“A Radical Plan” opens

UC Davis Design Museum, January 20–June 19, 2026

In 1975, ground broke on America’s first solar community. Located in the city of Davis, California, the co-founders and first residents of Village Homes bought into a larger ideal, a radical way to live more lightly on the earth. The design of this neighborhood shares features with other intentional sustainable communities, but what sets Village Homes apart is the integration of all these elements into a cohesive, large-scale, interdependent system.

The UC Davis Design Museum’s temporary exhibition “Village Homes: A Radical Plan” explored this holistic design. Through models, media and original objects the displays demonstrated what makes Village Homes truly distinctive, enduringly innovative, and why sustainable and community‑oriented design still point the way forward.

The final exhibition space was divided into two main halves—house and greenspace—and sectioned using the themes: Home, History, Site, and Community. The overall design took its cues from a DIY aesthetic made popular by the Whole Earth Catalog and 1970s counterculture. The team used key sightlines and physical structures as “wow-moments” to pull visitors through the space, a variety of exhibit media to convey the story, activate the senses, and strive for multimodality employing film, animation, light, typography, large format images, hands-on exhibits, architectural interventions, tactile materials, sound and archival objects.

“Village Homes: A Radical Plan” offered the ideal pedagogical platform to teach the effectiveness of the exhibition medium to communicate complex design narratives (such as architecture and ecology) to a general audience, and because of the installation’s significant build out, a valuable opportunity for hands‑on experiential learning through physical making. An undergraduate team of four students were assigned to help develop, produce and install the exhibition based on a pre-designed plan and in consultation with the curatorial team, museum staff and director.

UC Davis Design Museum, 120 objects, 600 photographs, 950 sq. ft. Co-curator with Adrienne McGraw (50%). Lead designer overseeing the project and design concept (100%). Design, implementation and installation working with Trevor Pope-Lance and student team (25%). Completed January 2026.

Link to segd conference paper “Towards an Active Classroom.”