Wallpaper* Design Award 2026 for Best Helping Hands goes to Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper of Stephen Burks Man Made, whose practice reshapes what a design studio can be. Living between Paris, Montana, Senegal, Alabama, the Democratic Republic of Congo and rural Japan, they embed themselves in local communities, sitting with quilters in Gee’s Bend or working with foresters in Yoshino. The aim, as Burks puts it, is to be ‘as close to making as possible’, using design as a conduit between worlds that rarely meet.
Their collaboration began at Harvard and deepened during the pandemic, when they started asking ‘what design could actually do’. That question reframed Stephen Burks Man Made, a long-running project that seeks to ‘bring the hand to industry’ by connecting artisans, manufacturers, non-profits and distributors. ‘Our goal is to believe in the possibility of trade, not aid,’ Burks says, ‘and to develop products that build upon capacity and move design in a new direction.’
Residencies now shape their work, from collaborating with contemporary Kuba makers in Kinshasa to pairing cedar ‘bodies’ with Kuba surfaces in Yoshino. ‘We make no distinction between art, design or exhibitions,’ Leiper says. What links their projects is a set of questions about who gets to participate in contemporary design, and how long-established techniques can evolve. They describe themselves as conduits, influencing ‘the systems of design that define who’s involved, what we’re making, how we’re making it, who benefits from it’, or, as Burks jokes, ‘the tube’.
For Burks, the lesson has been to keep resisting stasis – creatively, emotionally, structurally.
