People and Faculty

Erica Dorn

Assistant Professor

DSGN - DIM

Erica Dorn

541.737.6651

erica.dorn@oregonstate.edu

People and Faculty

Erica Dorn

Overview

Background

Publications

Overview

Biography

Erica Dorn is an Assistant Professor of Design and Innovation at Oregon State University. She is the founder of Suburb Futures, a collaborative social design practice focused on building civic infrastructure and fostering equitable, thriving futures in peripheral places. Her current research examines relational design practices aimed at promoting depolarization and belonging in an age of plurality and extremes.

Previously, Erica held senior leadership roles in community economic development, social impact investing, and business and leadership education. In 2015, she co-founded and served as Managing Director of the Etsy Foundation, with a mission to "reimagine commerce in ways that build a more lasting and fulfilling world." Through her social design consultancy, she has led transformational, participatory community development projects that co-design systems for human and more-than-human coexistence and thriving.

She earned her PhD in Transition Design from Carnegie Mellon University, where her dissertation, Relational Design for Transitions within U.S. Suburbs, explores how community-led design can catalyze just transitions in fast-changing suburban and in-between environments. Erica also serves on the Board of Directors for Third Millennium Alliance, a rainforest conservation organization in Ecuador, and is an Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellow. Additionally, she co-created Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición, a bilingual podcast exploring pluralistic approaches to world-making and just futures.

Career Interests

She has held senior leadership roles in community economic development, social impact investing, and business and leadership education. Erica earned her PhD in Transition Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Background

Education

Ph.D.Transition Design, Carnegie Mellon University

B.A. Spanish Language, Literature, and Cultures, Colorado State University

Honors & Awards

Carnegie Mellon University, PhD Merit Award (2024)
Humanity in Action, Senior Democracy Fellow (2020)

Publications

Other

DSGN - DIM

“Relational Design for Transitions Within US Suburbs”

Suburbs in the United States are seedbeds for systemic change. But entrenched stigmas often obscure the rapid social and environmental changes within suburbs and their untapped potential to catalyze transitions toward more equitable and sustainable futures.
In the U.S.,more people live and work in suburbs than in urban and rural areas combined. Suburbs are also becoming some of the most demographically diverse places in the country, where most immigrants to the U.S. arrive and establish their lives. These in-between places grapple with numerous complex challenges related to uneven mobilities, including institutional racism, lack of affordable multi-family housing, inadequate public transportation, and insufficient civic infrastructure. If national and international agendas for systemic change seek to progress toward more just and sustainable futures, acknowledging U.S. suburbs as crucial sites for catalyzing transitions is imperative.
This dissertation, a culmination of 13 practice-oriented research projects, including the formation of a non-profit organization, Suburb Futures, operationalizes theories related to place, mobility, and relationality through the framework of Transition Design. The dissertation contends that designing for transitions requires transdisciplinary, community-led approaches that honor the primacy of motion and distributed and polycentric relationships to place. It concludes with a proposal for an “ecology of systems interventions” to design for transitions through relational practices that leverage the trajectory of the suburbanization of place toward more equitable and sustainable futures

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Conference

DSGN - DIM

“Relational Design for Sustainability in US Suburbs”

United States suburbs are often stereotyped for their ecologically invasive and socially inequitable design due to many factors, including redlining, urban renewal, auto-oriented development, and exclusionary single-family zoning (Hayden, 2003; Jackson, 1985; Rothstein, 2017). Entire suburban neighborhoods and strip malls are built on greenfield sites that were once thriving indigenous ecosystems (Nassaur, 1997). Sprawling neighborhoods can be built and decline within a single generation. This pattern of disposable suburban design has proliferated the landscape where, today, the majority of people in the U.S. reside (U.S. Census, 2020). Policymakers and urban planners are advancing ‘new urbanist’ interventions to combat the impacts of sprawl (Duany et al., 2000). Suburbia is being retrofitted through densification efforts, multi-modal transit options, and mixed-use developments (Williamson & Dunham-Jones, 2009). But the speed of traditional sprawl is outpacing sustainability agendas, and the question of sustainability in suburbia lacks an acknowledgment of the many systemic inequities beyond the built environment that also impact suburbia's sustainability. At the same time, suburban population growth continues to significantly outpace urban growth in the U.S. Not only are suburbs where most U.S. residents live, but they are also increasingly the most socioeconomically, culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse places in the U.S. (Frey, 2018; Lacy, 2016). Suburbs are emerging as complex middle grounds and misunderstood places where the debate on sustainability may be won or lost (Bosch & Polzin, 2022; Lung-Amam, 2017). As people flock to suburban areas for more affordable housing options, designing sustainable suburbs becomes imperative. In this article we explore the national conversation around suburban sustainability concerns, illuminating specific local actions in U.S. suburbs that leverage their decentralized design and increase sustainability. We believe that designers from diverse areas of the field can play a significant role in stewarding sustainability agendas in suburbs. We offer ideas for how designers can better facilitate relational, community-led change, while bringing their essential skills to bear on these often forgotten and misunderstood places.

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DSGN - DIM

“Towards Relational Design Practices: De-centering design through lessons from community organizing”

Increasingly, designers seek to design in ways that more deeply involve those who are impacted by the very systems that design aims to repair, improve, or transform. Yet, despite its good intentions, the legacies of design practice often uphold entrenched systems of oppression. Fundamental components of systems change tend to be absent from most design training and practice: including the elements of power, relationships, and ownership in motivating and sustaining equitable change. Community organisers know what designers may not—that change happens through networks of relationships in a process of collective power building. This paper discusses systemic design’s current positionality and establishes an understanding of community organising principles, and finally translates several key principles for designers of systems-level change. It calls for designers to learn from principles and practices of community organising to adopt relational approaches that can sustain the promise that systemic design envisions and enables.

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DSGN - DIM

“Articulating theories of change towards more just and transformative design practices”

In any collaborative change-making process, team members hold individual,and often differing, ideas about how change happens. These ideas may addresswhether to work top-down or bottom-up, what leverage points are to be targeted, orwho should be involved in the work, in what capacity, and when. If these differencesin perspectives are not examined and discussed, they can lead to conflicting actions,lessen positive impact, and may even do harm. Mapping “Theories of Change” is anapproach that has been used to clarify strategiesfor initiating change across many sectors. Yet, when it comes to complex design engagements, we propose that a differentapproach is needed. Rather than utilizing a formal modeling process, we believe thatteams can find alignment and build more productive working relationships throughconversations that engage and clarify beliefs about transformation. In this paper, wepropose that designers should acknowledge, reflect, and discuss change theorieswithin collaborative teams. We offer a framework to support dialogue about changethat reflects three common phases of designing: Situate & Relate, Understand & Reframe, Intervene & Observe

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Democracy: by Design and on the Move”

Democracy today is a colonial artefact tied to violent borders. Moreover, it produces an increasing number of non-citizens, unable to participate in democracy where they live. Erica Dorn and Federico Vaz argue that Jean-Paul Gagnon's courageous enquiry into defining the historical landscape of democracy can bring more equity to its current – unjust – paradigm

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Diseño para la Transición: Entretejiendo saberes por medio de la conversación”

El Diseño para las Transiciones tiene el potencial teórico y práctico para transformar la disciplina del diseño hacia una nueva ética de práctica. Como marco emergente,reconoce que lo social, económico y ecológico están entrelazados y busca diseñar resultados contextuales, sistémicos, a largo plazo y plurales. Sin embargo, sin una pluralidaden las formas de difusión del conocimiento, más allá de la palabra escrita en inglés, losintentos de diseñar para transiciones hacia futuros más equitativos quedan atrapados dentro de una esfera epistemológica estrecha. Las autoras de este artículo ofrecen un caso deestudio de diseño para las transiciones a través del audio tapiz podcast bilingüe español/inglés Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición. Las y los diseñadores y aquellos quetrabajan en la transdisciplinariedad del diseño pueden aprender no solo del conocimientooral, bilingüe, entrelazado en cada episodio del podcast, sino también del arreglo organizativo emergente mediante el cual colabora el equipo de producción. Ofrecemos a las ylos lectores una descripción de las propiedades adaptativas y los componentes operativosdel podcast mientras describ

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Engaging with Theories of Change in Transition Design”

The transition design (TD) framework calls for integrating theories of change when designing for systems-level shifts. Meanwhile, a theory of change describes the relationship between actions taken and outcomes yielded in the process of initiating change. This paper recommends developing the capacity of transition designers to explicate the theories of change operating in our research and practice. To this end, the authors discern operational themes-situate, reframe, intervene-that can be found in TD work and offer prompts to help practitioners engage with the theories of change in their work.

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“How Aurora, CO leverages the Suburban Design of Decentralization with Mobile Social Services”

Despite rising suburban poverty nationwide, social services have not caught up with the needs of residents in sprawling suburbs, and nonprofits there often must stretch their operations across larger service delivery areas with fewer resources than those in larger cities. To address these challenges, suburban civic and community organizations are increasingly adopting flexible structures to meet the needs of vulnerable residents.

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Conference

DSGN - DIM

“Human-to-Human Interaction Design: Choreographing Relational Practices”

This paper explores Relational Design as a choreography of practices that cultivate the skills necessary to navigate differences and build community within design processes. It promotes a design practice that sees relationship-building as a core function of creating long-term stewardship in participatory worldmaking. The relational practices presented here emerge from outside traditional design disciplines, drawing primarily from community organizing, with an understanding that change occurs through networks of interdependent relationships. The paper outlines a trans-experiential set of practices that includes: honoring place as kin, revealing and redistributing power, cultivating a culture of accountability, facilitating dialogue, and hosting belonging and celebration. These practices strengthen multimodal design literacies that focus on care, repair, and regeneration. Ultimately, the paper positions Relational Design as a critical design practice for fostering pluralist, coalition-based approaches to systemic transformation.

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Building Relational Capital: Design interventions in institutional investing”

For too long, design has been distanced from the sources of capital and financial systems that sustain it. As design increasingly embraces social and ecological ethics, it is crucial to develop agency within the systems of capital and institutional investing that shape its impact.
Design often operates at the end of the process and therefore the role of design is frequently predetermined by the initial structure of investments, limiting its ability to address systemic inequities. Meanwhile, social inequities and ecological degradation continue to grow, underscoring the urgent need to build resilient economies while nurturing the social and natural systems they rely on. Designers working in systemic change must understand how institutional investment accumulates wealth and who benefits from it. There is a pressing need to innovate design processes that reshape institutional investment, enabling more equitable and sustainable ownership of its gains.

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Conference

DSGN - DIM

“Expanding Design’s Role in the Governance Paradigms of Democracy”

Design is increasingly recognized as a key agent in government innovation in the United States. Designers, as problem framers and catalysts for change, play a crucial role in transforming the functionality and accessibility of government systems and processes. However, this role is often narrowly defined, typically focusing on the improvement of digital services, especially through User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) approaches within digital government spaces.While these contributions are valuable, they represent only a fraction of the potential for design methodologies to foster more participatory, accessible, and effective governance structures. As design becomes more embedded as a strategy for innovation at the national, state, and local levels, the broader contributions of designers, beyond digital services, require deeper articulation and categorization. This paper explores how design is reshaping governance systems in the U.S. at local, state, and national levels, with a focus on non-digital applications that leverage design strategies and methods to address systemic challenges within government structures.

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Other

DSGN - DIM

“The Sciences of the Democracies”

The field of democracy studies—which includes democratic theory, democratization, and many traditional inquiries in political theory/science—is far more short-sighted than it needs to be or even should be. Democracy’s researchers, for all their insights, continue to study only fragments of democracy in isolation from each other. TheSciences of the Democracies proposes a means to study democracy more holistically. It begins by describing five sources of knowledge that can be tapped by researchers to better understand democracy & cognate terms—or, hereafter, “the democracies”. These sources are (1) individual people, (2) groups of people, (3) non-textual media, (4) texts, and (5) non-humans. This book details how pursuing the inclusion of these five sources across temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic, and species contexts – or what we term the“ethno-quantic domain” – leads to the discovery of democratic practices and institutions hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to the conventional “Western” mind. It also promises to generate a new class of democratic theorist (the “Fourth Theorist”) and the potential for generating better-founded—that is, less arbitrary and more inclusive—democratic theories. The book takes pause to consider the philosophical, institutional, educational, and methodological difficulties of the scientific understandings and undertakings it proposes. The authors’ ambition is to offer a touchstone text for government/public officials; citizens, residents and visitors; researchers and practitioners; and philanthropists(big and small) who are participating in what is an already burgeoning global discussion on how to study and practice democracy equitably and differently.

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