Our Approach
Our human-centered approach to rural design emphasizes deep community engagement, from understanding local needs to co-creating and scaling sustainable solutions. By involving communities at every stage—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Implement—it ensures development efforts are relevant, effective, and grounded in lived experience.
1. Empathize (Needs Assessment)
Begin by engaging with rural communities to understand their daily lives, challenges, and aspirations. Through interviews, focus groups, and observation, gather insights into local practices and socio-economic conditions.
2. Define (Problem Definition)
Analyze the collected data to uncover root causes of key issues. With community input, prioritize development needs—like clean water, education, or agriculture—and clearly define goals.
3. Ideate (Solution Development)
Facilitate collaborative workshops to generate practical, culturally relevant solutions. Encourage broad idea generation, focusing on sustainability and affordability. Diverse voices help spark innovation rooted in local realities.
4. Prototype (Model and Test Solutions)
Turn ideas into simple, testable models using local resources. Pilot projects allow for feedback and adjustments, helping refine solutions before full-scale rollout. This phase emphasizes learning by doing.
5. Implement and Evaluate (Execution and Iteration)
Expand successful prototypes with local leadership and training. Continuously monitor progress and adapt strategies as needed. The focus is on sustainable impact and solutions that grow with the community.
Living Laboratory
Our work centers around a Living Laboratory approach or the ability to anchor design solutions within an environment of research, practice, and teaching. Through this we focus on three priorities: growing a research agenda through scholarship, helping our local communities traverse current societal challenges, and developing hands-on skills among students that will last a lifetime.
In order to meet this end we focus on research into, through, and for design. Research into design is just that, the traditional act of research, a careful study of the thing. Research through design is understanding during the act or practice of designing. Research for design marks the return of knowledge to the field and can be seen through acts such as teaching.
The relationship of each mode to one another creates an ecosystem in which no one part is of more value than the other. Through this teaching can revolve around various local communities at scale and develop a “living laboratory” defined by mutual benefit and pursuit. By balancing these three perspectives students and communities alike can conduct research together.
Co-Design Framework
The Living Laboratory concept can be contained within several areas of focus including design, policy, and planning with a strong emphasis on leveraging technological innovation and data (left). When conducting work in rural communities we have worked to bring these areas together in order to establish a fully integrated experience.
Establishing a co-design framework for the interplay between design, policy, and planning allows for the development and regeneration of public spaces for communal value and sustainability. By working together with the public, the co-design framework seeks to design services and experiences with participation and perspective from those individuals who will be most impacted by the design efforts. Additionally, by working with both the citizenry and those officials who make decisions that impact the sense of place within a community we can create a dialogue between diverse stakeholders with various scale of roles and responsibilities.
