VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

This paper proposes a civic-centered model that views design education as a “flipped democracy,” where students become co-authors of public memory rather than passive recipients of the canon. Rooted in Henry David Thoreau’s calls for individual conscience, ecological awareness, and direct action, students utilize design as a civic practice grounded in lived experience. The framework grows from two years of research on the aftershocks of urban renewal in New Haven, Connecticut—once a showpiece of modernist planning, now scarred by federally subsidized clearance. Here, community gardens function as living archives: plots where residents cultivate produce and reclaim erased neighborhood histories. Echoing Thoreau’s woods as sites of reflection and self-reliance, these gardens anchor ecological care and civic identity in communal soil. Partnering with community garden initiatives in New Haven, students conduct fieldwork, oral history interviews, and speculative design. Residents become historians of their own experience; students serve as facilitators while learning by producing zines, AR overlays, and mobile interfaces. Outcomes include public exhibitions, participatory archives, and contributions to platforms such as the Smithsonian’s Community of Gardens. Intentionally modest and transferable, the model contends—after Thoreau—that meaningful reform begins with small-scale acts of planting, recording, and reflecting. While this project will initially be piloted in New Haven, it can be extended to other Connecticut cities that share similar legacies of industrial expansion and displacement. By integrating urban history, public humanities, and participatory design, design practice becomes a laboratory for democratic imagination, aligning with the U.S. Department of Education’s call for civic-ready colleges. It frames design not merely as career preparation but as public conscience, cultivating seedbeds of civic renewal in gardens, archives, and classrooms.