MBB’s Jeffrey Murphy traveled to Malawi recently to oversee the UNICEF school furniture prototyping process, based on our team’s design. He met with the fabricators and visited schools that will be using the furniture that our office designed.

MBB Architects was selected from a diverse group of international designers to develop classroom furniture prototypes for UNICEF. Intended for deployment in Sub-Saharan schools in Africa, the furniture is the result of a wide-ranging investigation into the design, fabrication and use of school furniture around the world. The collaborative design process involved engaging educators, fabricators and children in Rwanda and Malawi as well as UNICEF teams in New York and Copenhagen to develop well-informed design solutions. The resulting furniture is locally fabricated, playful, durable and child-friendly, providing the comfort that enables thousands of children in UNICEF-sponsored schools to focus on learning.