Design & Solidarit explores the power of design, art, and architecture in shaping emergent forms of mutualism, fulfilling their promise of solidarity, and ensuring that these values endure. The book emerges from the conversations led by the book’s authors—architect Rafi Segal (Massachusetts Insitute of Technology) and artist Marisa Morán Jahn (Parsons/The New School)—dialoguing with leading thinkers including social movement leader Ai-jen Poo, political philosopher Michael Hardt, platform cooperatives founding codirector Trebor Scholz, design anthropologist Arturo Escobar, economist and Africana scholar Jessica Gordon Nembhard, futurist Greg Lindsay, and entrepreneur Mercedes Bidart.

Marisa Morán Jahn is an artist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent whose work “exemplifies the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum) and explores “civic spaces and the radical art of play” (The Chicago Tribune). Working across media and scales, Jahn directly engages new immigrant families and low-wage workers—and millions more via Tribeca Film Festival, United Nations, Obama’s White House, The Guggenheim Museum, The New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and international media (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Univision Global, BBC, CNN). Jahn is a senior researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (her alma mater) and director of integrated design at Parsons/The New School.

Rafi Segal is an architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work involves design and research on the architectural, urban and regional scale, currently focused on how emerging notions of collectivity can impact the design of buildings and cities. His current ongoing work includes designs for new communal neighborhoods in Israel, Boston, Rwanda, and the Philippines. Segal directs Future Urban Collectives, a new design-research lab at MIT that explores the relation between digital platforms and physical communities asking how architecture and urbanism can support and scale cohabitation, coproduction, and coexistence. Segal has exhibited his work at venues including Storefront for Art and Architecture; KunstWerk, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Venice Biennale of Architecture; Museum of Modern Art; and the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and a MSc and BArch from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. After coteaching several courses at MIT starting in 2018, Jahn and Segal began collaborating on projects that scale from art, architecture, and urbanism. They cofounded Carehaus, the US’s first care-based cohousing project; cocreated the HOOPcycle (think MesoAmerican basketball meets tricycle), and with an international team won a competition to transform a former brick factory in Prishtina, Kosovo into an art and technology district. Both Jahn and Segal’s works are represented by Sapar Contemporary.