of place to promote social justice and outline the tools and processes that designers can use to create meaningful systemic change.

The Bicentenary Medal was instituted in 1954 to commemorate the founding of the RSA over two hundred years earlier, and has been awarded annually for outstanding contribution to the advancement of design in industry and society. In the RSA’s current account of design, the medal is awarded to an individual who has ‘used design to great effect as an instrument of civic innovation.’

To celebrate the opening of the RSA’s new coffeehouse, Rawthmells, we’re bringing together a series of powerful conversations and sharing the best ideas on some of the challenges we face as a society in the next decade and beyond.

Explore the full calendar of events and join the conversation.