In 2009, Project H founder/executive director Emily Pilloton and her partner Matthew Miller relocated from the West Coast to rural North Carolina to begin Studio H, an innovative design/build curriculum for high school students. Recognizing the need for a fresh approach to public education in economically challenged, rural geographies such as Bertie County, Pilloton and Miller embrace a radically local, hands-on approach, working from within the community to empower the next generation of residents with design skills that can help create lasting change. I recently caught up with Pilloton in Portland, Oregon, where an exhibition chronicling the studio’s first year, Studio H: Design. Build. Transform, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Craft.

Concepting chicken coop designs at Studio H. Photo courtesy Project H Design.

Katherine Bovee: What is the difference between “designing for” and “designing with,” and why is this distinction important?

Emily Pilloton: I don’t think it’s necessarily an either/or. “Design for” tends to be a much more top-down dynamic between designer and client, whereas “design with” is more fluid and democratic. Our clients are not corporations or wealthy individuals. They haven’t worked in a creative capacity—schoolteachers, a foster care home, 17-year-old students from a very impoverished part of North Carolina. “Design with” is not driven by just being more democratic for the sake of being more democratic, but by the nature of who we’re working with. We want to give them not just a say, but a stake in whatever is being produced, so that by the time we come up with something, it’s not a handover, it has already been embraced by the people that are going to use it and they feel like it’s their own. That’s what will make a project successful in the long run.

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