P+DC [Common]Place Series

Reinventing the Commons

Public-interest design and its role in producing public goods

Course Lessons


Meet the Presenter

Stephen Luoni, Assoc. AIA

Director, University of Arkansas Community Design Center

Stephen Luoni is director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC), an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies and a Distinguished Professor of architecture.  Luoni's work at UACDC specializes in interdisciplinary public works projects combining landscape, urban, and architectural design across Arkansas. 
Patrick Jones - Course author
Course Description
This presentation addresses public-interest design and its role in producing public goods, the very definition of what it means to be a profession. The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, a teaching office with professional staff, has developed building blocks for a new ecology of the city—a repertoire of eight placemaking platforms triangulating public policy, best practices, and design in agricultural urbanism, missing middle-scale housing, context-sensitive street design, development-oriented transit, watershed urbanism, and low impact development. Placemaking platforms in housing and food will be discussed.
1.0 AIACES HSW Learning Unit 

AIA Colorado Facilitators: Brad Tomecek, AIA, and Whitney Churchill, AIA 
Identify opportunities for design thinking in public-interest problems, including stakeholders impacted and ways to gain public input in diverse projects. This includes agricultural urbanism, missing middle-scale housing, context-sensitive street design, development-oriented transit, watershed urbanism, and low impact development—ecologically-based urban storm water management.
Participants will be able to identify expansive problem-solving through new design tools and pattern languages which address the public good and the role of community design centers in addressing the grand challenges that enlarge the design professions. By engaging diverse stakeholders in the design process and outcome remove barriers and promote inclusion and social equity, particularly with respect to vulnerable communities.
Participants will build an understanding of multi-scalar approaches and formal vocabularies intrinsic to addressing complex public-interest problems.
Participants will understand the benefits of collaboration utilizing models at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, address ways to bridge academia and practice to work on public-interest problems collectively. 
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