BC Library Conference 2019

Generously Sponsored By: CUPE BC

Fear Less. Build More.

Emily Pilloton, founder of the youth design initiatives Project H and Girls Garage, wants you to “go big or go home.” With decades of experience building real world projects with youth (a farmers market, tiny homes, and a workshop just for girls!), Emily will challenge you to channel your creativity and curiosity into new ideas for what libraries might be in the future. As a bibliophile (both her grandmothers were librarians!) and diehard maker and builder, she will present hands-on projects she has done with youth along with new mindsets to encourage prototyping, radical partnerships, and brave making in our library spaces. Her background in architecture and design will inspire you to experiment in new ways and envision new futures for the libraries we all know and love.

Emily Pilloton is a designer, builder, educator, and founder of the nonprofit Project H Design and its sister program, Girls Garage. Using architecture and design as a vehicle to transform communities and classroom pedagogy, she works alongside youth ages 9-18 to co-design and build public architecture projects. She has built a farmers market with high school students, a playhouse with girls whose mothers have experienced domestic violence, a school library designed by its own middle school students, and microhomes for a homeless housing agency. Her work seeks to change the authorship of our built environment and cultivate power in underestimated communities, specifically young girls, undocumented youth, and communities of color. With an educational philosophy rooted in creativity, design thinking, and project-based learning, Emily also works with educators and schools to reinvent teaching and learning in more hands-on and community-focused ways. Emily holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley, and a Master of Fine Arts in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a Lecturer in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley, and is the author of three books, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, Tell Them I Built This: Transforming Schools, Communities, and Lives With Design-Based Education, and a forthcoming book about tools and building for young women. Her work is documented in the full-length film If You Build It, and has been featured on the TED Stage, The New York Times, The Colbert Report and presented to the Obama Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy at The White House.