About

Stephanie Smith is the Founder/CEO of WeCommune, a micro-community aggregator that helps users come together and share resources in ways that are in tune with our times. Harvard-trained 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 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 also founded Ecoshack, a design firm and manufacturer of light, portable structures, including the Nomad Yurt, which was featured in numerous blogs and publications and was nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt “People’s Design Award.”

LONG BIO:

Stephanie Smith is a Harvard-trained designer and entrepreneur. Smith’s companies and projects have spanned the worlds of architecture, art, technology, and culture. Her work typically explores the ways in which alternative economies and physical/technological infrastructures combine to create new forms of community. Smith’s ideas often blur the boundaries between the fringe and the mainstream. She’s currently blogging about new online 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 NPR (National Public Radio). The Whitney Museum recently identified her as the designer/entrepreneur most actively taking the ideas of Buckminster Fuller into the 21st century, and she spoke about her work there in 2008 as part of the Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe exhibition.

Her most recent company WeCommune has just launched. In phase one, WeCommune is a technology platform, now in early 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 an Ecoshack social design project called Wanna Start a Commune? and 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.

Before founding Ecoshack, Smith 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.

Smith 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.“