EY Design Studio Philadelphia

EY Design Studio is comprised of hundreds of people across the Americas: Canada, United States, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, & Argentina. We all wanted to participate in HEART 17’s call for creative activism to promote the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), however all of our Studio locations were unique and different. So making a public art installation that would work at one Studio could not be easily replicated at other Studios. So we opted to empower one physical installation with our collective diverse voices through another physical component to compliment our painting.

When pedestrians would visit the window murals in Philadelphia, we hoped the art would provoke ideas about how to make the 17 SDGs a reality. What could I change? What could I do? What if…

So we decided to prompt “What if…?” to everyone in our Design Studio locations in the Americas. Through a simple online form, individuals responded with a thought, a hope, an idea as it related to one of the SDGs. We incorporated every one of these messages into the exhibit.

Through the help of Studio artisans in Philadelphia, these messages were handwritten on to individual ribbons and attached outside our Studio in front of the window with the 17 SDGs displayed. Pedestrians can learn about the goals and read messages from people in Canada all the way down to South America. We even color coded the ribbons to reflect the region they originated from.

"It's powerful to see our Design Studio community 'at a glance' through the various ribbon colors we selected to capture our individual intentions for the Heart 17 initiative. It's also engaging to see passersby selecting a ribbon and reading an intention from different country." — Travis

The final touch was to make this participatory for the local community. We added some white blank ribbons that simply read “What if…” allowing anyone with a permanent marker the ability to add a thought of their own.

"We received a huge response from studios across the Americas so transcribing these messages was no small feat! Some volunteers spent the entire day writing ribbons and many took on the added challenge of writing in a different language. Walking up to the railing, you'll hear the sound of over 100 ribbons floating in the breeze and you'll find wishes written in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English." — Nellie

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