MASS Design Group
We believe that every scale of design offers opportunities to benefit its users, makers, and the environment.
MASS Design Group is an architecture and design studio based in Kigali, Rwanda and Boston, MA. We design innovative buildings and products that improve people’s lives; and leverage inclusive engagement and fabrication processes to become engines for better health, justice, equity, and long-term sustainability.
Our team includes 250+ architects, builders, engineers, product designers, filmmakers, and researchers representing 20 countries across the globe.
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We believe everyone deserves good design. Good design is beautiful and just. It is essential to delivering human rights, essential services, and the spaces that will build a better world.
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Being climate positive is an imperative. Our projects strive for not only efficient operation, but the design of the entire supply chain to be sustainable, resilient, and regenerative.
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Looking at the design and fabrication process holistically—from material extraction to assembly and operation—ensures we have safe and equitable labor practices.
MASS.Made
By extending our commitment to local fabrication to the furniture scale, we are making sustainable products that benefit both people and the planet.
MASS.Made, our furniture design studio, emerged through MASS’s work on the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA), a project so connected to place, landscape, and sustainability that it seemed unjust to fill it with imported products. In 2018, we began applying the local fabrication approach that we have taken with our buildings for over a decade to make beautiful furniture products in Rwanda that are tailored to Rwanda. At the root of this approach was a bold ambition: to leverage the design and production of furniture to advance sustainable development in East Africa.
Design is led by our in-house team of product and interior designers, and fabricated in collaboration with our network of artisans. To date, we have developed 32 furniture collections and furnished over 21,000m2 of space, including the campuses of RICA, Norrsken Kigali House, and The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Fund.