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Community Engagement | Social Justice | Fabrication | Environmental Justice | Speculative Design

Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer: a practitioner and an educator who builds community power through social and physical infrastructure to ensure people can shape their own spaces. She views the disciplines of design and the roles of designers as sites of continuous self-construction. Through her postdoc, Sophie is working with community members in San Lazaro to create Colorado-specific ecological communication devices, using tufted textiles to record narratives of climate and migration. This research combines quantitative and qualitative information to document the physical landscape and oral histories of the residents. 

Sophie’s practice draws on her training as an architectural and landscape designer, planner, and political organizer. This work integrates her experience in the built environment with writing, textile art, and graphic design. As a designer-organizer, her work builds spatial and social relationships. This often takes the form of collaboration—Sophie is a leader in the Design As Protest Collective (DAP), Dark Matter U (DMU), Seeding Pedagogies, and the partnership just practice. Multi-racial and liberation-oriented, her work with these collectives aims to infiltrate institutions to proliferate anti-racist design methods and research. 

Professionally, Sophie has developed media for the National Park Service in Nome, Alaska, worked as an urban designer for Agency Landscape + Planning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, researched and drafted for Oualalou + Choi in Paris, France, completed a design fellowship at LA-Más (now Office Of: Office) in Los Angeles, California and campaigned for the 2020 Biden/Harris Campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina. Sophie has a Master's in Landscape Architecture and a Master's in Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Dean’s Merit Scholar and a BFA and Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design.