Stephanie Smith

Stephanie Smith is a Harvard-trained design architect, social entrepreneur, technologist, published author, and inspiring speaker. She’s a pioneer and expert in new forms of community, how they work, and why they matter. In 2008 the Whitney Museum identified her as the designer/entrepreneur most actively taking the ideas of Buckminster Fuller into the 21st century. Smith's work focuses on the intersections between alternative forms of community, radical economics and social technologies. Her ideas often blur the boundaries between the fringe and the mainstream. She has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, GOOD and Dwell; and on ‘All Things Considered’/NPR (National Public Radio). As a social entrepreneur Smith has founded and run a handful of companies. Her most recent is the Hi-Desert Barnraisers, a Joshua Tree-based nonprofit exploring group barter as a format for community-building and positive change. Prior to the Barnraisers, Smith founded WeCommune, a funded technology startup focused on creating the online and offline tools we’ll need in order to share resources and build deeper, smarter forms of community in the 21st century. The company was founded on the principles E.F. Schumacher laid out in his seminal book ‘Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered’. WeCommune began as a social design project called Wanna Start a Commune?. In 2008 – 2009 WSAC triggered ‘Cul-de-Sac Communes‘ in Southern California and beyond. The project was featured on All Things Considered (NPR) in early 2009. Listen to the 5-min podcast. Smith is also the founder of the design studio Ecoshack. Its shelter product, The Nomad Yurt, was nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt Peoples’ Design Award. Other Ecoshack projects include ecovillages, beekeeper’s huts, tipis and tent cities. Ecoshack began as an experimental 7-acre design lab and fabrication facility in Joshua Tree, CA. Workshops, events and experiments in off-the-grid design, alternative culture and communal lifestyle continue on the site today. Smith has lectured widely, most recently at Harvard University, the Whitney Museum and Carnegie Mellon University. She is a critic at design schools including Harvard University Graduate School of Design, UCLA, and Art Center College of Design. And since 1998 she has been an occasional design instructor at SCI-Arc. Her most recent design studios explore ideas of fabrication, sustainability and alternative forms of community. Course titles include Instant City: A Manufactured Kit for a Temporary Community and Unplugged: An Off-the-grid Ecovillage for 20 Surfers. Smith was trained at Harvard under Rem Koolhaas and she was project leader of Koolhaas’s Harvard Project on the City in its first year. Her essay, “To Get Rich is Glorious,” about the transformation of China from a local to a global economy, then back again, was published by Taschen in ‘Great Leap Forward’ and was included in the international art fair documenta X. According to one critic, “Stephanie Smith’s diary of encountering the people and customs of the new, development-crazed Dongguan City in southern China, offers the compelling and evocative observation of a first-class novel.“