Meet the Minds That Are Hacking Our Surroundings for the Better

Rebuilding a war-torn country, making houses out of mud, and more.

Mar 17, 2016

By Good Is

March 17, 2016

Each year, GOOD celebrates 100 people from around the globe who are improving our world in creative and innovative ways—advocates, inventors, educators, creatives, business leaders and more who are speaking up, building things, campaigning for change, and ultimately refusing to accept the status quo.

In this section, meet 16 individuals reclaiming and reshaping spaces—urban, rural, figurative—to be more sustainable, inclusive, and safe.

Jeff Hebert Plots New Orleans’ Comeback

New Orleans

Few cities need Hebert’s job as much as his current employer, New Orleans. The Big Easy, which is still fighting to recover from massive devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, hired the urban planner as its first chief resilience officer near the end of 2014. This year, Hebert will begin implementing “Resilient New Orleans,” a strategy that prioritizes infrastructure, inequality, and adaptation.

Sally Duncan Protects Playtime

Addis Ababa

Ethiopian urbanization is uniquely concentrated in Addis Ababa, the only urban area with more than 300,000 people in a country of over 90 million. As the capital continues to grow, Duncan wants to expand and democratize its public play space. Her company, Out of the Box, designs children’s recreational areas for low-income, high-rise condominium communities. Its first “adventure playground” opens this spring.

María Claudia Lacouture Puts Colombia On the Map

Bogotá

As president of Colombia’s official promotional agency, ProColombia, Lacouture has tackled her country’s dangerous, drug-fueled reputation with digital-age ingenuity. Tourism has increased by more than 50 percent during her four-year tenure, now outpacing exported coffee as a source of foreign revenue. She’s also helping turn the country into an international hotbed for tech, leading campaigns to encourage Colombians to enter the sector.

Kelly Ward Brings a Pen to a Gunfight

Washington, D.C.

As general counsel for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Kelly Ward developed the “gun violence restraining order,” allowing California officials as of January to temporarily confiscate firearms from those deemed a clear and present danger. Next on Ward’s agenda is expanding similar legislation across the country.

Liz Alden Wily’s Land Rights Revolution

Leiden

Rogue political economist Liz Alden Wily has spent decades contesting legal systems that deny community-based land rights. Now she’s fighting to put 6 billion hectares back into the hands of indigenous communities whose land tenures predate the existence of a state. Last November, she helped launch LandMark, an interactive digital map that provides information on land tenure history as well as national land and resource laws. She also started the African Land Rights Transparency Index, a biannual report on rural land rights policies in various states. The report will expand to include 25 countries this year and the entire continent by the end of 2017.

ShamsArd Gets Crafty In Palestine

Ramallah

Danna Masad, Lina Saleh, Dima Khoury, and Rami Kasbari of Palestinian design studio ShamsArd champion local earthen building materials and affordable, sustainable architecture. But as Israel tightened its grip last year on imports into Gaza and the West Bank—draining Palestine’s supply of concrete and cement—ShamsArd became vital for a new reason: It offers design solutions based on construction materials Palestinians can reliably acquire. The five-year-old firm has worked on homes, hospitals, and community centers; it’s currently collaborating on 20 new playgrounds.

Autowale Decongests India’s Streets

Pune

With the world’s second highest number of traffic fatalities, India clearly has a congestion problem. Janardan Prasad and Mukesh Jha are attempting to alleviate that with Autowale, an app, website, and phone-in service that functions like Uber for auto-rickshaws. Autowale connects customers with drivers of India’s ubiquitous three-wheelers, which facilitate 20 percent of the country’s urban trips while occupy- ing just two percent of the road. The company now employs over 1,000 drivers—many of whom have increased their monthly salaries twofold with the steady work—and has served half-a-million customers. This year Autowale is testing hyperlocal food, grocery, and e-commerce deliveries.

Ravi Naidoo Nurtures Africa’s Creative Class

Cape Town

Few are more responsible than Naidoo, founder of renowned creative agency Interactive Africa, for turning Cape Town into an international design hub. The annual Design Indaba Festival he launched in 1995 brings together Africa’s foremost and emerging creatives to exhibit, network, and reimagine the continent.

Sarah Lidgus Crowns Community King

New York City

As founder of the urban inequality-focused creative studio Small City New York, designer Sarah Lidgus’s community-based design practice aims to make cities friendlier, specifically by engaging its inhabitants in the process. She speaks passionately about building lasting relationships, understanding a project’s political context, and accepting the community as the expert. Last year, Lidgus launched a community design school in Queens, produced an employee rights guide for nail salon workers, and led a community art project in the South Bronx.

Beth Stryker Gives Cairo a Facelift

Cairo

An architect, artist, and curator by trade, Beth Stryker co-founded CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) with architect/urbanist Omar Nagati in the Arab Spring’s aftermath, to foster urban research, architecture, art, and design initiatives. CLUSTER works to revitalize downtown Cairo, through long-term projects to reinvigorate the city’s passageways and rooftops as public space. The lab has also developed designs for a community park to integrate informal and formal neighborhoods, held participatory design workshops, and designed a model for urban eco-houses.

Thomas Granier’s Inspired Mud Masonry

Ganges

In sub-Saharan Africa—where desertification and deforestation are depleting natural timber resources and modern construc- tion materials can bankrupt families—20,000 people use or live in Thomas Granier’s “Nubian vault” homes, built with local, raw-earth bricks and based on methods invented over 3,000 years ago in Egypt. Formerly a mason’s apprentice, Granier co-founded the Nubian Vault Association in 2000 to reduce housing costs, battle climate change, and cultivate a new, smarter generation of West African masons. Last year, the organization expanded into its fourth and fifth countries, Benin and Ghana.

Sarah Drummond’s Pedal-Powered Movement

Glasgow

CycleHack started as an annual 48-hour event uniting citizens, government officials, and cycling agencies in cities around the world to prototype design solutions for cycling accessibility. It quickly grew into an online community sharing tricks year-round, like how to use a penny and rubberband to temp rarily makeshift a skirt into bike-friendly pants. This year, founder Sarah Drummond, proud owner of a blue racer named Lost Boy, is bringing the event to more than 70 cities and developing bike-friendly curriculum for schools.

Adib Dada Revives Polluted Rivers

Beirut

The Beirut River is more sludgy sewer than river, complete with rumors of a resident crocodile lurking in the muck. Adib Dada thinks he can clean it up. Using biomimicry techniques developed at theOtherDada, his architecture and design practice, Dada is attempting to rehabilitate the river and reintegrate it into Beirut’s natural ecosystem. He’s also rebuilding the city’s infrastructure around a more symbiotic relationship between nature and the built environment. The first stage, Beirut River 2.0, which addresses infrastructural decay and contamination in the most polluted neighborhoods, is currently under way.

Susannah Drake Soaks Up Pollutants

Brooklyn

Architect Susannah Drake’s DLANDstudio, a design firm that fuses landscape and architectural engineering, unveiled an ambitious proposal that fundamentally reimagined New York City’s oppositional relationship with water in 2010. Her vision starts to take shape when Gowanus Canal Sponge Park opens in Brooklyn this spring. Among other features, the park’s custom-engineered soil will absorb toxins and heavy metals from the canal’s heavily contaminated waters, which the EPA has estimated would take over $500 million to clean completely.

Carolina Osorio Fights Traffic with Formulas

Boston

There’s a good chance the next generation of urban transportation systems will run on algorithms developed by Carolina Osorio. The Bogotá-born civil and environmental engineer, currently an associate professor at MIT, builds real-time traffic management strategies and models derived from advanced math theory that use high-resolution urban mobility data collected on smartphones to reduce urban congestion. Simply put, your future commute is looking a whole lot nicer.

Facundo Guerra Revitalizes Sao Paulo Nightlife

São Paulo

Urban entrepreneur and nightlife architect Facundo Guerra injects culture and revelry into the areas of São Paulo that need it most. As one of the leading forces behind the city’s cultural resurgence, Guerra brings a forward-looking nostalgia to his transformation of run-down, seedy street corners into vibrant nightlife hotspots that rejuvenate, rather than replace, seasoned establishments. His revival of Riviera, a locally cherished bar that closed in 2006, and opening of Cine Joia, a 1950s cinema-turned-music-venue, have landed Guerra on the list of São Paulo’s most buzzworthy tastemakers.

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Photo credit: stomy/iStock via Getty Images – Many coffee shops today seem to be aesthetically divorced from time and place.

Culture, Design

Indie coffee shops are meant to counter corporate behemoths like Starbucks – so why do they all look the same?

The anti-chain cafe has quietly become its own chain look.

Good Partner

4/9/2026

Conrad Kickert

Jeffrey Parker

Kelly Gregg

Like many young, urban professionals, we run on coffee. We especially enjoy frequenting independently owned cafes that pride themselves on ethically sourced beverages, strong local ties and a hip aesthetic.

They’re the kinds of places that sneer at the homogenization and predictability of Tim Hortons, Second Cup, Dunkin and Starbucks.

But as public space and consumer culture researchers, we began noticing a pattern: While the invention of new, nondairy milks to mix into lattes continues to amaze us, many U.S. coffee shops seemed to share a similar aesthetic.

What was up with all the exposed brick? Why did so many of the baristas look cooler than us, but also so similar to one another? And why did most menus appear on a chalkboard, as if we were still in kindergarten?

Weren’t we supposed to be in one-of-a-kind, authentic settings that make us feel unique and, let’s admit it, slightly elevated?

As it turns out, the visual patterns we noticed had never been backed up by research. So after a quick cortado, we set out to test our hunch that local coffee shops had adopted a uniform aesthetic.

Measuring homogeneity

We asked over 100 American and Canadian young professionals living in cities to share an interior image of their favorite independent coffee shop, describe why they liked the shop’s appearance, and document aspects of its interior design.

They could select these interior design features from a list of 23 common elements that we had identified in a pilot study – brick walls, marble counters, indoor plants, local art, vintage furniture and even the look of the baristas. Respondents could also write down other details they noticed.

The elements that they selected and wrote down showed a fascinating overlap.

Baristas led the pack: Two-thirds of the participants’ favorite local coffee shops had staff with tattoos or piercings. Over half had baristas with beards. Well over half of the respondents noted that their favorite shop had chalkboards, reclaimed wood features, local art, milk foam designs on beverages, local event posters and exposed brick. A large share of the shops had vintage furniture, community message boards and free books available to patrons to read. One-third of the images had indoor plants, trees or greenery.

Chances are your favorite local coffee shop has a barista with a beard and tattoos. Wera Rodsawang/Moment via Getty Images

Next up, we challenged the participants to identify the city where these coffee shops were located.

Using the images provided by the respondents from the initial survey, we asked 158 new and prior participants if they could match the location of the shops depicted in six photographs to Cincinnati, St. Louis or Toronto – cities chosen for their different architectural and aesthetic qualities.

Not a single participant was able to correctly identify the correct city for all the photos.

We gave respondents another chance by showing two pictures of coffee shops, one at a time. This time, the two shops were located in Chicago and San Francisco – again, places that pride themselves on their unique and recognizable design culture. They were now given the choice of these key cities to select from, as well as three wrong cities. Only 6% successfully located both coffee shops, and nearly 20% immediately gave up.

As one participant conceded: “Honestly, these aesthetics are very transferable now … they were random guesses and they could have been in any of the cities mentioned.”

In other words, independent coffee shops in North America have become so similar aesthetically that their location cannot be picked from a lineup. The purportedly unique and local feel of coffee shops has instead been homogenized into a singular, palatable, North American aesthetic.

Ironically, these shops have narrowed their aesthetics like a de facto brand franchise – exactly like the chain stores that their patrons ostensibly reject.

Exposed brick, check. Plants, check. Chalkboard, check. Tara Moore/Digital Vision via Getty Images

Computers and capital

So why is this happening?

New Yorker cultural critic Kyle Chayka has attributed aesthetic homogenization to popular social media platforms like Instagram. He calls it the “tyranny of the algorithm”: Social media algorithms promote the visuals that users are most likely to engage with. This, in turn, causes the same types of visuals to be liked and shared, since users encounter them more often. Because the algorithm sees they’re popular, it continues to promote them, in a self-reinforcing cycle. In turn, coffee shop owners also see these online images and try to replicate them in their own establishments.

Artificial intelligence will likely accelerate the digital homogenization of visual culture, since AI models are trained on massive datasets that feature widely circulated images. Whether it’s popular fashion, architecture or interior design, idiosyncrasies are collapsing into a generic, hegemonic aesthetic – what scholars Roland Meyer and Jacob Birken call “platform realism.”

Finance plays a role as well. With the average cost of starting a new coffee shop between US$80,000 and $300,000, and with only a small share of coffee shops expected to stay open beyond five years, banks are keen to reduce their risk. Many of them will therefore ask aspiring coffee shop owners to opt for cheaper interior design choices that appeal to the broadest customer base.

The consumer also plays a role

But patrons of hip coffee shops may also be to blame.

Decades before the rise of social media, AI and financial risk management, scholars such as Sharon Zukin revealed how young urban professionals paradoxically embrace the homogenization of their environment in their quest for authenticity.

Those exposed brick walls? Zukin already described how Manhattan real estate brokers had marketed them to gentrifying SoHo yuppies in the early 1980s.

Like their predecessors, today’s hipsters, creative professionals and knowledge workers are essentially cultural and aesthetic consumers. Many of them crave visuals – from fashion to architecture – that are different enough to feel cool and authentic, yet safe enough to match their lifestyle and their social status. They want a tasty latte as much as a palatable interior to drink it in.

Businesses and developers are eager to appeal to these upwardly mobile consumers. At the same time, they want to reach the biggest number of customers. So they tend to create repeatable, homogenized environments in what Zukin describes as a “symbolic economy.”

In coffee shops, patrons want more than a good espresso. They want to immerse themselves in a “scene” that matches their lifestyle and aspirations. And the exposed brick and the vintage furniture do just that – even if they’ve been copy-and-pasted in cities, small and large, across the nation.

As we chase authenticity, we may just be finding comfort in carefully curated conformity.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Canva – An obvious overpack for travel.

Culture, Design

Overpackers love this simple ‘5-4-3-2-1’ packing rule that makes travel way easier

When it comes to travel, packing efficiently is a skill acquired through experience. Lifestyle and content creator Alison Lumbatis shares a helpful 5-4-3-2-1 method designed to take the stress out of packing for both seasoned travelers and first-timers. Trying to pack light while still remembering everything you need can feel a little daunting. A simple…

Mark Wales

3/11/2026
When it comes to travel, packing efficiently is a skill acquired through experience. Lifestyle and content creator Alison Lumbatis shares a helpful 5-4-3-2-1 method designed to take the stress out of packing for both seasoned travelers and first-timers.

Trying to pack light while still remembering everything you need can feel a little daunting. A simple trick is knowing exactly what’s necessary, making your bag lighter and more practical.

@alisonlumbatis
Calling all overpackers—this one’s for you! ✈️🧳 The 5-4-3-2-1 packing method is one of my favorites because it’s totally customizable. Prefer dresses? Swap a top and bottom for a dress. Love skirts? Sub them in for pants! These pieces should last you 1-2 weeks, depending on your access to laundry. 🔗’s to everything in bio! #outfitformulas #packinglight #styleconfidence #wardrobemadeeasy #travelcapsule #dailyoutfits #closetconfidence #vacationstyle #fashionover40 #smartstyle
♬ original sound – Alison Lumbatis

Putting The ‘5-4-3-2-1 Packing Method’ Into Action

In her trending TikTok post, Lumbatis shares a packing system she claims to be “as easy as it sounds.” Here are the basics of the 5-4-3-2-1 packing method:
- 5 TOPS
- 4 BOTTOMS
- 3 SHOES
- 2 LAYERS
- 1 MISCELLANEOUS
Lumbatis explains, “So all you got to do is pick out 5 tops, 4 coordinating bottoms, 3 pairs of shoes, 2 layering pieces, and 1 of anything else. Like a dress, pajamas, a hat, a belt, or any other accessories that you might need. And then of course pack as many undergarments and toiletries as you need.”

The strategy isn’t just about simplifying and maximizing the number of items you bring on a trip. It’s also about function. “The key is to pick versatile pieces that can mix and match so you can pair them up for whatever activities you have planned for your trip.”

Packing the necessary items
Photo credit Canva

Taking Pictures Can Help Plan Ahead

Another helpful step is taking photos of your outfits to remember how everything fits together. Lumbatis offers, “You can even take pictures of the outfits with you wearing them or flat lays of the pieces and keep them on your phone or in your Notes App — So you can refer back to it on your trip.”

Is the 5-4-3-2-1 packing method effective? These were some of the thoughts in the comments from readers hopeful to put the plan into action:

“Great tip for me. Hate packing and never wear all the clothes I bring.”

“Heading to Japan and I was just going to my closet to put it together. I overpack so this is sooo helpful.”

“I’m dreading how to not over pack for such a variety of occasions, heat, and limited washing facilities. Ugh.”

“I struggle with under packing so this is super helpful!”

Soaking up the adventure.
Photo credit Canva

The Science Behind Good Preparation

Traveling is a great way to alleviate the stress and burdens of our daily lives. A 2025 study in Springer Nature Link showed travel helped people improve their long-term resilience by creating positive emotions while ecouraging self reflection. National Geographic found the benefits of travel begin even before the trip begins.

However, preparation can have a powerful effect on the simple stresses a person might acquire during traveling. A 2025 study revealed that planning reduced anxiety and helped people prepare for delays or unexpected changes. Research in 2025 reported by AP News found that even making a simple checklist reduced anxiety and helped make for smoother trips.

Lumbatis claims, “If you struggle with overpacking and want to create a great capsule wardrobe packing list, you’ve got to try this method.”

People hope that traveling will relieve stress more than generate it. The 5-4-3-2-1 packing method offers a clear and simple way to pack just what you need. Careful preparation helps prevent last-minute chaos and produces a more enjoyable trip. Hopefully, this method can help you spend less time worrying and more time soaking in the adventure.

Watch this YouTube video on incredible vacation destinations to inspire your next trip:
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Photo credit: @bring_back_doors – Sadie has declared war on non-private hotel bathrooms.

Design

People are cheering woman’s refusal to accept the latest trend in hotel bathrooms

“I HATE how hotels started thinking going to the bathroom is a shared experience.”

Erik Barnes

10/30/2025

It can be frustrating seeing change for change’s sake in the world. To be more specific, changes that are said to be done in the name of innovation and design, but are in truth ways for companies to save a buck.
One example that is getting attention is the bathroom doors in hotels… or the lack thereof, actually. One TikToker has had enough and has taken it upon herself to save regular bathroom doors in hotels and to point out why open-space bathrooms and glass doors just don’t cut it.
On her @bring_back_doors TikTok account, Sadie has a collection of videos highlighting the flaws in hotel bathroom designs, with the most prominent being the lack of a regular door to the bathroom. In one viral TikTok, Sadie discussed a hotel that reached out to her, explaining that they have “foggy” glass doors to their bathroom to provide privacy. She was quick to point out that it still doesn’t provide adequate privacy. “Yes you can see through these,” Sadie said, adding that “glass doors do not close properly.”

@bring_back_doors
Hotel name: Alexander Hotel, Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands I need to be clear. Glass doors are not private. And making them foggy does not make them private. I am once again sitting here saying screw you to all bathroom doors that are not solid and close fully. And I am providing alternative hotels with guaranteed doors at bringbackdoors.com Check your hotels door situation before you book or risk your privacy. Door submitted by @mmargaridahb, DM me to submit your own bad doors. #bathroomdoors #hotel #travel #fyp Bathroom doors | bathroom design | hotel design | bad hotel design | travel fail | travel memories | travel inspo | door design | hotels with privacy
♬ original sound – Bring Back Bathroom Doors

The comments rallied behind Sadie’s bathroom-door crusade
The commenters joined in with Sadie, demanding the return of solid, closing, and lockable doors to bathrooms in hotels:
“I HATE how hotels started thinking going to the bathroom is a shared experience.”
“I hate how you can’t turn the bathroom light on without disturbing the other person in the room.”
“The foggy ones are almost worse, you just get a hazy fleshy silhouette hunched over on the crapper like some kind of sack of ham.”
“I just don’t get it, NOBODY wants this, even couples. I won’t be more likely to book two separate rooms for me and my friend/sibling/parent, I’ll just book another hotel.”
“Love this campaign, I do not want a romantic weekend listening to the other person poo.”

@bring_back_doors
Hotel Names⬇️⬇️ Citizen M South Hotel (first pics) and Fletcher Hotel (third pic) both in Amsterdam. As part of this project, I’ve been emailing hotels around the world to put together an easy to reference list for people to find hotels with guaranteed doors at BringBackDoors.com And I did notice that in Amsterdam a lot of hotels were saying they don’t have doors. It wasn’t the worst city (that honor goes to Barcelona, so far I’ve only found TWO that have said yes to all doors), but it was still bad. Then I went into the comments. And kept getting people mentioning these hotels in Amsterdam. And I realized that clearly the city has a designer or architect on the loose who has a thing for test tubes. It’s horrible. Luckily, I was able to find 6 hotels in Amsterdam that all have bathroom doors in every room and have them all listed on BringBackDoors.com These hotels were submitted by so many people I couldn’t name them all. But to submit your own bad hotel bathroom send me a DM with hotel photo, name, and location! #hotel #bathroom #hoteldesignfail Bathroom doors | hotel bathrooms | hotel privacy | no privacy | travel problems | hotel issues | travel | hotel design | hotel design fail | hotel designers | design fail | hotel concept | bathrooms | Citizen M | Hotel Fletcher | Hotels in Amsterdam | Visit Amsterdam | Amsterdam
♬ original sound – Bring Back Bathroom Doors

A great way to save a buck—er, I mean, ‘create a modern look’
As many commenters asked, why do hotels have glass doors — or, worse, no doors at all—in their bathrooms? Well, this has been a growing trend in modern hotels over the past decade as a means to create a sleek aesthetic and to allow glass partitions to bring more daylight into otherwise darker sections of the room.
At least that’s what’s being promoted to the customer. In reality, skimping on solid doors for glass ones or none at all gives the illusion that the room is bigger than it is while requiring fewer building materials. It does bring in more daylight, but mostly with the hope that you’ll cut down on electricity use for lights in an otherwise enclosed space. These reasons are also why some hotels don’t have solid walls around their bathroom areas at all.
TikTok · Bring Back Doors

TikTok u00b7 Bring Back Doors www.tiktok.com

Tired of the lack of privacy? Check out the database
To combat this trend, Sadie has developed a database at bringbackdoors.com for her and her followers to report which hotels have true, solid, private bathrooms in their accommodations and which ones do not, so people can properly plan where to stay and have true privacy during their most vulnerable moments.
“I get it, you can save on material costs and make the room feel bigger, but what about my dignity?,” Sadie wrote on her website. “I can’t save that, when you don’t include a bathroom door.”
Over time, the hope is that sanity and dignity can be restored as hotels realize that their glass “features” don’t have any real benefit when they don’t allow basic privacy.

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