About Stephen Burks Man Made

Partners Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks have forged a unique path by embracing the challenge to advocate for hand production as a strategy for innovation. Their holistic approach transcends the singular definitions of art, architecture, and design in favor of a hybrid synthesis of craft, community, and industry. With solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Stephen Burks: Man Made (March 31 - June 26, 2011), the High Museum of Art, Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (September 16, 2022 - March 5, 2023), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (November 19. 2023 - April 16, 2024), they have distinguished themselves through socially engaged partnerships that contribute to a more inclusive and pluralistic vision of design. Since 2024, their nomadic practice has taken them around the world as artists-in-residence in Senegal with the Albers Foundation, Montana with the Archie Bray Foundation, and Japan with Space Un Tokyo where they opened the transcultural exhibition Kuba Sugi (September 6 - October 26, 2025). Most recently, as co-curators of the US Pavilion exhibition PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity (May 10 - November 23, 2025) at the 2025 Architecture Biennale in Venice, they presented their groundbreaking contribution Objects of Belonging.

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Stephen Burks

Stephen Burks is an acclaimed industrial designer, product development consultant, and educator whose innovative approach to design synthesizes craft, community, and industry. Independently and through association with various non-profits, he has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in over twenty countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary design.

Stephen and his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made, have been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation to express a more pluralistic vision of design including BD Barcelona, Cappellini, Dedar, Dedon, MASS Design Group, Missoni, & Roche Bobois.

He has been visiting faculty and a strategic consultant to academic institutions around the globe and taught architecture and design at Berea College, Columbia University GSAPP, ECAL, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Stephen received a Bachelor of Science in Design from the Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus) at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation. He is the only African-American to win the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Product Design and the only industrial designer to be awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Stephen Burks Man Made takes its name from the studio’s eponymous solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011.

Malika Leiper

Malika Leiper is a multidisciplinary designer whose creative practice bridges art, architecture, and urbanism. Born and raised in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Leiper’s upbringing during a period of post-conflict reconstruction and rapid urbanization deeply influenced her focus on cultural conservation and economic transformation through design.

As a young adult, she moved to New York to attend Columbia University, where she earned her BA in History and Creative Writing. Upon graduation, she began a five-year career in the culinary arts as a chef at the beloved West Village restaurant Buvette. Recognizing the socio-spatial dimension of the city through its restaurants led her to pursue a Master in Urban Planning degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2020, she joined renowned studio Stephen Burks Man Made as Cultural Director and later, partner.

Leiper has also contributed as an author to design publications like The Architects Newspaper, Disegno, and Domus writing on topics such as post-colonial modernism, the decolonization of museum practices, and how design can extend craft traditions into the future.

A Design Manifesto for the 21st Century

The 20th century model of designer as singular auteur operating in isolation from society must change. In this age of converging global crises – rising global temperatures, mass displacement, and extreme income inequality – designers must do more than give form to objects of desire and consumption. Designers must work collaboratively within communities, between disciplines and across social spectrums to define global problems and implement local solutions.

Design is a western concept whose mass-market output is currently controlled by a very small percentage of the global population. Using a value system that attempts to dictate taste and control the market from a position of Eurocentric bias and economic exclusivity, those in the dominant position of the Minority World produce products that bypass the majority of people on Earth or contribute negatively to their well-being through waste and exploitation.

Beyond attempts at cultural sampling for luxury consumers following trends, how can the other 90% of the globe – the Majority World – participate in shaping the future? How do we find new ways to incorporate alternative narratives and possibilities for how we imagine, use, and make design?

Designers of the 21st century must build bridges between the Majority and Minority world. The system of design and designers must find new voices, new modes of operating, and new tools for fabricating. If the future of design is to be pluralistic and inclusive of all cultural perspectives, then the designer of the 21st century must act as a conduit through which ideas flow. This begins by acknowledging that everyone is capable of design. And that everyone should have access to the potential for social and economic transformation that design unlocks.

Design education, professional practice, and technology have the potential to drive economic transformation from the ground up by sharing knowledge, creating opportunities, fostering jobs and laying the foundation for the long-lasting infrastructure that can make a real difference as populations shift from rural to urban, traditional to modern. Yet, modernity is not a one-size-fits-all condition and designers of the 21st century must define alternative forms of progress derived from within rather than imposed upon communities.

Indeed, how we translate and adopt traditional and indigenous ways of knowing into design practices and principles for the future may well be our salvation. If working with artisanal communities gets us closer to the act of making, how can we as designers create more room for innovation? If the future of craft is technology, then the future of technology must support craft. When does the age-old wisdom of making from the so-called developing world meet the knowledge of data from the so-called developed world to truly improve people’s lives by design?

Our goal is to integrate hand techniques into industrial manufacturing in order to shift the perception of craft towards necessity and extend craft traditions into the future through a more symbiotic relationship with diverse communities within the built environment and the objects that define us. By doing so, we believe design can serve as a tool for realizing all the world’s futures and not just a privileged few.