Emily Pilloton is an architect and designer disguised as a public high school teacher in the poorest county in North Carolina. In January of 2008, Emily founded Project H Design as a nonprofit design entity to use design and building to transform communities from the inside out. The organization has since taken on projects from water transport to foster care spaces, homeless-run design enterprises, and most notably, public education. As a co-instructor of Studio H with her partner Matthew Miller, Emily teaches the one-year design/build program within a public high school in the deep South, believing that design and vocational building is an unparalleled framework for transforming education, and growing creative capital within struggling rural communities that need it most. With her thirteen students, she has designed and built locally relevant projects including public chicken coops and currently a farmer's market, which will be built in downtown Windsor, North Carolina this coming summer by her construction crew of Studio H students. Emily uses design as a process rather than a product, a community catalyst rather than an artifact, and believes that smart design coupled with innovative education can change the world. She is a PopTech social innovation fellow, has spoken at TED, appeared on the Colbert Report, and published a book on the power of humanitarian design.