Good Interventions is an annual exhibition of intangible design projects that address the pressing issues of our time by bringing together the power of design and social sciences. For its fourth edition, fifteen projects have been selected to be exhibited. The program is organized by the School of Design Strategies and will take place in its permanent exhibition as a portal in the Platform of Design Strategies.
Designers: Alison Thomson | Andrea Wollensak | Azra Sungu | Bilge Merve Aktas | Cem Caliskan | Chuman Rachel Zhang | Diya Basu-Sen | Deborah Swinglehurst | Ece Günesen | Ethan Hoppin | Irem Tekogul | Ishita Bhardwaj | Katja Novak | Mariam Mamaladze | Mariam Mohammedamin Abdul Malek | Nina Fudge | Oriola Omololu | Parisa Mehta | Rachel Barnard | Scheepers Simon | Shemona Singh | Simone De Vivo | Shuruthi Saravanan | Srividhya S | Susanti Vijaykumar | Timo Vreux-Gerbier | Vaibhav Kapri | Yaman Çiçek | Yoon Jungmin
Asking for Her Wool is a speculative multispecies wool-based textile manufacturing model. It prioritizes the needs of the material resource, namely sheep, rather than the end-user, the human. In this model, the end-user temporarily lives on a farm with sheep they are matched with and learns the sheep’s way of being. They interact daily and live as partners to co-produce wool. When the time comes, the material is collected and used to produce textiles. This project challenges the long-established practice of humans instrumentalizing other beings for their own favor to control the nonhuman world at the expense of destroying the world. By bringing nonhumans toward the center of human-made systems it promotes coexistence over domination and exploitation.
Our body leaks different fluids, menstrual blood, pee, and vaginal discharge. These fluids have the property that it is not controllable, and it is involuntary. I want to show how the three body leaking objects inspired by these three types of body fluids reveal the data we leak, and in the end, how the exhibit itself makes it explicit that data brokers are always watching us and selling our data to manipulate our behavior. I gave three examples through these three objects on what it means to share data. In the following, I present three explorations on three body leaking objects and how these three explorations in an exhibition relate to our daily lives in terms of data.
Citizen science usually asks citizens to collect data and stops there. Who frames the question, who interprets the results, who benefits: that stays with institutions. We propose a co-design toolkit that intervenes earlier, before an app or protocol exists, to redistribute that authority and expertise. Three components of the toolkit — scenarios, reflection prompts, and field-tested tactics — push designers and researchers past "how do we get citizens to collect data" toward designing for meaningful participation and ground-up engagement. Piloted with 25 participants, it moved teams from treating "the community" as a data source to designing toward governance itself.
Settling in New York City is an expensive, often punishing process, and immigrant families frequently struggle to afford common necessities like furniture and electronics to live comfortably. That is why Furnishare was developed: a privacy-protecting nonprofit network that collects pre-owned necessities and donates them to immigrants in need. Through a simple four-step process, donors post items, requesters claim them, the admin team contacts the requester, and Furnishare's team coordinates delivery. Founded by a high school student from an immigrant family, Furnishare aims to ease the cruel quality of life that the city's affordability crisis imposes on immigrants, who make up 38% of New York's population.
Homelessness in New York City is rising, and social workers stand on the frontline trying to meet a need that keeps growing. Yet the systems meant to support them are full of gaps - outdated tools, administrative overload, and little room left for the human connection that drew them to this work. Through 100+ hours of research, interviews, and field collaboration with The Bowery Mission, we uncovered these gaps firsthand. In response, we built Haven: a tool created with social workers, for social workers, that offloads documentation so frontline workers can reinvest their time and energy into the people they serve.
Kroglabbet explores how restaurants can become more accessible through co-design with people with visual impairments, disability rights organisations and hospitality businesses in Gothenburg, Sweden. Developed as an embedded and participatory design project, it investigates how exclusion emerges through menus, communication systems, staff routines, and spatial environments. Rather than proposing a single solution, Kroglabbet intervenes across multiple layers of restaurant infrastructure through accessible menus and websites, staff training tools, and guide dog communication campaigns developed, tested, and implemented in collaboration with local cafés and restaurants to support autonomy and participation in restaurant environments.
Older people in the UK increasingly take ten or more medicines daily, a global patient safety crisis called polypharmacy. After five years of ethnographic research in surgeries, pharmacies and homes, we found that even medication reviews rarely resulted in stopping medicines. The problem was not missing information: it was the conditions of the conversation itself. Strikingly, when older people joined our co-design workshops to reimagine the medication review, even they, with full creative licence, could not bring themselves to stop medicines in fiction. In response, we crafted seven fictional short stories to open up the conversations that remain otherwise impossible to have.
Developed during a 2023–2024 Fulbright residency in Tallinn, Estonia, "Mapping Your Journey" is a community project addressing Ukrainian youth displacement. The initiative fostered collaboration between the Estonian Refugee Council, the Ukrainian Cultural Center, the Estonian Academy of Arts, and local schools. Created by artist Andrea Wollensak and poet Katja Novak, the project brought Estonian and Ukrainian refugee students together for creative writing workshops. Utilizing a specialized creative writing toolkit created for these sessions, participants translated their physical paths, memories, and observations into precise, vivid poetry.
The project aims to process lived trauma, find common ground, and strengthen community bonds. It culminates in a collective video-text poem and an open-access educator toolkit designed to facilitate digital storytelling and amplify refugee narratives.
NachbarSchafft is an intangible design intervention located in Lucerne’s hyper-diverse BaBeL district, an area home to over 80 nationalities often stigmatized as a “problem zone.” Operating from a low-threshold physical space, the project challenges this deficit-based narrative by treating social relations as design material. Through a living "Relational Archive," it maps and connects neighborhood needs and offers to facilitate horizontal, non-transactional mutual aid. The project's intent is to transform diversity from a divider into a shared practice of resourcefulness, building community self-efficacy and long-term urban resilience.
The Sapna Rannaghor (Dream Kitchen) Cookbook project is a community-led, strength-based collective reimagining English language learning for adult immigrants in New York City. Beginning as a bilingual community cookbook with 30 Bangladeshi immigrant women in ESOL classes at Sapna NYC in the Bronx, the project has grown into an ecosystem of interventions including educator tools, digital recipe compilations, and a learning collective spanning three institutions and 140 learners. Rooted in translanguaging principles and co-created with community members, Sapna Rannaghor embeds English practice within learners' existing cultural routines and daily lives, showing that when education honors the complexities of immigrant identities, language learning becomes an act of belonging.
SeedLoop is a farmer-owned digital cooperative addressing why small organic farmers in Ireland's Midwest Biodistrict cannot reuse the genetic resources their own farms produce. Every season, locally-saved seed is discarded for imported certified seed, breaking a viable reuse loop. SeedLoop lets farmers list, exchange, and trace locally-saved seed while building a shared knowledge commons, closing this loop before Ireland's 2036 EU derogation deadline removes the current fallback entirely. Grounded in stakeholder research and Caliskan's DARN framework, SeedLoop treats seed not as compliance risk but as a tradeable cooperative resource.
Signal in the Noise is a design intervention that addresses how flood emergency communication systems fail to reach deaf and hard of hearing residents. Existing warning infrastructure relies entirely on hearing, leaving a documented gap with no accessible alternative. The project responds to this through three connected interventions: a Special Needs Registry awareness flyer, a flood preparedness kit that consolidates scattered resources and existing alert services into one accessible guide, and FloodSafe, an AR navigation app for real-time evacuation support. Together, they move residents who are deaf and hard of hearing from unaware to prepared and to safely evacuated.
Tasting Tomorrow explores how design can intervene in the way people experience climate change. Drawing on environmental datasets and ecological research, the project translates scientific evidence into speculative organisms and immersive encounters. Instead of asking audiences to interpret abstract information, it invites them to observe, question, and imagine possible biological futures. Through this shift from data to lived experience, Tasting Tomorrow reframes climate communication as an embodied, emotional, and participatory intervention that fosters deeper public engagement with environmental change.
The Convenience Store is a narrative game that exposes the hidden cost of convenience by translating manipulative Indian quick-commerce platform interactions into a physical supermarket.
Removing the digital interface of these platforms, it reveals the design tactics that often go unnoticed online, inviting players to reflect on how convenience shapes their decisions and normalises compromises around their ideals of dignity. Rather than relying on awareness through information, the project uses play as an intervention, making these everyday trade-offs tangible and difficult to ignore.
Self-tracking frames the female body as a resource to be optimised, promising legibility through wearables. Yet these systems are technically ambiguous, built on datasets not designed for women. The result is a quiet erosion of interoception, as an app's readiness score feels more trustworthy than one's own internal state.
Grounded in poetic computation, this project deliberately uses ambiguity to return interpretive authority to the individual. The outcome is a family of two objects: Umbra, a health data display that renders biosignals as evolving glyphs, and Sibyl, a satellite object that offers questions instead of answers. Together, they propose a practice of self-cryptography for attunement.
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
To receive updates about public programs and events at The New School, subscribe to our mailing list. Visit our Livestream and YouTube channels to watch select events live and recorded.
