At Next City, I enlisted Quilian Riano of DSGN AGNC and Next City's creative director Anthony Smyrski to design a pavilion for the World Urban Forum called “Innovative Americas." Local partners Proyecto NN helped to source local materials and build the pavilion on site.

“Exhibition booths are often anonymous spaces with little potential for meaningful interaction,” Riano writes in a blog post explaining the modular space’s structure. “The Innovative Americas booth is designed to facilitate discussion and questioning through flexible elements that allow multiple uses.”

Posters, for instance, are replaced with “cubes that can be taken out of their frame, examined and used as seating.” Depending on how you flip the features, it can be a bleacher, chalkboard or bookshelf.