Designing Justice + Designing Spaces co-founder Deanna Van Buren to present closing keynote for Iowa State’s Trauma-Informed Design Symposium
AMES, Iowa — Deanna Van Buren, the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), will present the closing keynote lecture of the 2024 Trauma-Informed Design Symposium at Iowa State University.
Van Buren’s free public talk, “How to Design Physical Environments that Promote Healing, Justice and Peace,” will be at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 16, in the Durham Great Hall at the Iowa State Memorial Union.
Van Buren will speak about the role interdisciplinary approaches to design with social workers, game designers, artists and others can play in healing and repair as they relate to supporting inner and outer peace.
Topics covered will range from research and its associative spatial applications for environments for survivors of violence to artistic practices that support personal and interpersonal healing and transformation.
About the speaker and DJDS
An architecture and real estate nonprofit working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions, DJDS builds infrastructure that addresses 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.
About the symposium
Van Buren’s keynote will close out 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 criminal justice at the University of Washington Tacoma.
Stevens and Toews are among the pioneers in the field of trauma-informed design.
“Trauma-informed design — a new and emerging area of practice and scholarship — seeks to create spaces with trauma survivors through a rich process centering co-design, evidence-based practices and the development of supportive communities and relationships with and between survivors, care providers and designers,” Stevens said.
“This symposium brings together a transdisciplinary group of practitioners, scholars, service providers and survivors to develop a framework and guiding principles for creating dignified, human-centered, healing environments,” she said.
Symposium participants include:
- Shalini Agrawal, founder, Public Design for Equity, and director of programs, Open Architecture Collaborative
- Cecilly Hildebrand, executive director, Candace House
- Chad Holtzinger, president, Shopworks Architecture
- Garrret Jacobs, director of research and evaluation, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
- Ameyalli Mañon-Ferguson, cultural ecology program manager, Cultural Ecology Project, Parrot Creek
- Carlos Medellin, adjunct assistant professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
- Julie Stevens, associate professor of landscape architecture, Iowa State University
- Barb Toews, associate professor of criminal justice, University of Washington Tacoma
- Deanna Van Buren, CEO, design director and co-founder, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
- Jenny Wilson, director of research and impacts, Shopworks Architecture
The symposium will include a public panel discussion titled “Environmental Design is a Social Service Issue” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, in the Lyle E. and Anna Lightfoot Forum (atrium) of the ISU College of Design, and an exhibition of work by symposium participants and interactive pieces created by students in Stevens’ trauma-informed design studio courses.
The Trauma-Informed Design 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).
Contacts
Julie Stevens, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, 515-294-6927, jstevens@iastate.edu
Heather Sauer, Director of Strategic Communications, College of Design, 515-294-9289, hsauer@iastate.edu
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