S8E8: Nina Cooke John

Nina Cooke John is founder and principal of Studio Cooke John, and also teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Cooke John works on everything from residential spaces to public art projects to problems of urban strategy:

They talk about walking at night being this amazing experience, that as you wander through a city at night it’s meditative in a way because of the lights and it’s quiet and everyone should do this. But everyone can’t do this. Women wouldn’t even dream about doing that right after a certain hour. So how do we give women the access to this purportedly amazing experience by allowing them to walk freely at night?

She developed a combination of physical interventions (lights embedded in sidewalks) and digital ones (an app for communicating with other women) to make women feel safe and empowered:

In my research, much of what they said as well is that women are more likely actually to be attacked by people they know than people on the street. So a big part of it is just giving women the confidence to feel like they can walk at night.

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.