A research initiative applying complexity science, ethnography and design to the problems of rural communities — beginning with one town on the Lake Erie shore.
What this isThe Institute exists to change that: to treat a town as a system rather than a list of problems, and to do the work close enough to the ground that it can be acted on.
The idea came out of ethnographic field work commissioned by Re:Vision, a rural redevelopment non-profit in North East, Pennsylvania, with its research partner ReD Associates. One absence kept surfacing. Very little ethnographic research is done in rural regions at all, and almost none of it applies complexity science to rural questions. National research capacity for rural communities is scarce, scattered across agencies and universities, and rarely designed to be used by the places it describes.
A town is a complex adaptive system. Its economy, ecology, institutions and families interact, and the behaviour of the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Complexity science offers the traditions and methods to study those dynamics whole, emergence, networks, adaptation, resilience, and design offers the discipline to turn what is learned into something a community can actually do. Most rural research isolates a variable. Most interventions treat a symptom. We are interested in the leverage points that move the system.
The founding shorthand, used often to describe this new initiative: the Santa Fe Institute crossed with IDEO. Long-horizon, multidisciplinary research, inseparable from design and implementation in the field.
Five lines of work, all of them currently running. Each one feeds the others.
Two people, fifteen years of shared work, and one town.
A designer for thirty-nine years — Xerox EuroPARC, IDEO, Frog Design, Studio Archetype — and author of the Design Squiggle, one of the most widely reproduced illustrations of how uncertainty becomes form. He taught ME313, Human Values and Innovation in Design, in Stanford's graduate design program for five years, and led the Future of Fish project with the Packard Foundation and Ashoka. He grew up inside Xerox PARC, where his father worked; his grandfather ran the section of Bletchley Park that built Colossus.
Founder of Re:Vision, the rural redevelopment non-profit in North East, Pennsylvania, and author of the Re:Vision Framework — the systems framework for researching and designing rural communities that runs, as a working instrument, on the Institute's Tools page. Her work in North East is the reason the Institute exists.
Damien and Stacey have worked together for fifteen years, most recently co-founding Darling&Co, a film development company. The Institute was conceived out of research conducted for Re:Vision.
Much of the work is done with other organizations. These are the ones the work currently rests on.
The Institute is in formation, which is the most useful moment to hear from researchers, funders, town officials and practitioners.
hello@theruralinstitute.org