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Erica Dorn is an Assistant Professor of Design and Innovation at Oregon State University. She is the Founder of Suburb Futures, a social design institute that works relationally on policy design and new narrative building to bring about more equitable and living futures in US suburbs. She holds a PhD in Transition Design from Carnegie Mellon School of Design, her dissertation is titled Relational Design for Transitions within US Suburbs. She currently researches relational design practices towards depolarization and belonging in an age of plurality and extremes.
Previously, Erica held senior leadership roles in community economic development, philanthropy, social impact investing, and business & leadership education. Through her social design consultancy, Erica stewarded transformational and participatory community development projects that co-design systems in which the human and more-than-human world can belong and thrive together.
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.’ Now known as the Good Work Institute, GWI is a bioregional, worker-run non-profit. She is on the Board of Directors for Third Millennium Alliance, a rainforest conservation organization in Ecuador, an Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellow, and a co-creator of the Spanish bi-lingual podcast, Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición, a podcast about plural notions of world-making towards just futures.
Learn more about Erica’s Landecker Democracy Fellowship project here.
Updated September 2024
