The Curry Stone Design Prize (CSDP) is awarded each year to honor innovative projects that use design to address pressing social justice issues. The Prize is supported by the Curry Stone Foundation.
Through the prize, CSDP seeks to highlight, honor, and reward projects that improve daily living conditions for ...
CSDP defines design broadly, including architectural, urban, landscape, product, and graphic design, as well as projects that incorporate design thinking. It believes that design has always been concerned with the built environment and the place of people within it, but that its application has too often limited its impact to narrow segments of society. CSDP hopes this prize can help designers and non-designers be inspired to apply design approaches in improving community vitality around the globe.
The number of winners varies each year as does the amount of the financial award. A typical single winner is awarded US$100,000. There are no restrictions on the use of the grant. The winning projects emerge from a wide pool of nominations, which are selected by a rotating team of approximately 200 contemporary design leaders from across the world. Selection is via a jury process, with the jury composed of Foundation members and invited international experts. Unsolicited proposals are not accepted.
This year, in honor of CSDP's 10th anniversary, it has assembled a group of 100 of the most compelling social design practitioners of the last decade. It calls this project The Social Design Circle. These are practices which have captivated and inspired CSDP over the years, as it has built a global community of visionaries, activists and game changers. Each Circle member will receive an honorarium and an award, and as the year progresses, CSDP will be highlighting their practices on its website.
A limited number of Circle members will be featured on CSDP's new podcast Social Design Insights. Hosted by Eric Cesal and Emiliano Gandolfi, the weekly podcast will tackle the toughest questions facing social designers, and it will talk with Circle members hailing from all over the world about how they make change in their communities.
Curry Stone Design Prize Team
Andre Almeida He is CEO and Publisher Diário do Sudoeste (newspaper) and Vanilla Magazine, member of the board of directors of the bank Sicoob, member of the board of directos of the ADI (Paraná State Association of Daily Newspapers) former president of Pato Branco Development Forum, former president of Pato Branco Chamber of Commerce. Andreis a member of the Curry Stone Foundation board. He is a law graduate who attended 4 years of medical school. In his spare time he rides bicycles.
Diana Bianchini is the founder and Director of PR & creative strategy firm Di Moda Public Relations. She is in charge of public relations for the Curry Stone Design Prize.
Eric Cesal is a designer, writer, and noted post-disaster expert, having led on-the-ground reconstruction programs after the Haiti earthquake, the Great East Japan Tsunami, and Superstorm Sandy. Cesal's formal training is as an architect, with international development, economics and foreign policy among his areas of expertise.
He has been called "Architecture's First Responder" by The Daily Beast for his work leading Architecture for Humanity's post-disaster programs from 2010 to 2014. Cesal has served as a juror for various design awards and frequently lectures globally on disaster reconstruction and resilience.
Cesal is also widely known for his book, Down Detour Road, An Architect in Search of Practice (MIT Press, 2010) which sought to connect architecture's chronic economic misfortunes with its failure to prioritize urgent social issues. Cesal is currently working on a new book about how foreign and economic policies of the developed nations incite and aggravate the conditions which lead to catastrophic disasters.
He currently works as the Weaver of all Webs for the Curry Stone Design Prize. Cesal co-hosts Social Design Insights, the weekly podcast series that interviews the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field of socially responsible design and architecture.
Clifford Curry is a cofounder of the Curry Stone Foundation and the Curry Stone Design Prize. He is an architect and planner. Curry has been a partner of the retirement housing industry pioneer William Colson, which built over 40,000 units in senior-living communities across the United States, Canada, and England. Curry serves on the board of the AIA Foundation.
Gary Feuerstein is a board member of the Curry Stone Foundation. He is a mechanical, electrical, and structural engineer. He started and ran a successful private engineering firm. In the past decade he worked for the US Department of State as Facilities Manager for the embassies in Morocco, Iraq, and China.
Emiliano Gandolfi is the Director of the Curry Stone Design Prize, as well as an architect and independent curator, and co-founder of the non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial development Cohabitation Strategies. Gandolfi is also the co-host of Social Design Insights, a weekly podcast series that interviews leading practitioners and thinkers in the field of socially responsible design and architecture.
Terrie Kolodzie, RN, BSN, MS, is a public health consultant. Her current projects focus on tuberculosis vaccine development and healthcare worker advocacy in China. Her previous positions include clinical research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Terrie has managed a broad range of public health and personal medical services projects. She received her nursing degree from Johns Hopkins University. Terrie advises and acts as an internal facilitator to the Prize and Foundation.
Rahul Mehrotra is Professor of Urban Design and Planning at Harvard University. He is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. His firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 in Mumbai and has designed and executed projects for clients that include government and non-governmental agencies, corporate as well as private individuals and institutions. The firm has designed a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bangalore, a campus for Magic Bus (a NGO that works with poor children), the restoration of the Chowmahalla Palace in Hyderabad, and with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative, a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal. The firm is currently working on a social housing project for 100 elephants and their caretakers in Jaipur as well as a corporate office in Hyderabad and several single family houses in different parts of India. Rahul is an advisor to the Curry Stone Design Prize.
Sandhya Naidu is an architect working on slum development in Mumbai with the Curry Stone Foundation. She formerly worked in Singapore as a design associate. Sandhya spent half a decade with Architecture for Humanity, on various design, business development, operations, and lean innovation interventions with a focus on community-led design particularly on projects related to education and healthcare in poor communities. She has worked across Asia, Africa, North America, including having helped set up a design office in Haiti to address post-disaster reconstruction work after the 2010 earthquake.
Sandhya is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York City; and the architecture program at RV College of Engineering in Bangalore, India. She is a TED Fellow, has been nominated for the Yale World Fellows Program, and served on the jury for the Nathaniel A. Owings Award.
Donna Read is the Curry Stone Design Prize video advisor, editor, and producer. She started her career in Montreal, on the Canadian Film Board. Her past films include The Women and Spirituality Trilogy and Permaculture: The Growing Edge.
Kim Saunders is a futurist with cross-industry success helping bring innovations into reality. Her career in high tech includes over 20 years as a senior leader at Microsoft Corporation. She is the founder of Farmhouse Cottages LLC, a real estate development firm focusing on Five-Star Built Green communities. Kim also wrote the libretto to Newton's Cradle, a new musical premiering at the 2016 New York Musical Festival. Kim is an advisor to the Curry Stone Design Prize.
Dr. Louisa Silva is a physician and researcher specialized in Chinese Medicine and Public Health. Her research concerns the cause and treatment of children with autism. She has published many studies demonstrating loss of the sense of touch in autism, and done controlled studies showing loss can be effectively treated with a daily 15-minute massage, delivered by the parents. As touch returns to normal, children recover from autism. See www.qsti.org. Louisa is a member of the Curry Stone Foundation board.
Delight Stone is a cofounder of the Curry Stone Foundation and the Curry Stone Design Prize. Delight holds an international MBA, an MA, and a PhD in historical archaeology, and has worked in business for three plus decades. She also cofounded and served for 15 years on the board of La Clinica Medical de la Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Salem, Oregon and spent a decade preventing a copper mine development in her watershed.
Taryn Turner is the Director of the Curry Stone Foundation.