Rooms Are Never Finished

“A house? A work in progress, always.”

—Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished

Schools aren’t static. We might imagine our campus in its platonic ideal—that perfectly assembled grade-level cohort, curriculum unit, schedule, or mission. Remember that school year when everything felt perfectly perfect? No. Schools, like rooms, create space for rich, dynamic lives, perspectives, and needs that evolve as families and employees join, depart, or grow. No fixed and final floorplan—or structure or approach—can fully predict the ever-changing richness of perspective and need in our schools.

In the early 2000s, architect Alejandro Aravena introduced a radical idea for affordable housing in Chile: Half a House. Instead of constructing small, fully built homes, his team designed half-finished structures. The other half remained unfinished—not due to resource constraints, but because Aravena believed the people living in these houses would know best how to realize their unfinished halves, given their intimate awareness of their own lives.

Schools make space for so much life—how might any one individual design a fully finished place of learning, no matter how well-intentioned? Any one of us can become fixated on our own perspective and miss the everyday realities of those who also lend life to the space. But if we leave room—if we invite participation, iteration, and ongoing shaping—everyone in the system takes a stake in the school’s evolution. A school grows and evolves not because of a perfectly executed plan, but because the people inside it are shaping, reshaping, and responding to what unfolds around them. Curiosity matters here—how we remain open to new questions, voices, and experiences that keep our communities alive, rather than locked in place. 

Rituals for Designing Together

How might we cultivate a participatory design mindset in our communities, no matter our role? In schools, that mindset emerges when everyone who lives and learns in the space helps shape and reshape it over time. Empathy interviews, think tanks, design charrettes, and community days—at Leadership+Design, we use a broad range of techniques to build understanding and cultivate co-design in the processes we lead.

Those bigger moments are remarkable, but it’s the smaller ones—the rituals you can weave into a quick five-minute window or devote a single meeting to each year—that truly inculturate participatory design into your culture and practice. Over time, these small steps become an engine of reflection and growth, making co-design a living part of how you work, rather than a one-time event. It’s not just about designing better schools. It’s about creating the conditions for a community to build together, to convene, commune, and cultivate understanding across difference.

Here are some approaches, small, medium, and large:

1. The Regular Check-In

The start of any employee meeting or family engagement is an ideal time for a check-in—a simple yet powerful group-maintenance practice. By inviting early contributions, you help participants articulate how they see a particular effort, value, or aspiration playing out in the community. This brief ritual can take several forms:

• A Reflection: “An action or practice helping us move ____ forward is…”

• A Small Win: “A moment that gives me confidence we’re transforming ____ is…”

• Positive Gossip: Noticing and naming a school value in action, sharing where it showed up and how it made a difference.

These quick prompts can be woven into a five-minute window at the start of a gathering, grounding everyone in shared purpose and collective progress.

2. Monthly Explorations

Too often, we ask people to present finished ideas when what we really need is unfinished thinking—the kind that builds a culture where we shape our ideas together. Once a month, invite a team to bring something they’re developing—a program idea, a schedule revision, or a decision in process—and share it with the group in the spirit of exploration, not mere validation or critique. Consider questions like:

• What are you hoping this will achieve?

• What tensions are surfacing?

• What’s the smallest version of this you could test first?

By holding the unfinished together, a school makes meaning before making decisions, ensuring that the solutions are shaped by collective insight rather than an isolated point of view.

3. EcoCycle Planning

Schools are living ecosystems, and all programs, traditions, and structures move through a natural cycle: birth, growth, maturity, creative destruction, renewal. One yearly ritual I love engaging teams in is mapping where key activities are in their development—anything from parent engagement to performance-based assessment to cultivating specific skills. This mapping is a form of co-creation in itself, revealing whether people align on whether something is growing or mature. Then we can ask:

• What needs nurturing?

• What is fully mature?

• What should we creatively dismantle?

By naming what’s emerging, thriving, and fading, we ensure that schools remain adaptive, not static.

4. Build to Think

In many of the experiences we design, prototyping is paramount. A team might generate 7–10 quick models or solutions—whether that’s a landing page for a new program, a mock schedule, or a simple storyboard. The goal is not talk to think—where conversation can circle endlessly—but build to think, which encourages us to hold ideas more lightly and see new perspectives.

We build to think, not to finish—to make ideas visible, deepen the conversation, and gain a head start on what’s possible. The act of prototyping shifts our dialogue from “Is this right?” to “What else might we do?” and expands what a solution could become.

We often think of design as something external—deciding on a curriculum, shaping a program, or reimagining a schedule. But every time we make a change, the system changes us.

A school that redesigns its schedule is making a statement about what it values, how it sees students, and how it defines learning—through the lens of time. When that redesign happens through participatory design, the school is also deciding how it sees its people and how it connects diverse perspectives to navigate difference.

However, participatory design doesn’t mean design by consensus. (A camel is a horse designed by committee, as the saying goes.) Instead, it’s an opportunity to cultivate understanding, clarify direction, and identify where support might be needed to maintain momentum.

When done together, the process itself becomes an act of meaning-making. The final product may be important, but the real change happens in the act of shaping it—in the tension, the conversations, the shared sense of possibility. We don’t just build better structures. We build trust, shared language, and a deeper understanding of who we can become.

The goal is not to complete the house and finish the room.. The goal is to bring our communities together to imagine, with all our energy and perspective, how we might continue to shape together, in curiosity.