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Most small and rural communities in the United States are shrinking. This population loss is often accompanied by economic and social upheaval—job losses, out migration of young people, school closures, reductions in local services, and deteriorating physical infrastructure. Because design firms cluster in metropolitan areas and most rural commissions are for private clients, architects are largely absent from these places. The AIA Framework for Design Excellence calls for the professional community to enable more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive environments, yet rural places pose a challenge because they remain a strikingly underserved market for architectural services. How can this vision for Design Excellence extend its reach into places where new construction is rare, and architects are not present to learn from and develop relationships with potential clients?This paper presents an overview of an interdisciplinary research project at Iowa State University funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The research begins with this question: why do people in some rural towns perceive their quality of life to be increasing even when the population continues to shrink? Using twenty years of survey data about quality of life, the team identified small rural communities in Iowa where the typical association of population loss with community decline did not appear to hold true. Through interviews, site visits, spatial analysis, and data analysis using machine learning and other methods, the team is working to better understand what influences people’s perceptions of quality of life. Understanding more about these unexpectedly resilient communities requires conversations and building trust in places where few outsiders ever visit. Examples of projects in towns working with the research team include adaptive reuse of closed schools and other abandoned properties; improved recreational spaces and parks; and repurposing underused commercial properties. 

Estimates of resident satisfaction with public education have great utility in public administration, especially among decision makers in shrinking small communities. But such estimates are typically obtained via surveys, which are costly and often unreliable at high spatial resolutions given low response rates. Our study found that satisfaction with public schools among residents of small communities can be reasonably estimated at the community level using public data. Several models generalized adequately to unseen data—these models typically included the following covariates: state student assessment scores, school reorganizations, net open enrollment, and the cost of educational outcomes relative to neighboring districts. Our findings thus amount to a cost‐effective survey alternative for gauging satisfaction with public schools in small Iowa communities. 

Many small and rural places are shrinking. Interactive dashboards are the most common use cases for data visualization and context for exploratory data tools. In our paper, we will use Iowa data to explore the specific scope of how dashboards are used in small and rural area to empower novice analysts to make data-driven decisions. Our framework will suggest a number of research directions to better support small and rural places from shrinking using an interactive dashboard design, implementation and use for the every day analyst.