The Glass-House Community Led Design Competitors

DESIGN FOR AMERICA (DFA), founded in 2008, is a pioneering social impact nonprofit training the next generation of social innovators. DFA is a network of college students, young professionals, alumni, educators, and partner organizations using DFA's award-winning curriculum to explore and address community challenges. DFA’s program of courageous change-making provides the structure and psychological safety people need to explore the problems they want to solve and the futures they want to create. Participants develop lifelong skills: sustained curiosity; systems thinking; comfort with ambiguity; collaborative problem-solving; real-world prototyping; and communications. Mission-aligned partners gain access to a robust student network of innovators, potential employees, and youth market voices while activating broader goals around employee and community engagement. After more than a decade of stable growth, DFA is poised to scale as it continues to expand its network of 90+ student-led studios at colleges/universities across the US, and increasingly abroad, while also expanding and diversifying its portfolio of project partnerships, sponsorships, and philanthropic support.

Design Council's purpose is to make life better by design. We are an independent charity and the UK Government's advisor on design. Our vision is a world where the role and value of design is recognised as a fundamental creator of value, enabling happier, healthier and safer lives for all. Through the power of design, we make better places, better products, better processes and better performance.

At Collective Architecture we have been working for over 25 years within various sectors including housing, civic and culture projects, community facilities, learning and enterprise buildings, conservation/retrofit work and strategic planning. Working with both public and private sector clients, we encompass a wide range of views and approaches to the practice of architecture and foster friendly and collaborative working environments. In addition to delivering a vast array of architectural projects, we have three specialist divisions - Energy, Strategy and Conservation. Collective Architecture is a 100% employee-owned architectural practice, currently over 50-strong, working across studios in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee. We shape buildings and spaces for, and with, everyone in society. We do this through our specialist skills, agility, and a participatory approach fused with empathy. We occupy, and enjoy, the creative space between idealism and pragmatism. Our approach and service aim to deliver socially responsible architecture by means of collegiate and collaborative practice, where the voices of communities and society are listened to and ideas shared. We value and foster people-centred design to create spaces and places that really work, bring meaning and pride, and that are loved and cared for by those who occupy them. We promote an emphasis on nurture and joy, prioritising people and their comfort, health, and social well-being. We think holistically of ways to best evolve to our new realities. To minimise our carbon creation, we believe in conservation, re-use and retrofit as first principals while ensuring the creation of new buildings are low-energy and low-carbon to tackle both the climate crisis and fuel poverty.