Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers' minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.
Project H uses the power of the design process to catalyze communities and public education from within.
We are a team of designers and builders engaging in our own backyards to improve the quality of life for all. Our six-tenet design process (There is no design without (critical) action; We design WITH, not FOR; We document, share and measure; We start locally and scale globally; We design systems, not stuff; We build) results in simple and effective design solutions that empower communities and build collective creative capital.
Our specific focus is the re-thinking of environments, products, experiences, and curricula for K-12 education institutions in the US, including design/build Studio H high school program in the Bertie County School District, North Carolina.
WE BELIEVE DESIGN CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.
Free web-based education site with comprehensive features for teachers, students and parents.
Anyone can teach and/or learn using the system, whether it's at school, at home, or on the move.
PD is an approach to design. It actively involves current and future users of a space in the design and decision making process. PD is a dynamic and continuous process. Sometimes designers may revisit a site and start another PD process because the needs of the site's users have changed. Open Road uses PD to design sites and in many of its other projects. We follow the five step participatory design process described below.
J. Carroll, G. Chin, M. Rosson, and D. Neale. Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, page 239--251. ACM, (2000)
M. Scaife, Y. Rogers, F. Aldrich, and M. Davies. CHI '97: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, page 343-350. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (1997)
J. Carroll, G. Chin, M. Rosson, and D. Neale. Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, (2000)