Designing With the Community: Systems for Better Planning Decisions

What this episode covers

Joshua Santabria, founder of GO Architect and creator of the community engagement platform Engage, joins the show to unpack how large-scale planning decisions can be made without sidelining the people most affected by them. In this conversation, Joshua explains how traditional approaches to community engagement—static PDFs, in-person meetings, and limited access—often fail to produce meaningful input. He shares how GO Architect shifted proposals to interactive websites with videos, animations, translations, and cost scenarios so communities could actually understand and respond to plans. That work eventually led to Engage, a free digital platform that turns familiar in-person exercises like sticky-note feedback into scalable online tools. Joshua walks through how Engage allows hundreds or thousands of participants to contribute on their own time, in their own language, and even quantitatively rate ideas from one to five stars. This approach helps teams move beyond anecdotal feedback and reduce the “loudest voice wins” problem that often distorts decision-making. The discussion also covers broader expectations in architecture and planning, including why spending more time upfront can save tens of thousands of dollars later, how AI is now baseline for site and performance analysis, and what leadership lessons translate across disciplines. Joshua reflects on starting GO Architect, the two-and-a-half-year period it took to find focus, and why non-traditional investors—former colleagues, family, and early team members—often matter most.

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