design:SD — Team Orientation

March 26th, 2009 by Mike Knutson

Design South Dakota got off to a start last evening with a reception and team orientation session at the 109 Club in Gary, SD. It provided an opportunity for the design team (made of architects, planners, and community development specialists) to mix with community members and hear details of the following three days.

Joe Bartmann, the project’s co-leader (along with Tom Reasoner) asked the team to remember two points that I’d like to share:

1.) Design like people matter. By this, Joe meant that “place matters.” And how people interact within places may be different. The team’s job is to capture how people will interact within their place, and then design to facilitate that interaction.

2.) Design Team’s job is to help the community have “new eyes”. From my perspective as a community development specialist, this is particularly important because residents rarely see the whole picture of their community. After looking at their community day-after-day, some elements of the community seem to disappear. We no longer see them, or at a minimum don’t see them the same way outsiders do. It’s the design team’s job to help people see their community in new ways.

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