Governance, Participation and Social Design
Main language of instruction: English
Head instructor
How can designers collaborate with stakeholders to create better communities?
What processes lead to place-making that is at once healthy, flexible, resilient, regenerative, beautiful, fun, and engaging? As a workshop team we’ll pursue these questions, engage in cooperative and regenerative design principles, explore relevant project case studies, focus on optimized project processes, while we respond to a specific, timely, and real-world request for design services.
Through discussions, presentations, teamwork, research, and project-specific
practice we will grow to have a deeper understanding of:
1. How design teams may best engage with community members to
collaborate on resilient +/or post-disaster ‘acupuncture‘ projects.
2. The roles of diverse client(s), cultures, environments, and sites as
foundational assets and springboards for appropriate design responses.
3. Engaging in a real-world project stream focused on design/build-for-change
results through the application of workshop methodologies and materials.
4. The widening range of opportunities, resources, challenges and pitfalls
related to humanitarian design/build projects and participatory/community
design processes.
1. Arriving at a nuanced understanding of how and
when to appropriately work with diverse communities
in challenging circumstances
2. Enhancing assessment and practical capabilities
relative to real-world humanitarian design project
scenario(s)
3. Deepening knowledge of culturally and
environmentally-appropriate design process
4. Increased ability and real-world experience stemming
from the workshop collaboration
5. Increasing understanding of built examples and useful
methodologies to amplify participants’ capacities in
future design collaborations
A. Design Challenge: A charrette running throughout the
workshop to engage students in a design process in
the context of one or more Real-World Design
Challenge(s)* Note: TBA in Workshop Brief
Package(s)
B. Talks: Presentation of case studies and empirical
narratives focused on approach, interaction and
practice methodologies relating to diverse ‘client’
communities and their challenges
C. Roundtable Discussions: Group analysis (with Q + A)
at periodic intensives focused on community
engagement, team work, community interface, local
capacity and materials/systems amplification
D. Student Presentations: Pin-up Review + discussion of
student design approaches to the Real-World Design
Challenge workshop brief(s)
Group work, case study analysis and group presentations.
Per UIC grading guidelines with emphasis on attendance, quality of participation and graphic and verbal communication.
1. [Oral Histories, Community Input, Deep Listening (unwritten); Whatever the
community stakeholders say out loud is a, perhaps the, primary resource]
2. Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working after
Disaster, Esther Charlesworth, Routledge, 2014 à| pages viii-15, 214-228.
3. Places to Intervene in a System, Donella H. Meadows, Whole Earth, Winter
1997 à| pages 1-12.
4. Design Like You Give a Damn [2]: Building Change from the Ground Up,
Architecture for Humanity, Abrams, New York, 2012 à| Lessons Learned...
pages 11-46.
5. New Architecture on Indigenous Lands, Joy Malnar & Frank Vodvarka,
University of Minnesota Press, 2013 à| pages 42-59, 179-202
6. Do It Yourself Architecture, BOUNDARIES International Architecture
Magazine, Luca Sampo Editor, Issue No. 9, July-September 2013 à| pages
32-39.
7. Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and
Mobilizing a Community’s Assets, John P. Kretzmann and John J. McKnight,
Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research, 1993, An Introduction to Asset-
Based Community Development à| pages 1-11.
8. Sustainable Native Community Collaborative, exemplary housing case
studies resources (pdf files) and short films (vimeo), online at:
http://www.sustainablenativecommunities.org/fieldnews/2013-case-studies/