Community-Engaged Design Education: Power, Culture and Practice

October 8-9, 2026, University of Colorado Boulder

ENVD students on site.
ENVD students work together in Rome
A beautiful flower garden

Community-Engaged Design Education: Power, Culture, and Practice is an international symposium exploring one of the most urgent questions in design: How do we teach and practice design ethically across cultural boundaries?

In a world where connection and division coexist, this symposium gathers design educators, community partners, social scientists and practitioners to examine how power, culture and lived experience shape community-based design. In this two-day event, we will explore real collaborations in which the learning process is defined by tensions, failures, breakthroughs and reciprocity.

We approach design not as something done for communities, but as something created with them.

About the symposium

This symposium is a collaborative working forum. Through workshops, storytelling sessions and dialog, participants share grounded case studies from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, product design and related fields.

Culture is not treated as a backdrop, but as a central force shaping knowledge, pedagogy and practice.

The symposium serves as the foundation for a forthcoming edited volume that documents and reflects on these experiences, offering one of the first sustained explorations of power and culture in community-engaged design education.

Goals

The work speaks to community partners, educators, students, practitioners, NGOs, policymakers and researchers across global contexts where design is being reshaped around social justice, cultural sustainability and environmental stewardship. The symposium aims to:

Advance ethical, culturally responsive models of design education.

Examine how power operates in partnerships between universities and communities.

Share global case studies grounded in lived experience.

Bridge education, activism and cultural exchanges.

Provide practical and pedagogical frameworks for participatory design.

Reimagine design education as reciprocal, relational and justice oriented.

Symposium structure

The symposium is organized as a working process that leads directly to publication. Following the call for abstracts, the selected cases will be the cases presented at the symposium.

 

Case-based workshops

Participants will present and workshop real community-engaged projects at the symposium, based on abstracts submitted for discussion and publication. These sessions incoporate local voices, collaborative processes, material negotiations, and ethical challenges. Successes and failures are equally examined.

 

Collective reflection

Through facilitated dialogue, participants identify shared patterns across cases—ethical tensions, pedagogical dilemmas, and political realities shaping community engagement.

 

Book development

The resulting volume will be structured in two parts:

  • Section I: Case studies
    Authored by educators, practitioners, and community partners directly involved in the work. These chapters document processes, challenges, and grounded realities across diverse geographic and cultural contexts.
     
  • Section II: Shared iInsights
    A cross-case reflection examining ethics, pedagogy, politics, and future directions for community-engaged design education.

The book will bridges architecture, education, participatory design, community development, cross-cultural studies, and design ethics—offering frameworks that link learning with social responsibility.

Who should participate

If you are working at the intersection of design, culture, and community engagement, this symposium is for you. Those who will draw the most benefit include:

  • Design educators and studio leaders
  • Architects, planners, landscape architects, and product designers
  • Community partners and nonprofit leaders
  • Researchers specializing in pedagogy, anthropology, and cultural studies
  • Policy makers and practitioners focused on inclusive development
  • Design-build teams and education abroad faculty
  • International development and engineering professionals

Call for cases

We invite educators and practitioners to apply to participate in the symposium, and contribute to the resulting publication, by. By sending a ‘case’that has with the following components:

  • A community engagement design project.
  • An educational component.
  • An engagement with a community partner.

We welcome case submissions that address the following themes: 

  • Navigating power dynamics, authorship, and equity in community projects. 
  • How culture and context serve as frameworks for design learning. 
  • Analyzing the "unspoken" challenges and provisional nature of engagement.
  • Storytelling and representation as tools for bridging divides. 
  • The shifting identity of the educator as researcher, partner, and activist.

Join a global network committed to reshaping design education through ethical collaboration, cultural humility, and shared knowledge production.

Abstracts will be accepted soon. Questions and inquiries can be directed to Marianne Holbert.

Sponsors

The Community-Engaged Design Education symposium gratefully thanks the following sponsors: the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information at CU Boulder; the Department of Environmental Design within CMDI; and the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR).