Our mission is to make high quality education accessible to all students through powerful and sustainable design.
BloomBox 2.0 Opening Ceremony | Mulanje, Southeast Malawi, 2022
BloomBox Design Labs is dedicated to the application of sustainable design strategies, materials, and energy to advancing access to high quality education, innovative entrepreneurism, and development in low resource, rural, and remote environments. Many of these environments represent emerging populations and markets with vast human potential and unmet needs for infrastructure for education, commerce and housing. Conventional methods of construction and energy distribution are unable to keep pace with population needs for infrastructure and for participation in the ideas economy. BloomBox Design Labs Inc. employs modular and configurable strategies to scale access to educational and general infrastructure and to provide sustainable energy to growing communities. This includes the upcycling of shipping containers as well as custom made retractable structures, application of solar power, precision design of indoor/outdoor spaces for specific and adaptable uses, local production, sourcing, supply chains, and employment. Modularity, transportability, and retractability of the built infrastructure to address dynamic needs and security, are key features of design. Customers, including schools, businesses, housing developers, and governments would access design, architecture, supply chain, and logistics experience in the creation of human centered infrastructure.
Sofie Roux | Engineering, Architecture and Design Student | Stanford University
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BloomBox Design Labs is a public benefit corporation that was started by Sofie Roux, a student with a lifelong fascination with education and a deep commitment to sharing her own educational experiences with other students. Her work began when she was in primary school with fundraising efforts, primarily through sales of her art, that raised close to $450,000 in support of girls’ education initiatives in Malawi and South Africa, including the installation of fresh water wells in rural communities, local production of sanitary pads to improve school participation of secondary school students, and the installation and maintenance of a computer lab in a children’s home. Sofie’s passion for girls’ education sparked an interest in architecture and design as a means to build and scale beautiful and sustainable infrastructure that includes and engages students of all backgrounds in high quality education, particularly in STEAM fields. To date, she has led a brilliant and talented team in the design and installation of 3 state of the art computer learning labs in urban and rural educational environments, as well as in a refugee camp, in Malawi. These labs have brought electricity and education technology to off grid communities for the first time, and have transformed the educational experiences of thousands of students. Sofie has had the privilege of working closely with the Malawi Ministry of Education and the UN High Commissioner on Refugees in the installation of these labs, and is ready to scale them across Malawi and beyond.
To date, BloomBoxes have been funded through sales of
Sparkly and Smart art - a whimsical social enterprise for girls' education.
