About

Stephanie Smith is a champion of alternative lifestyles and new forms of community. Her ideas have made her “one to watch” in the worlds of architecture, technology, art and culture. 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 companies and projects typically explore the ways in which alternative economies and physical/technological infrastructures combine to create new forms of community. Her ideas often blur the boundaries between the fringe and the mainstream. She’s currently blogging about new online/offline communities and why they matter at ‘Learning from FarmVille‘.

Smith has been featured in publications such as The New York Times and Dwell Magazine; and on ‘All Things Considered’/NPR (National Public Radio).

Her most recent company WeCommune is a technology platform, now in beta testing, that provides aggregated micro-communities the tools they need to share resources and build deeper, smarter forms of community. 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 Ecoshack, a design studio that began in Joshua Tree, California in 2003, and is now based in Los Angeles. Ecoshack became a manufacturer to produce its first shelter product, The Nomad Yurt, which has been featured in numerous blogs and publications, was named “the country’s best yurt” by Dwell magazine in 2007, and was nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt Peoples’ Design Award.

Ecoshack began as an experimental 7-acre design lab and fabrication facility, a place where architects, designers, artists and anyone else with a passion for change could design, build and hang out. Workshops, events and experiments in off-the-grid design, alternative culture and communal lifestyle continue on the Joshua Tree site today. Visit Ecoshack.com for more info.

Smith also spent seven years as a design, brand and management consultant, providing strategic advice and directional design concepts to companies small and large, including Motorola, Reebok, IKEA and The Coca-Cola Company. And she has conducted seminars for graduate students at the Architectural Association (AA) and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, and the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam.

She has also been a design instructor at SCI-Arc. Her most recent design studios explored ideas of collectivity and sustainability. Topics centered on the re-examination of forgotten or discredited architectural and urban polemics, and she and her students actively participated in alternative forms of community as part of their course work. 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 received her MArch degree in 1997. 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 Press in Great Leap Forward. 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.“