In this studio, students explore critical, participatory, and process-focused strategies for community based design practices to consider how the agents with whom we design, and the practices with which we engage them, shapes, alters, and informs our processes, our outcomes, and our larger professional practice. Designers’ unique creative and conceptual methods enable them to be adept at responding to complex problems with multiple drivers. Contemporary designers are actively engaged in projects that address these large, interconnected, and intractable problems through expanded practices that transcend buildings, landscapes, and products to consider underlying systems and structures—whether financial, social, cultural, environmental, material, or technological.

Known variously as Community-Engaged Design, Participatory Design, and Public-Interest Design, practitioners broadly address both public needs and the underlying systemic problems that create these needs. Public Interest Design practitioners are guided by the belief that access to design is a public right, not a privilege. Practitioners insist that responding solely to the needs of paying clients limits the profession’s ability to address widespread contemporary challenges.

In this studio, we consider the place of this work in the larger context of architectural practice through research and discussion, as well as through reciprocal engagement and co-learning with a community client/partner on a realizable project. We are incredibly grateful to our community partner, Abundance Farm, for working with us this semester to experiment, test, and hone these practices.