of a place that I now call home.

It's a story of public education

and of rural communities

and of what design might do to improve both.

So this is Bertie County,

North Carolina, USA.

To give you an idea of the "where:"

So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in,

Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state.

It's about two hours east

driving-time from Raleigh.

And it's very flat. It's very swampy.

It's mostly farmland.

The entire county

is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed.

So there's only 27 people per square mile,

which comes down to about 10 people

per square kilometer.

Bertie County is kind of a prime example

in the demise of rural America.

We've seen this story all over the country

and even in places beyond the American borders.

We know the symptoms.

It's the hollowing out of small towns.

It's downtowns becoming ghost towns.

The brain drain --

where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back.

It's the dependence on farm subsidies

and under-performing schools

and higher poverty rates in rural areas

than in urban.

And Bertie County is no exception to this.

Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with,

like many communities similar to it,

is that there's no

shared, collective investment

in the future of rural communities.

Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now

benefits rural communities,

and yet 20 percent of our population lives there.

So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor.

It is the poorest county in the state.

It has one in three of its children living in poverty,

and it's what is referred to as a "rural ghetto."

The economy is mostly agricultural.

The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco,

and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut.

The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant.

The county seat is Windsor.

This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now.

It's home to only 2,000 people,

and like a lot of other small towns

it has been hollowed out over the years.

There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair

than occupied and in use.

You can count the number of restaurants in the county

on one hand --

Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite.

But in the whole county there is no coffee shop,

there's no Internet cafe,

there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore.

There isn't even a Walmart.

Racially, the county

is about 60 percent African-American,

but what happens in the public schools

is most of the privileged white kids

go to the private Lawrence Academy.

So the public school students

are about 86 percent African-American.

And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class,

and you can see the difference is pretty stark.

So to say that the public education system

in Bertie County is struggling

would be a huge understatement.

There's basically no pool

of qualified teachers to pull from,

and only eight percent of the people in the county

have a bachelor's degree or higher.

So there isn't a big legacy

in the pride of education.

In fact, two years ago,

only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders

were passing the state standard

in both English and math.

So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place,

but I promise there is good news.

The biggest asset, in my opinion,

one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man:

This is Dr. Chip Zullinger,

fondly known as Dr. Z.

He was brought in in October 2007

as the new superintendent

to basically fix this broken school system.

And he previously was a superintendent

in Charleston, South Carolina

and then in Denver, Colorado.

He started some of the country's first charter schools

in the late '80s in the U.S.

And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary,

and he is the reason that I now live and work there.

So in February of 2009,

Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design --

which is a non-profit design firm that I founded --

to come to Bertie and to partner with him

on the repair of this school district

and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district.

And he invited us in particular

because we have a very specific

type of design process --

one that results in appropriate design solutions

in places that don't usually have access

to design services or creative capital.

Specifically, we use these six design directives,

probably the most important being number two:

we design with, not for --

in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design,

it's not about designing for clients anymore.

It's about designing with people,

and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within.

So at the time of being invited down there,

we were based in San Francisco,

and so we were going back and forth

for basically the rest of 2009,

spending about half our time in Bertie County.

And when I say we, I mean Project H,

but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller,

who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder.

So fast-forward to today, and we now live there.

I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo,

because he would kill me if he knew I was using it

because of the sweatsuits.

But this is our front porch. We live there.

We now call this place home.

Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth,

we realized we had fallen in love with the place.

We had fallen in love with the place and the people

and the work that we're able to do

in a rural place like Bertie County,

that, as designers and builders,

you can't do everywhere.

There's space to experiment

and to weld and to test things.

We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger.

There's a nobility of real, hands-on,

dirt-under-your-fingernails work.

But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there,

there is a huge need.

There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County.

There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county.

And so we saw an opportunity

to bring design as this untouched tool,

something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have,

and to be sort of the -- to usher that in

as a new type of tool in their tool kit.

The initial goal became using design

within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger --

that was why we were there.

But beyond that, we recognized

that Bertie County, as a community,

was in dire need of a fresh perspective

of pride and connectedness

and of the creative capital

that they were so much lacking.

So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education,

but then to figure out how to make education

a great vehicle for community development.

So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches

to the intersection of design and education.

And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County,

but I feel pretty confident that they could work

in a lot of other rural communities

around the U.S. and maybe even beyond.

So the first of the three is design for education.

This is the most kind of direct, obvious

intersection of the two things.

It's the physical construction

of improved spaces and materials and experiences

for teachers and students.

This is in response to the awful mobile trailers

and the outdated textbooks

and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days.

And so this played out for us in a couple different ways.

The first was a series of renovations of computer labs.

So traditionally, the computer labs,

particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County,

where they have to benchmark test every other week,

the computer lab is a kill-and-drill

testing facility.

You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave.

So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology,

to create a more convivial and social space

that was more engaging, more accessible,

and also to increase the ability for teachers

to use these spaces for technology-based instruction.

So this is the lab at the high school,

and the principal there is in love with this room.

Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them.

And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers

of this educational playground system

called the learning landscape.

It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects

through game play and activity

and running around and screaming and being a kid.

So this game that the kids are playing here --

in this case they were learning basic multiplication

through a game called Match Me.

And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams,

one team on each side of the playground,

and the teacher will take a piece of chalk