“That Is Not What This Place Is to Us”: Adaptive Reuse, Public Ethnography, and the Politics of Knowing in Rural West Texas

Design becomes public ethnography when knowledge co-production, rather than aesthetic output, is the goal. In practice that means embedding ethnographic methods — sensory mapping, walking interviews, oral history, iterative community-led review — into design research; staying transparent with communities about how findings will circulate; and building accountability into every stage rather than adding it at the end. The deeper insight is that the transitions between fieldwork, studio analysis, and public dissemination are not only presentational decisions. They are ethical and political ones. In design projects with communities, every transition is an occasion to ask again who has a say, what becomes visible, and what should remain held in the community. In places that have been subjects of knowledge production with little benefit to them, accountability is not optional. It is the condition under which co-production becomes possible at all.