Design thinking and the problem-solving process of design is a strategic resource. Through creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship it can help communities optimize limited land and water resources in urban and rural landscapes. To address the problems facing communities, it connects human, animal and environmental health through design for both urban and rural regions.

Rural Design for the Future provides a methodology for holistically crossing borders and connecting issues to nurture new design thinking and collaborative problem solving. It recognizes that human and natural systems are inextricably coupled and engaged in continuous cycles of mutual influence and response. It presents a process which provides an integrated system of human communities, plants and animals that meet the needs of people, the economy and the environment in the present, without compromising for the future. Following the author's first book Rural Design, it discusses the development of community based rural design over the past decade, and expands on using the rural design process to cross national, state, county, township and city borders in order to make connections for better urban and rural futures for everyone.

The book includes projects from around the world including many of the author's sketches in black ink and watercolor of places that he and his wife have visited together. It will allow designers, architects, policymakers and citizens to envisage the solutions to some of the most pressing issues in rural design.

Autorentext

Dewey Thorbeck obtained his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. He then won a Rome Prize Fellowship and studied in Italy for two years. The recipient of a number of architectural design awards, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and past president of AIA Minnesota. Because of his rural design expertise, he was selected to serve as Vice Director of the organizing committee for the creation of the first World Rural Development Committee that will be managed by the World Green Design Organization established in 2010 by China and the European Union. Thorbeck is an Emeritus Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, Emeritus Founder of the Center for Rural Design sponsored by the College of Design and College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, and now a Senior Research Fellow in the Minnesota Design Center in the University of Minnesota College of Design. His sponsored research work is focused on bringing design and design thinking as a problem-solving process to rural and urban land issues.