Case study outline:
Using Deign to Cultivate Personal Skills and Serve the Community
- Bertie County is the poorest county in North Carolina
- Home to the community-focused nonprofit group Project H Design; uses the power of design and hands-on building to catalyze communities and public education from within (headed by Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller)
- Studio H is a public high school “design/build” curriculum; it was the country’s first design, vocation, and community service program in public highschool - mission is to encourage design thinking in a classroom without resorting to being a “glorified art class”
- Studio H was founded as an official community college course where high school juniors earn college credits and have the opportunity to partake in a paid summer internship as well. Each semester focuses on a small number of large communist projects, which students design and build from start to finish
- Miller and Pilloton designed studio h’s curriculum as a specific extension of the work they had strong doing in berry county and launched in 2010
- Studio H borrows from Project H design’s six overall design tenets, a group of principles (6 values that they can always come back to)
- 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
- Studio H opens opportunities for students, teaching ; didn’t write this program to recruit next generation of architects, but to leave students something as they go on with life