Dan Etheridge brings over 18 years of experience in the public interest design field to his role as director of Living Lab Northern Rivers. After graduating from Southern Cross University’s Applied Science in Coastal Management program in 2002, Dan returned to New Orleans, Louisiana where he had studied for a semester as part of an SCU exchange program.
In Louisiana, Dan worked for Tulane University helping to establish applied research coastal restoration programs and ultimately working with the Tulane School of Architecture to open a community design centre. The Tulane City Center was founded to support resident driven recovery and rebuilding programs after Hurricane Katrina. Dan helped direct the TCC for 10 years, establishing it as a critical component of the recovery and resilience infrastructure in the New Orleans area and one of the leading university-based community design centres in the country. Dan went on to co-found and direct the Public Interest Design Student Leadership Forum based out of University of Texas, Austin, a program that built a network of design and planning schools across America and developed an intensive short format curriculum focused on skills development for applying design and planning in the public interest.
Dan has also worked with a range of clients in a consulting capacity, including the United Houma Nation and ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, on projects relating to community driven design and planning, disaster recovery, and developing partnership models and collaborative design processes for universities and non-profit organisations.
