25 Small City Anchor Institutions • Feature • Bohannon projects that are grounded in shared understanding and shared ownership. Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to translate research into practice; it’s to expand the range of what practice can be by using design research to deepen our understanding of place and to build projects with communities, not just for them. Conversely, how can practice and community realities better inform academic research? I approach academic research through the lens of practice and community experience. For me, the most meaningful work begins not with fully formed research agendas, but with listening, allowing questions to surface from the conditions communities are already responding to. In community-engaged design, this reorientation fundamentally changes how knowledge is created and shared. Practice and community realities become powerful drivers of research when we spend time listening before defining the problem. Municipal staff and community members are navigating layered constraints every day, including environmental risk, economic pressures, policy limitations, and long histories that shape trust and decision-making. When those realities shape what we study, research becomes more grounded, more accountable, and ultimately more useful. Design research methods are especially well-suited to this because they allow research to be embedded in place. Through participatory mapping, walking interviews, visual documentation, and co-design workshops, researchers encounter forms of knowledge that rarely appear in formal datasets, informal adaptations, cultural memory, and relationships to land and water that are deeply lived rather than formally recorded. Those moments when community knowledge challenges academic assumptions are often the most generative for research. A clear example of this from my own work comes from Apalachicola, Florida. Initially, the research focus was framed around familiar questions of coastal resilience and adaptation. But as we engaged more deeply with residents, city staff, and local historians, it became clear that the issues people cared most about were not just technical or environmental; they were deeply tied to place, history, and cultural identity. Student work. Adrian Robins. Ephemeral Tidings. UVA School of Architecture.
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