News Release
This year marks the 25th anniversary of DW Legacy Design®, the core of Design Workshop’s ethos and the embodiment of our mission to design with purpose and intention. Through this process, we create lasting impact through the guiding lenses of environment, economics, community, and art. These categories shape what it means to create a sustainable project, guiding both our clients and team in clarifying their vision. This framework ensures our work addresses the most pressing challenges in the built environment while delivering measurable impact. It forms the backbone of our workshop culture and is central to the way we practice.
Originally conceived as a time to rally around our workshop culture, Legacy Design Day has grown into a firm-wide practice of reflection, reconnection, and inspiration. Once a year, each of our studios sets aside a day to step away from our desks and project work, reconnect with place and people, and reimagine our role as landscape architects, planners, and designers.
Rather than sitting behind screens, teams venture outdoors, participate in tactile design exercises, and engage in conversations that encourage deep, critical thinking. Whether it’s exploring local landscapes, analyzing the legacy of past projects, or getting our hands dirty in a creative exercise, the day invites us to approach design through a different lens — one grounded in curiosity, purpose, and long-term thinking.
Each year, the day is guided by a new theme that encourages us to look at our work through a fresh filter. Past topics have included the human experience of site, synergistic ideation, and context-sensitive form-giving. Each year’s curriculum prompts new ways of thinking, collaborating, and engaging with our surroundings. These rotating themes serve a larger purpose by helping us reexamine our design practice and deepen our connection to the principles of DW Legacy Design®. At its core, DW Legacy Design® represents our commitment to creating work that outlasts us with projects that contribute to a healthier, more equitable, and more resilient world. It’s a reminder that the landscapes and places we shape must respond to the most pressing issues facing the built environment today, and that our work must deliver measurable benefits for people, communities, and ecosystems over time. Legacy Design Day gives us the space to realign with these values and return to our work with renewed clarity about what it means to design with legacy in mind.
This year’s event brought a revived energy and sense of gratitude across all studios. We focused on how to ideate as a workshop: using model-making to explore how curiosity, collaboration, and critical thinking are essential to generating legacy-defining solutions to the landscape’s complex problems. We use this time to get out of our routines and reflect on the deeper purpose behind our projects and processes. It’s a chance to slow down and ask ourselves, “What kind of legacy are we building — and for whom?”
Legacy Design Day is not just a moment of pause; it’s a commitment to continual growth, an invitation to think differently, and a reminder that design excellence is as much about our process as it is about the final result.