Assistant Professor
DSGN - DIM

Erica Dorn

Overview
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

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.

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

Book
DSGN - DIM

“Cultivating Suburban Place Affection: Encountering the Pluriverse Within Peripheral Centralities”

The majority of the peripheries and in-between spaces of the planet’s urban regions are living spaces and working landscapes. Despite this, we understand little about the centrality of urban peripheries as the sites and spaces for some of the most imaginative, anticipatory, and purposeful instances of urbanism. This volume demonstrates the centrality of urban peripheries in all their variety with a view to reworking urban, architectural, design, planning, infrastructural, sociological, ecological, and geographical theory from the outside in. The book also examines the relationships of these new centralities to the metabolisms, assemblages, and urban political ecologies beyond the built and imagined materialities of their immediate situation.
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