Hosted on the Colgate University campus, the workshop invited people from rural communities around New York to join in learning and conversation addressing design challenges in their communities. The centerpiece of the workshop was time spent “occupied with small group design problems. The intention of these problems is less to introduce rural issues or problem solving skills, than to try and pose different ways of looking at rural problems. To illustrate these problems, [staff] prepared a profile and accompanying resource data set of a typical rural town: "Your Town.” Your Town is part real, part fiction, but the issues and problems are what [staff] have found to be similar to rural areas over much of America. The design approach, however, must be site specific - which is why [they began] by providing a vignette of Your Town, NY.”

Learn more from the Hamilton Workshop Notebook.