NEB Prizes 2023: All Applications

An industrial building will be renovated to house the new Mondragon Team Academy-Teamlabs laboratory in Barcelona. The project and process is understood as a collective learning laboratory towards more sustainable models. It aims to be a driving force behind the Industry 4.0 activity hub and a catalyst for the transformation of one of Europe's future sustainable neighbourhoods. It will perform as an academic-professional, public-private, leisure-work and indoor-outdoor ecotone.

The Fashion Kitchen is a non-commercial do-it-yourself workshop for anyone looking to repair, find or make clothing with a focus on reuse, participation and collective making. The initiative invites local participants and fashion consumers to engage in skill-sharing and upcycling of discarded textiles and clothing. Together we learn about garment origins, craft and reevaluate our relationship to the making of things.

Waste to Wonder is a participatory design build lab organized and run with university students in Umeå Sweden. It focused on seeing waste as an opportunity, and design as a means to address our societal challenges like ecological and social degeneration. In a three week period we interviewed users, designed a public intervention focused on physical literacy and built it ourselves out of materials gathered from the local recycling centers. Everyone is creative and can be part of the solution!

SPLOT UA Residency – an interdisciplinary creative program for young Ukrainians currently residing in Poland due to the war. Participants collaborate on designing prototypes of social innovations in 3 working groups with topics inspired by the UA Recovery Plan: Healing the city, Rewilding the night and Revitalizing education. Our goal is to combine competencies from different industries and facilitate integration between Ukrainian, Polish and international creative communities.

High above the city sits another, emerging landscape. Our rooftops have immense potential to deliver a sustainable and exciting future. We need affordable housing, social spaces, mobility networks, and renewable energy!

RoofScape is a partnership of the City of Rotterdam and design firms MVRDV and Superworld. It is centred on an open-source software - a design and knowledge-sharing tool to envision the transformation of the rooftops.

Can we collectively imagine a RoofScape for everyone?

Under the Landscape is an educational and participatory project focusing on the local building traditions and the landscape of Therasia and Santorini (Cyclades, Greece). It unfolded through applied and theoretical learning settings for craftspeople, diverse practitioners, researchers and the local community. The unique materiality, the vernacular architecture and the cultural landscape are perceived as tools for collective learning, sustainable development and social empowerment.

Our “Urban AquaFarma” project is about creating a green-garden mobile installation for the local food production which is based on an aquaponic system, but supported by rain and stormwater collection infrastructure. Alongside food production, the infrastructure plays an educational and social role, integrating the citizens, creating the workplace, but predominantly it propagates the environmentally-friendly behaviours for all age groups.

An inner city neighbourhood reveals new opportunities for re-inhabitation/enriched living environments in Irish towns and cities. A close reading of historic modes of living and existing city fabric reveals a range of untapped conditions and ways to expand existing living/working infrastructures, promoting long-term resilience of communities; a tool kit for ‘gardening’ our inherited plots and building stock in a process of pruning, grafting, and companion planting: a kind of urban horticulture.

At Finnish School of Kosovo, we believe that societal transformation begins with education and tackling environmental issues is one of the main factors. To help equip young people with the skills and competencies needed to turn the tide, we launched our #HoldTheRoll initiative, a month-long global campaign dedicated to activism and innovative ways in reducing waste from the smallest things, like toilet paper rolls.

“La mia Scuola è Differente! - Azione Scuola 2.0” and “EQUI 0-6” projects apply the methodology of participatory design as a tool to involve stakeholders of educational spaces in finding solutions to shared problems. Co-design implements design tools to activate interaction between the participants to make the educational offer more connected to the educating community through the redesign of shared spaces. The projects aim to create beautiful and sustainable educational spaces together!