Adbusters Media Foundation has launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week, and Occupy Wall Street, and is known for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements. Additionally, it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine devoted to challenging consumerism.

Adbusters is a Canadian nonprofit media group and activist hub founded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in 1989. ​The foundation was born out of their belief that citizens do not have the same access to the information flows as corporations. One of the foundation’s key campaigns continues to be the Media Carta, a “movement to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In addition to their advertising work, the group publishes a high-quality, full-color magazine that is often a launching pad for campaigns. 

Adbusters has been an early adopter in using social media and digital tools, such as memes, to spread its message. It mobilizes its large “culture jammers network” by sending out calls to action over e-mail and on its Twitter and Facebook feeds, with the intent of countering the message saturation orchestrated by corporate and commercial forces. Through the creation of memes and “mind bombs,” Adbusters has inspired and popularized international protests like Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week. In a world saturated by consumerism, advertising, and political messaging, their work stands out as at once subtle, powerful, and necessary.

In mid-2011, Adbusters proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy, a growing disparity in wealth, and the absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis. They promoted the protest with a poster featuring a dancer atop Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull. On 13 July 2011, it was the staff at the magazine that created the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag on Twitter.

Having come about in protest of corporate dishonesty and ecological delinquency, today Adbusters treats everything from politics to pranks, consumerism to cosmology, aesthetics to activism as within its purview. Its uncompromising approach and distinct visual flair have made it known among designers as well as activists around the world. Currently, the team is attempting to wield their influence and experience to stave off extinction. 

We had an opportunity to speak with Kalle Lasn about ‘culture-jamming’ and political resistance on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

Model of Architecture Serving Society (MASS Design) is a Boston-based architectural practice focusing on advocacy, the education of the next generation of architects, and the impacts of architecture on human lives.

MASS works primarily in resource-limited settings. Each project begins with an immersive research period that identifies the broader needs of the community being served. This initial step ensures that the buildings MASS designs aren’t just beautiful and functional, but also that they amplify the needs of the community as well as the mission of the client. The driving belief behind MASS Design’s work is that architecture is not neutral; it either helps or hurts.  To acknowledge that architecture has this kind of agency and power is to acknowledge that buildings, and the industry that erects them, are as accountable for social injustices as they are capable of preventing them. 

MASS Design uses a sustainable nonprofit business model; by fundraising to cover costs, MASS has found a way to provide services outside of a traditional design practice, such as job training and research, while also helping small NGOs afford high-quality design.

The practice’s first project, the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, began when MASS co-founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks met Partners in Health executive director, Paul Farmer. He commissioned MASS to design the hospital, and they consulted with local healthcare workers, Partners in Health, and the Harvard Medical School faculty to ensure that their design layout optimized patient and staff flow while implementing standard infection-control strategies. The result opened in 2011. MASS continues to develop the site, adding a housing complex for doctors and a training center, among other buildings. MASS has also consulted with the Rwandan government to improve current regulations for health care structures.

At the international level, MASS has collaborated with the World Health Organization and USAID to create an online assessment tool and database to assist architects and healthcare professionals working in high-risk areas. In Rwanda, MASS has partnered with the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology to aid them in creating the country’s first professional school of architecture.

Today, MASS has worked in over a dozen countries on projects ranging from schools to community centers to the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which memorializes African American victims of lynching. Practice leaders have fostered public awareness of the way architecture can heal through lectures and talks.