Ideas for Main Street, Millinocket, ME

The design guidelines for Main Street in Millinocket, ME, was completed as part of the National Endowment for the Arts program The Citizens Institute on Rural Design (CIRD). CIRD brings together designers and stakeholders in rural communities to address pressing design needs. In Millinocket, those needs were to bring a sense of identity and vitality to Main Street in downtown.

For the design team, community engagement isn’t just a box to be checked but an integral component of the design process that happens throughout the work. The CIRD workshop was originally planned to be a 3.5 day intensive workshop, scheduled to take place in April 2020, with design experts coming from across the country to collaborate with Millinocket residents. With the unanticipated arrival of COVID-19, the team took some time to adjust the approach and developed a hybrid online and in-person workshop, taking place September 2020. While the community engagement looked a little different than originally planned, this hybrid approach allowed the team to get the continuous feedback and collaboration with residents that’s vital to community-led design.

The resulting design guidelines for Main Street were a synthesis of all of the feedback received during these workshops, as well as additional research and expertise that the design team brought.

Partners: Our Katahdin, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Housing Assistance Council, Mitchell Rasor, James Reynolds

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