Community and stakeholder engagement isn't just a step in our design process—it's the heart of it.

To design effective social infrastructure—the gathering places that support and encourage interpersonal interaction in an increasingly digital world—we must combine thoughtful design with creative thinking, guided by the voices of project stakeholders.

While we know the design “language” of many different project types, from schools to museums and libraries, we need to learn the community’s unique “dialect.” By meeting current and potential users where they are, listening to their needs, and fostering conversations, we transform ideas into places that resonate and endure—the “palaces for the people” envisioned by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s worldwide library-building program. After all, beloved places are less likely to be torn down, which is better for the environment and our well-being.

It is only by connecting deeply with stakeholders that we can design innovative places that are tailored to user needs. This is why we consider community engagement to be not just beneficial but essential to project success.

Who Is the Project’s Community?

The first step is to identify whom the project serves. For an office renovation like the one we performed for the Merit Network, stakeholders may be limited to the organization’s staff, while our work for national venues like the Kennedy Center serves a much broader audience. We adjust our engagement approach for each project to the client’s and community’s needs, employing different tools for outreach to different stakeholder groups.

Whether we’re conducting focus group sessions, open public meetings, or city-wide surveys, our goal remains the same: to hear a broad range of voices, gather valuable insights, and co-create innovative spaces that are tailored to the community.

Small-Scale Engagement: Facilitating Vision

The smallest scale at which we conduct engagement is a steering committee or core group of project decision-makers—generally consisting of ten or fewer people.  

Discussions at this scale allow for very focused exercises that yield rich information. While large-group feedback from instruments like surveys is great for identifying high-level project priorities, it’s in small group conversations that we hear innovative suggestions for how to address these issues.  

We use the following strategies for engaging small groups, which help us identify themes that we can begin to translate into a design vision.

Interactive Discussion

The process often starts with our asking participants to brainstorm about the kinds of spaces and functions they want to see in the project, or how they want to feel in the finished space. We may approach this discussion by distributing “visioning cards”—generic images of, say, a tree in a field or two people shaking hands—to prompt reflection. We often use sticky notes to record participants’ ideas because we can move them around and organize them as we see themes emerge.

Connecting Spaces

Once programmatic needs have been identified, a key part of the engagement process is determining adjacencies—which spaces need to be located near each other within a building or on a site. To help participants think through this complex topic, we might use a wheel showing spaces and functions and ask participants to draw connections between them.

Medium-Scale Engagement: Gathering Input

The next level of engagement involves groups of about 10 to 30 people, a size that allows us to hear more voices but still interact personally with each participant. Participants may include stakeholders or community members who are not direct decision-makers, but who nevertheless provide crucial insights.  

At this scale we still use discussion, but we generally focus on individual spaces or draft plans rather than the larger project vision. These techniques help us gather valuable qualitative data that informs project decisions. For a project that does not serve the wider public, medium-scale engagement might be as far as we go.

Participatory feedback exercises

We often put up precedent images and have participants “vote” for their favorites using colored dot stickers. For existing places, we may organize a tour to gauge their feelings about the current space. At later stages of design, we may provide draft plans or renderings and ask for feedback.

Engagement with Teens

Teens are a difficult group to engage through traditional channels like large community meetings. Instead of expecting teens to come to us, we facilitate engagement sessions at schools, recreation centers, libraries, or other places where they’re already congregating.  

We find that medium-scale groups work well for teens: large enough that participants don’t feel put on the spot, but small enough that they know their voice is being heard. Some teens prefer to give input through creative exercises like sketching, storytelling, or real-time online feedback tools rather than pure discussion.

Large-Scale Engagement: Bridging Voices

For public projects, our approach typically involves community meetings that are open to everyone. These meetings can involve 100+ participants, depending on the level of turnout—which we encourage by holding meetings after normal business hours and in locations where the community already gathers. Open community meetings can present challenges, but they are essential for building trust and ensuring we hear a broad range of voices.  

For groups of this size, we create simplified versions of the strategies we use with smaller groups, in addition to some tactics specific to large groups.

PROJECT SYNOPSIS

We know that community members come to public meetings with different levels of knowledge about the project at hand. We always want to convey key background information like a project overview, schedule, and summary of what we heard at previous meetings—either as the introduction to a presentation or on boards participants can peruse as they enter the venue.

Storyboarding

Storyboards can help participants imagine the possibilities for how they might interact with a place. For example, narrating a "day at the library" for a family, a high school student, and a retiree can illustrate how the building might support different activities and uses for different people and at different times.

Breakout Group Discussions

Breaking large groups into smaller ones of six to eight people fosters more focused conversations. Participants might draw on plans to show us how they currently use a site, such as where they park and enter the building, or spaces where they’ve noticed bottlenecks. These discussions provide valuable insights into community habits and needs.

We also like to use breakout groups to co-create the building program: the list of spaces the building will house and how big each space will be. We present participants with a program area—for example, a music practice room—and our suggestions for the kinds of activities that will take place in the space as well as the types of seating, lighting, technology, etc. that should be included. Participants then highlight the items that are important to them, strike out the ones that are not, and write in what they feel is missing. This exercise provides us with critical guidance as we develop the design.

Extra-Large Scale Engagement: Reaching Out

For public projects, everyone in the community is a stakeholder. For a branch library, this might mean multiple neighborhoods; for a city hall, the entire city.  

Because these projects are open to everyone, we want to connect with and gather insights not just from regular or likely users, but also from individuals who might not typically interact with the venue. Casting a wide net with our engagement allows us to discover unmet community needs and help us find ways the project can address them. It also acts as an outreach tool for the client, helping build awareness of their services and programs.  

The primary method for community-scale engagement is distributing surveys, both in-person and online. We design the surveys to gather meaningful quantitative data while encouraging wide participation, which we then help the client distribute throughout the community—for example, by setting up tables at local government buildings, markets, or public events. It takes time to disseminate surveys and receive the information back, but they help us ensure that the design aligns with the community's needs and expectations.

Designing With, Not For, Communities

For an example of our engagement approach in action, look to Fairfield Library in Henrico County, Virginia. Community members told us they often visited the library in intergenerational groups, leading us to incorporate caregiver-friendly features like a workstation with an attached playpen and a central reading lounge that overlooks both the children’s and teen areas. Watch our video “Listening to Understand” to see how the community informed design decisions.

The architects…were listening to understand, and you can tell they understood because this is the result of them truly engaging with this community and understanding what we needed.

Stephanie Tillman – Fairfield Library patron

By embracing many voices, adapting to community needs, and listening at every scale, we create spaces that both serve and inspire their users. From libraries and theaters to cultural sites and landscapes, we continue to demonstrate that the most impactful designs are those created with the community, not just for it.