MAS Context is a quarterly journal that addresses issues affecting the urban context. Each issue delivers a comprehensive and critical view of a single topic through the active participation of people from different fields and perspectives who, together, instigate the debate over urban issues that affect the way we live and design. MAS Context shares the most remarkable design ideas and work with the public. It is produced by designers for people interested in the future of the place where they live. It embraces collaboration, explores new formats of distribution, and thinks in a critical way about the issues that affect how we live. And at the same time, it works to generate a collaborative culture of design in the city where it is produced, Chicago.

Iker Gil is an architect, editor-in-chief of the design journal MAS Context, director of MAS Studio, and co-director of the Chicago Expander program at Archeworks. He is the editor of the book Shanghai Transforming (Actar, 2008), and curator of the exhibitions Shanghai Transforming and Synchronizing Geometry. His project Inside Marina City, produced with photographer Andreas E. G. Larsson, was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, pinkcomma gallery in Boston, and WUHO in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the 2010 Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club, as well as grant support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Gil is licensed as an architect in Spain and obtained his MArch from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Barcelona.

Andrew Clark, contributing editor, is the director of Bruce Mau Design, Los Angeles. He's focused on building a talented studio working on brand, visual identity, communications, and environmental projects. Currently, he and the design team are driving the brand design and touch-points for Sonos. Prior to Bruce Mau Design, Clark was an experience designer at MINMAL focusing on brand and C\communication design for clients, start-ups and entrepreneurial projects. He also was art director for all brand touch-points including packaging, web, and social communications for MNML's self-started brand LUNATIK. Andrew previously worked at Bruce Mau Design in Toronto and Chicago.

Julie Michiels, contributing editor, is a licensed architect at Perkins + Will, and works in their interiors department. She is also a collaborator at the design office MAS Studio, where she has participated in award-winning entries to international competitions such as Cut. Join. Play, which will be exhibited in the official U.S. Pavilion at the Thirteenth International Venice Architecture Biennale.

Michelle Benoit, contributing editor, is a designer and researcher interested in exploring the intersections between architectural history and current architectural practice. Recent projects include working in rural Rwanda with MASS Design Group and investigating urban redevelopment programs in Istanbul. She especially enjoys discovering the personal aspect of architecture through documenting buildings and the people who inhabit them.

Paul Mougey, editor, helps companies tell better stories. A writer and brand strategist living in Chicago, he started out in the film world, working in New York for the director Martin Scorsese. Who better to mentor the art of storytelling? Mougey has created winning and persuasive narratives for Coca-Cola, Samsung, Daimler-Chrysler, Kraft, IBM, State Farm, Trek, and many others, and is presently at work on his first novel.

Thirst, art director, is a Chicago-based communication design practice. Its principal designers are Rick Valicenti, John Pobojewski, and Bud Rodecker. They work with design, cultural, and civic communities. They engage in a process of discovery and experimentation, focusing on concept, craft, and artful investigation. Their work lives at the threshold between art and science, resulting in keepsake artifacts and unique experiences. Thirst believes design is integral to the human condition. It is ubiquitous, nourishing and transformative. Design allows us to connect with one another and compels us to slow down and pay attention.

The mission of  MAS Context, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded in 2011 and based in Chicago, is to advance the fields of architecture and design through the dissemination and sharing of ideas from different disciplines to address in a critical way specific issues of our built environment. It does so through a quarterly publication as well as a series of public lectures and events.