Far from New York or San Francisco, Emily Pilloton is making her design headquarters in a rural area that few have heard of: Bertie County, North Carolina. In this unexpected location, Pilloton and her partner, Matthew Miller, are running a mini-design firm with high school students as collaborators. Bertie, a rural community with 27 people per square mile, is the poorest county in the state. Here, Studio H, the name of the high school curriculum that Pilloton and Miller have created, has flourished.

A design/build program, Studio H has been integrated into the students’ daily schedule, and Pilloton and Miller work as high school teachers. Students in Studio H not only earn high school and community college credits, they also earn a summer wage to build a community project that they designed.

The students, high school juniors, start by brainstorming, designing, and ultimately building projects for the town, including a cornhole game, chicken coops, and eventually, a farmer’s market, consisting of a 3,000 square-foot pavilion; they participate in every aspect of the project from planning to building.

Pilloton, the founder of Project H, which stands for “Design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness,” has always been emphatic about the need for design to work with a community rather than for it. The firm’s simple rallying cry is “We believe design can change the world.” In her book Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, she wrote a manifesto for designers called “The Designer’s Handshake,” which includes the promise “To measure, share and teach.” In Bertie, Pilloton is making good on that oath, and using design to revolutionize one small classroom.

Claire Lui: Can you explain a little bit more in detail about how you decided to work in Bertie full-time?

Emily Pilloton: We’ve been working in Bertie County since February 2010, when we built four of our Learning Landscape educational playgrounds. In partnership with the former superintendent, who was a total visionary, we did additional projects like computer lab redesigns, the football team’s weight room, and a graphic campaign for a countywide technology initiative. After about a year, we realized we could only do so much as “designers as consultants,” and that to really bring impact to education through design, we wanted to teach. We felt that design had something special to offer as a framework for education, particularly in a district on the brink of collapse like Bertie County (in 2007, only 37% of all 3^rd-8^th graders were passing the state standard in both reading and math).

We wrote Studio H as a design/build program for the high school that would combine design thinking with vocational shop learning, and put those two things towards community development projects. Typically, designers are not good builders and builders are not good designers, but to put the two together and ask students to conceive of something and execute it, and to build as they design and design as they build, was an amazing framework for project-based learning with relevance. The truth is that this place is in need of so many changes, new infrastructure, new visible progress to prove that it has a future. For that change to come from the students, in real, built ways, was a real opportunity to seize.

Over the course of 12 months, students have 2 semesters, 3 hours a day, every day, earning 17 college credits, in our Studio H shop/studio/barn that we built out as a creative laboratory. Over the following summer, they become Project H employees to build the project they have spent the year designing – in this year’s case, a farmer’s market pavilion in downtown Windsor (the county seat). We start small with cornhole boards (a carnival-style beanbag toss game), which teach basic wood construction, conceptual development, and graphic design, then work up in scale to community chicken coops (which teach architectural construction, material selection, scale, and understanding a client- in this case, a chicken). The farmer’s market is the final culmination, taking the entire Spring semester to do research, outreach, conceptualization, presentation to and partnership with the Town of Windsor and Chamber of Commerce, material sourcing and budgeting, permitting, construction

We hope that Studio H can continue as a one-year program in Bertie indefinitely. Matthew and I plan to stay here as long as there is support for us, though at the same time, we are exploring additional locations and the expansion of the one-year program into a full four-year charter school. My goal is not to replicate Studio H in every district in America, but to fine-tune the program with precision, and possibly as a charter school, to be a powerful case study for systemic change (I would love to have lunch with Arne Duncan about this). Selfishly, Bertie County is not an easy place to live and work. I do see Project H having a presence here for the long run, though we also need to work to make our operations here more sustainable without myself and Matthew, so that the two of us can continue to think about the scalability of the project.

What part of the design education programs have the students found to be the most challenging? The most rewarding?

We teach everything from hand-drafting, graphic design, color theory, and ethnographic research techniques, to welding, woodshop, concrete construction, structures, and more. The power in the program seems to be the synthesis between all those things, and teaching them not as individual skills but as pieces of a bigger puzzle- all of which are necessary to design, say, the coolest chicken coop Bertie County has ever seen. But, most of the students are the most focused and excited when it comes to the wood and metal fabrication. After spending a few days or a few weeks designing and prototyping in the studio, all they want to do is to see it take shape. One day they asked us about college design programs, specifically architecture, and they were shocked when we told them that most architecture students stop at representation, and that it is rare to actually get to build the things you have designed. “What’s the point in that?” they all said. The building process for us is the home run— otherwise it’s just thinking up ideas and calling it design, without having to grapple with how to bring that idea into the world in an efficient and functional way.

How is Project H funded?

This is quite a story. Right now, we are unpaid by the school district, and our only “salary” comes from adjunct faculty positions Matthew and I hold at Pitt Community College (our Studio H students earn 17 college credits over the course of the year and are dually enrolled in both Pitt Courses and high school elective credit). Originally, we had written our grant proposals to not include our instructor salaries, because when the former superintendent was still in Bertie County, we worked closely with him to allocate those positions and salaries for us as high school instructors. One month before Studio H started, the school board fired the superintendent on completely ridiculous charges of fiscal irresponsibility. With our biggest ally now gone, Studio H was on the chopping block because it was supported by the now-fired superintendent. After we begged and pleaded that they not cut the program (this is after we had raised $180,000 in grant funding), the school board agreed that we could run Studio H with the condition that they would not be giving us a single penny. As of now, Studio H is primarily funded by two generous foundations who see the value in the program and have been wonderful partners. These two foundations provided the funding for everything from our shop build-out to the student summer salaries, and the construction materials for the farmer’s market pavilion next summer.

Project H, as an organization, is funded by those two foundations and some individual donors for Studio H, and all the smaller local initiatives are funded by small individual donations. I also continue to speak around the world, and those speaking honoraria go towards Project H’s overhead.

How did the class decide to build the cornhole boards, chicken coops and farmer’s market?

The projects were actually collaboratively decided on between us and the students. Having worked here for a year and a half before starting Studio H, we had developed relationships with the students, teachers, and community members, and began listening to what the needs and desires were. The farmer’s market was an obvious solution— something people identified as lacking (in an industrial agricultural economy, there is virtually no small-scale farming and certainly not much priority put on local healthy food). Additionally, the obesity rates are astronomical, and the farmer’s market could provide both a place and a programmatic framework to talk about public health in a broad arena. We heard these sentiments around town, and our own observations echoed the idea. The two smaller projects, to be honest, were our ideas, but again, in response to the context. We play cornhole almost every weekend with neighbors, friends, etc, and it turns out the cornhole board is an ideal object to teach basic design skills, from graphics to table saw. The chicken coops are very much in response to the fact that the biggest employer in Bertie County is the Perdue Chicken plant (think Fast Food Nation). The idea of small-scale sustainable food production sort of flies in the face of what Perdue represents here, but is also just smart. The chicken coop is also a manageably-sized architectural project that would be a good introduction to working at a particular scale.

Have you had any interactions with the families of your students?

Our students’ parents are our biggest fans. Across the board, they have told us that this is the first class their children come home and are excited to talk about, which is hugely rewarding. The parents are a huge part of the educational “ecosystem” and we try to bring them into the process as much as possible. In some cases, our students are the first to graduate high school in their family, so for them to succeed is of huge importance not just to them but to the entire family. Design has been such a great platform for the students’ education in this way too, because it is active and social and is hopefully fostering different types of conversations at the dinner table.

Are you considered outsiders in Bertie?

I don’t think we’re outsiders anymore. Of course, we’ll always be “those people from California,” but we’ve been here for 2 years now, and we teach at the high school. We hang out with the mayor, and know all our students’ families by name. I would like to think we have earned the trust of most, though there will always be skeptics who look at us sideways either because we’re “outsiders,” or because we are doing new things. The problem with some small communities, and particularly small towns in the south that are plagued by poverty, racism, and other huge systemic issues, is that most of them are not looking for change, because change is scary. The trick for us is not to talk revolution, but to speak of change as just a smart way to move forward. The same old doesn’t cut it, and people are starting to realize that. We’re trying to put the future in the hands of the youth, and work with the community to better understand that change is not scary, but necessary, and we can do it well and appropriately together.

What part of teaching have you found to be the most challenging? The most rewarding?

The most challenging thing is the attitude, social dynamics, and personality conflicts that teenagers bring to our classroom every day. I love our students, and when we’re productive, the work shines, but so much of teaching is managing personalities. And particularly in a place where the youth is so sheltered (not one of our students had heard of Twitter, or the BP oil spill five months after it happened), there’s a stubbornness and “nothing’s my fault and I’m always right” sort of entitlement that is difficult to break down. I absolutely have new respect for my parents. I understand that teenagers are teenagers, but I honestly don’t care about all the attitude and drama. Come to the studio, come to the shop, and work. The biggest challenge has been putting aside the social distractions and focusing attention on the importance of the work and physical production. This place comes with a lot of social injustices—racism and sexism at the top of the list. Being a female teacher, half-Asian, and from California—that is three strikes against me. I’ve been disrespected so many times, called “useless,” and berated behind my back by our students, but I have to remind myself that this is a product of the culture we’re working in, and that our students can break out of that with the right guidance and opportunities. And that opportunity starts in our classroom for many of our students.

The biggest reward is the personal progress that each student has made. One of our students, whose father is overseas with the US Army, is an average student, quiet, but last week, learned how to MIG weld. He took home two pipes tack-welded together in three spots, and smiled the rest of the week. During our chicken coop project, two of our students were so excited about the design and building process that they designed and built their own chicken coops for their families, and one asked for a dozen chickens for Christmas. It’s incredibly rewarding to see students taking these lessons beyond our classroom and realizing that we aren’t just teaching them these skills for the fun of it, but because it’s a sensibility that can help you reason through every day life, and bring more beauty, function, logic, and inspiration to their own back yards.

What have you learned from the students and teachers of Bertie?

The biggest personal lesson we’ve learned is how to work with our polar opposites, which has been infuriating, eye-opening, and instrumental in our work succeeding here. Being from the Bay Area, I grew up taking social/gender equality, healthy food, and open-mindedness for granted. For the most part, those things are hard to find here, and the norm seems to be incredibly conservative, religiously-influenced decision-making that is usually not all that amenable to “design innovation.” That being said, we have found unexpected allies who if nothing else, want their children to succeed. We have learned the importance of finding that common ground, and working towards that shared goal without letting all our other differences get in the way.

Have your students perceive their learning as a “design education”? Have they started applying their learning to other areas of school or their life?

It’s a funny thing, because essentially what we’ve created is a “design/build” program, similar to Rural Studio or others you see at a college level, but we’re doing it in a public high school. For our students, I don’t think they view this as “a design education” so much as “an awesome place to spend three hours/day that sure beats sitting at a desk taking notes.” We’ve never been in this to recruit our students to become designers, but rather to give them skills that will serve them well whether they go to college, or work on their family’s farm, or need a job as a welder at a local fabrication plant. Most of them have in fact found ways to use what they’ve learned outside of Studio H. One of our students comes from a poultry-farming family, and is about to inherit hundreds of acres of land. He has been working on his own time to design his farm management strategy, down to the barns, fences, animal experiences, and more. One of our other students told us at the beginning of the year that he wanted to learn how to cook, and recently that “cooking’s sort of like design.” The parallels are definitely there, and that’s what we want to see more of. Studio H is a design/build program, but it’s not really about design. It’s about communication and citizenship and problem-solving and using creativity within dirt-under-your-fingernails work.

Has your experience in Bertie changed or more finely focused your design philosophy?

Absolutely. It has reminded me that it is so easy to get caught up in talking about design as a noun, without doing design as a verb-—in other words, the need for us all to “shut up and work” sometimes. Many of us as designers (including myself) have become removed from working with our hands. So to spend every day in an old barn, welding with teenagers and bringing their ideas to life, is to me what design is all about. We essentially run a design firm with 13 teenagers. We produce quality work that doesn’t look like high school work. What design means to me now is the growing of creative capital in places it didn’t exist before, by the hands of underestimated individuals like our students. Studio H has also taught me to be thick-skinned, to focus on the work, and let the work speak for itself. While we can argue with critics all day, or with each other about how to be good designers, it’s hard to argue against a beautiful public chicken coop, accessible to all, designed and built by 16-year-olds.