What we do
As a social design studio focused on collective action against systemic oppression, we work alongside movements, grassroots initiatives, INGOs and institutions to reimagine more inclusive futures through narrative activism, systems design and solidarity.
We draw on a vast array of tools and skills to build projects that can meet the wicked challenges of the modern world. If what you need isn’t listed below, get in touch, and we can craft a brief together.
Research and investigations
We explore social systems and injustices, using fieldwork and inquiry to reveal patterns, challenge assumptions, and build evidence.
Information is power, and how it is gathered, held and used shapes who gets into the rooms where decisions are made. We follow small stories into large structures, studying the architecture of relationships and power. That might mean walk-and-talks through a neighbourhood, interviews and focus groups, action research or mixed methods, with the people living those realities present as co-researchers and experts.
In Makers Valley, Johannesburg, we worked with over 50 community members to map the local initiatives already driving socio-ecological restoration, and turned what we found into a blueprint for community-led urban development.
Storytelling and data activism
We transform evidence into visuals, narratives, media and campaigns that make visible the systemic dynamics of the global majority.
How a story is told and what data gets collected informs what people see, value and act on, which makes them both crucial tools for imagining and pushing for inclusive futures. We design visuals, narratives and media that make complex systems clear and accessible, and attempt to keep that knowledge in the voices and hands of the communities it comes from.
We’ve turned 15 years of community-led mapping into a handbook to train thousands of people in slums across Africa into data activists, and illustrated complex topics on imagining an alternative to the capitalist paradigm of philanthropy.
Facilitation and collective inquiry
We design workshops, dialogues, and collaborative processes that engage diverse knowledge, build solidarity, and co-create pathways.
Need we remind ourselves that working together is always better than working alone? Yet how we do that really determines our success. We gather and support groups to cohere around their focuses and learnings, to ensure more diverse, robust and integrated plans for bringing about the outcomes they want.
Amongst others, we have supported a UN taskforce in its annual reviews, gathered housing justice organisations and tenants to discuss collaborations, and facilitated community engagement in informal settlements to ground design processes in lived realities.
Systems and strategy design
We map complex landscapes, design methodologies and develop interventions that address root causes and strengthen locally-led change.
As we attempt to counter the oppressive dynamics we exist within, our role is also to understand, imagine and build new systems and centre new logics for the foundations of the future. We highlight where power is reproduced, and where there may be gaps for steady change, whilst ensuring ongoing evolution through revolutions of learning and adaptation.
With local actors across South-East Asia and South-East Africa we designed and led a full adaptive monitoring, evaluation and learning cycle around locally-led development, and are currently working on a housing justice data commons that civil society can use in advocacy.
Partnership and organisational support
We work with movements, organisations, and institutions to build capacity, strengthen networks, and co-create strategies.
We consider relationships to be central to the work that we do, and recognise that they’re also the place of most tension and turmoil in social impact spaces. Caring about how we nurture a more resilient and collaborative civil society, we partner with people to bring their values and practices closer together and set up the structures that allow them to hold over time.
This has looked like four years refining methodologies for rural community-led economics, stress-testing an alternative model for funding community care work, and helping a Cape Town tenants’ movement grow from research working groups to over 300 volunteers
Education and advocacy
We speak, teach, and partner across classrooms, panels, movements, and policy spaces, ensuring research and grassroots insights shape public discourse and decisions.
Drawing on Paulo Freire’s call for collective conscientisation and public education, we are focused on reaching the people that can use the knowledge and insights we’ve stumbled across and articulated to build new worlds. Through formal teaching, op-eds, public speaking and the like, we aim to get the information to the people.
This has looked like recent op-eds in the Daily Maverick, designing and teaching courses that bring township entrepreneurs together with student graphic designers, and engaging in public participation processes to influence policy.
