Erica Dorn

541.737.6651

erica.dorn@oregonstate.edu

Faculty

Erica Dorn

Overview

Background

Publications

Overview

Biography

Erica Dorn is an Assistant Professor of Design and Innovation at Oregon State University. She is the founder of Suburb Futures, a collaborative social design practice focused on building civic infrastructure and fostering equitable, thriving futures in peripheral places. Her current research examines relational design practices aimed at promoting depolarization and belonging in an age of plurality and extremes.

Previously, Erica held senior leadership roles in community economic development, social impact investing, and business and leadership education. In 2015, she co-founded and served as Managing Director of the Etsy Foundation, with a mission to "reimagine commerce in ways that build a more lasting and fulfilling world." Through her social design consultancy, she has led transformational, participatory community development projects that co-design systems for human and more-than-human coexistence and thriving.

She earned her PhD in Transition Design from Carnegie Mellon University, where her dissertation, Relational Design for Transitions within U.S. Suburbs, explores how community-led design can catalyze just transitions in fast-changing suburban and in-between environments. Erica also serves on the Board of Directors for Third Millennium Alliance, a rainforest conservation organization in Ecuador, and is an Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellow. Additionally, she co-created Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición, a bilingual podcast exploring pluralistic approaches to world-making and just futures.

Career Interests

She has held senior leadership roles in community economic development, social impact investing, and business and leadership education. Erica earned her PhD in Transition Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Background

Education

Ph.D.Transition Design, Carnegie Mellon University

B.A. Spanish Language, Literature, and Cultures, Colorado State University

Honors & Awards

Carnegie Mellon University, PhD Merit Award (2024)
Humanity in Action, Senior Democracy Fellow (2020)

Publications

Other

DSGN - DIM

“Voices from the Field A New Approach to Microfinance”

Understanding Social Entrepreneurship: The Relentless Pursuit of Mission in an Ever Changing World by Jill Kickul and Thomas S. Lyons is a leading textbook that applies entrepreneurial principles to solve social problems, covering the entire process from discovery to delivery with a strong theoretical and practical focus. It's a comprehensive resource for students, featuring real-world case studies, "Voices from the Field" insights, and updated content on topics like lean start-ups, social intrapreneurship, and sustainability, making it a go-to text for understanding how to create innovative social ventures.

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Civic Reciprocity: Multilingual, Place-Based Civic Re-membering in Aurora”

My proposed submission centers on community-engaged participatory research in Aurora, Colorado. In this project, we co-designed a community-centered, multilingual listening initiative conducted in local third spaces across six languages, in collaboration with the civic artist collective Warm Cookies of the Revolution. The project sought to surface how residents, including community members who are co-authors of the proposed paper, define civic belonging on their own terms, and to understand the relational conditions, power dynamics, and lived experiences that shape participation, non-participation, and alternative forms of civic exchange.
The work foregrounds linguistic access, relational accountability, and informal civic infrastructures as sites of knowledge production, challenging extractive, and institution-centered norms of civic membership. The paper reflects on how multilingual, arts-led, and place-based methods can contribute to decolonizing participatory research practice in civic and governance contexts.

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Academic Journal

DSGN - DIM

“Polytopophilia: Mobility-Just Design for Transitions”

Place-based design for transitions is positioned as a critical strategy for fostering systemic change through localized interventions rooted within communities and ecologies. In an era marked by hypermobility, displacement, and translocal entanglements, this framework faces profound limitations. Mobility, whether chosen or forced, has become a defining condition of contemporary life, shaping how people relate to, inhabit, and design for place. The tension between grounded transition efforts and the lived realities of uneven mobilities calls for approaches that integrate mobility justice within a place-ethics for design.
This article situates this kinetic era of mass movement as a backdrop for rethinking the spatial commitments of transition design. The paper argues that place is not a fixed or bounded entity but a relational and distributed construct.
Polytopophilia is introduced as an orientation of affection for multiple places that challenges static notions of rootedness and embraces the layered, networked geographies that shape contemporary life. Rather than assuming fixity as a condition for stewardship, polytopophilia affirms that people can cultivate deep commitments across dispersed and shifting locales.
Mobility-just design offers a critical extension to existing transition design methodologies by embracing fluid, distributed, and contested place-relations and infrastructures.

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