“Cool” your town with a design:SD visit!

Mike Knutson of Reimagine Rural shares great research from Michigan State University’s Land Policy Institute about what makes small towns cool. Unfortunately the study itself does not include any South Dakota communities, but Mike highlights one of design:SD’s communities, Hill City, as a cool South Dakota community. Thanks for thinking of Hill City, Mike. I think everyone on the design team would agree!

And, if you’re a community who’s looking for a little “cool,” consider a design South Dakota visit to your community. We’re looking for a place to land, Fall of 2010!

A little dSD love from Federal Transit Administration

dSD teamer Mike Knutson sounded the fun alarm today after a neat discovery. It seems FTA Deputy Administrator Therese McMillan likes what we’re doing. She praised design:South Dakota and our sponsor, the Rural Learning Center, at the recent Annual Meeting of the Dakota Transit Association in Fargo.

Thanks for the props, Therese.

the hill city boards

Life has flown by since our visit to Hill City the first part of this month. The folks in Hill City are awesome. The team (you know who you are) was right on target. And the results are beautiful.

Thanks to everyone who played their part.

design:SD Heads to Hill City

Hill City has officially been selected as the next design:SD community! In fact, the design team will be heading west next week, October 1-3, 2009.

The community has been busy preparing, as has the design team as we do our second charrette of this year. As we gear up for the charrette next week, I just wanted to share a bit of the community’s application, as I think it shares what’s so great about design:SD and the process.

“The partnership sees the design:SD charrette as a crucial step in an important community-wide process already underway to understand and appreciate the role that aesthetics and practical design have on the development of a community. Our rural town of 800—through the participation of the community, several non-profit organizations, and the city government—has been involved in a series of civic / social improvement and visioning programs, with a goal of bringing the community together for future, conscious development. The design:SD charrette will come after more than a year of exploring poverty reduction, assessing assets and weaknesses, implementing productive programming, and conducting surveys of residents and visitors. Including the element of design allows people to focus on solutions, such as exploring various aspects of community spaces (greenways, throughways, priorities in allocating space). As a necessary part of a stepped, comprehensive visioning, the design:SD charrette will engage community stakeholders in a joint venture to create a shared vision for the businesses, streamline the design process, and validate design guidelines.”

We’ll try to keep you updated during and after the charrette! Thanks so much to Hill City for inviting us, and to our wonderful volunteers who continue to make design:SD possible!

Rolling in Deuel County

The design:South Dakota process is really a dance in three parts:

1. Preparation: getting ready for the team by beginning the dialogue in the community,
2. The Charrette: the intense three days where the team and community mix it up, and
3. Implementation: making the dreams and visions real.

Implementation is usually the toughest part. It’s easy to get fired up during the “big event,” but once the team leaves town it gets harder to keep the momentum going. Not so in Deuel County, at least so far. They’ve convened the “Big Meeting,” and more people keep jumping into the circle to make things happen. Very exciting.

Read all about it on the Digging into Deuel blog.

some d:SD love

The Reimagine Rural blog is shining some love on design:South Dakota. Check it out here.

Better images of the Boards

We’ve scanned the Deuel County vision boards, so the slideshow below has much better images. You can also check out the boards and other photos from the Deuel County charrette on Flickr.

The theme of our charrette this year became “Deuelities.” A play on ‘Deuel’ and ‘Duality.’ A duality is a relationship between two things, where both are different, but something is shared. That’s pretty much what we saw and heard in Deuel–several individual communities with identities of their own, but connected by a commonality or shared space and culture. County boundaries are certainly just imaginary political lines, but Deuel County communities have an opportunity for bigger things by connecting and working together.

The Deuel County Vision Boards

Here’s a quick look at the final boards from Saturday’s presentation in Clear Lake, SD. It was an exhaustively beautiful charrette. Thanks to all who helped make it happen. We’ll be posting more about the charrette here and on the Reimagine Rural blog.

The images in this slideshow aren’t top quality. We’ll be scanning the boards and rebuilding a better slideshow soon. Until then, hope you enjoy these.

(We’ve updated the slideshow with higher quality images of the boards. Check it out here.)

Meet the Deueling Team

Hello Deuel County! The design:SD team is 17 members strong and gearing up as we speak to head to Deuel on Wednesday. You can get a glimpse of who will be helping the Deuelites–just check out the team roster. (Of course, the roster is subject to change. It almost always does!)

Tom Reasoner and I will be co-leading the charrette this time around, with Larry Crane and Alan Weiskamp helping to make sense of the chaos in the design studio. Tom is the big picture seer. I’m more of the process-sergeant. Hopefully together we’re a lovely yin and yang.

An upfront thanks to all the sponsors making this charrette possible: Rural Learning Center in Howard, SD, American Institute of Architects-South Dakota, and Deuel Area Development Inc. Also thanks to the City of Clear Lake for providing a space to work and for a bunch of wonderful local volunteers who are really making this happen.

We haven’t even held our team orientation yet, but we already have co-MVP’s of this charette. Super props to Briana Hoffman and Lindsey Karlson for pulling it all together.

Cheers.
Joe Bartmann

Design:SD Heads to Deuel County this Week

The folks in Deuel County can expect a little extra excitement this week. A group of 18 architects, landscape architects, engineers, planners, and community development professionals will spend three days in Deuel at the end of this week (March 26-28) for Design: South Dakota.

Design: South Dakota, now in its third year, is a is a new way to help rural communities across South Dakota create a better future by design, where architects, engineers, planners and community developers volunteer to help South Dakota’s small towns gather and illustrate ideas for their future.

The 3-plus day design:SD event, called a “charrette,” is described by project leaders as a “mixing bowl” of local knowledge, ideas and visions for the future, with the expertise and experience of professionals from outside the community.

The Deuel County community has been preparing for the event since the fall of 2008, when they were selected as the next Design: SD community. Recently, Deuel Area Development (a local non-profit development corporation) has hosted a series of roundtable discussions leading up the charrette. The topics have included: agriculture, main street business, healthcare, recreation, young families, and uses for the former school for the blind property. The information harvested from these conversations was sent to Design team members to help them prepare and understand the community a bit before the three day event.

“The design charrette is the shortest portion of the process, when you consider the work that must be done before and after the event,” said Joe Bartmann, co-leader of the d:SD, Project Deuel County. “The ideas that are illustrated have, in many ways, been long in the making for a community—and when the design team leaves it is up to the community to follow-through and make the ideas a reality.”

If you’re a Deuel County resident, or simply interested in learning more about Design:SD, you’re invited to several community events during the charrette. Events, times, and locations are listed below.

• Thursday, March 26th, 2:00 pm–Meet and Greet the Design Team–Alibi in Gary, SD
• Thursday, March 26th, 6:00 pm–Community Visioning Dinner–Clear Lake Community Center
• Friday, March 27th, 2:00 pm–Public Feedback Session–Clear Lake Community Center
• Saturday, March 28th, 10:00 am–Community Presentation–Clear Lake Community Center