Architect and activist Deanna Van Buren, the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), will speak about the role interdisciplinary approaches to design with social workers, game designers, artists and more can play in healing and repair as they relate to supporting inner and outer peace. Her talk will range from research and its associative spatial applications for spaces for survivors of violence to artistic practices that support personal and interpersonal healing and transformation.

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. Van Buren is also a socially engaged artist working across media platforms including public art, film, and video games.

She 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.

Van Buren’s public lecture is the keynote address for the Trauma-Informed Design Symposium organized by Julie Stevens, associate professor of landscape architecture; Abbie Gaffey, ISU Extension and Outreach community development specialist; and Barb Toews, associate professor of social work and criminal justice at the University of Washington Tacoma.

The symposium is supported by an ISU Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities Symposium Grant; the King Excellence Fund; the ISU Department of Landscape Architecture; the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma; the Stanley G. and Dorothy F. Thurston Fund for Excellence in Care-Centered Design; the ISU Institute for Design Research and Outreach and the ISU College of Design.

Van Buren’s lecture is co-sponsored by the ISU Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government).