Community Design Assistance
Does your community have a project that needs facilitation and visualization?
Community design projects can be delivered in a number of ways. Fees vary depending on the scope and method of collaboration with faculty, staff, or students. Projects can be administered as:
- Service-learning projects through the Department of Landscape Architecture (UKLA) during the academic year. Depending on the type of project and a match with faculty interests and course goals, UKLA can collaborate on service-learning projects during the academic year. For consideration, projects need to be requested at least 3 months in advance of the academic year. Review UKLA past and ongoing community design assistance here.
- Immersive summer internship efforts through a range of community funding opportunities.
CEDIK’s award winning community design summer internship immerses a cohort of multi-disciplinary interns into a rural community to develop projects and recommendations based on that community’s specific needs. The first summer internship focused on Manchester, Kentucky. The students spent the summer of 2018 working from a pop-up design studio in a downtown storefront. With a weekly presence in Manchester, the four interns extensively engaged with the community and were able to understand both the cultural and physical character of downtown Manchester, in addition to how people experienced and used downtown. This understanding grounded the findings in the local needs and many of the recommendations have been implemented in the year following completion of The Downtown Plan for Manchester, Kentucky.
Each of the cohorts that worked in Manchester (2018) and Harlan (2019) featured a mix of graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Kentucky, in addition to students from Berea College and Northern Kentucky University. With each student bringing their unique strengths and backgrounds to the project, they worked collaboratively in an environment that mimics professional practice to learn from each other. For communities, this allows the interns to take a deep dive into their community to identify and understand the local character and needs, with community engagement as a foundation during each step of the process. - Storefront design studio projects, such as our current studio in downtown Winchester, Kentucky.
In 2019 CEDIK and the College of Design at the University of Kentucky launched the Winchester Design Studio. Located in a Main Street storefront in the heart of downtown Winchester, Kentucky, the Studio serves as a proof of concept for how the design and economic development resources of the University can be embedded in a community to support their needs. Working with a wide network of local partner organizations, the Studio seeks to support them by being both a physical space for them and by connecting them to resources across the Commonwealth. These resources include business programs from the Bluegrass Small Business Development Center, Clark County Cooperative Extension programming and academic design studios through the College of Design.
One of the innovative aspects of the storefront studio is the positioning of design and planning as fundamental to downtown revitalization. There have been a series of academic design studios, including architecture, historic preservation and urban design, that have focused specifically on Winchester. With the downtown storefront as a highly visual front door to these efforts, the Studio seeks to provide a place where innovative/productive activities occur and useful information is shared to enhance the sense of place and economic opportunities. With a two year commitment to Winchester, this Studio acts as a proof of concept to determine the adaptability of the Studio to relocate to another community in response to their specific needs.
How to Get Started
Dr. Jayoung Koo, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, has set up an application if your community/organization is interested in working with UK. Apply here.