A selection of projects showing how Bound approaches meaning, content, and outcomes across disciplines and contexts
>> HOW BOUND SHOWS UP
The work below isn’t a list of services or a prescribed process. It’s a set of examples that show how Bound works in different contexts, over time, and across disciplines. Each project reflects the same underlying stance of paying attention before rushing to explain, telling the truth without stripping it of context, and using language with care for the people and places it touches.
These examples aren’t meant to define what Bound does in every situation. They illustrate how our work adapts to what’s present, what’s at stake, and what needs careful handling.
1 - MODE of WORK: Name What’s Forming
Orientation, noticing, and allowing meaning to emerge before it is fixed or explained
Relevancy Report
A community-centered research framework co-created to bring lived experience into strategic planning. The Relevancy Report reframes destination marketing as a contributor to a community’s quality of place, connecting resident insight to planning, policy, and economic development. The work surfaces local strengths that support residents while also shaping visitor experience.
Highway One
An multimedia installation drawn from interested travel through overlooked landscapes. Using sound, imagery, and found objects, Highway One honors memory embedded by ordinary spaces without romanticizing them. What matters is noticing what is usually passed over and letting it be anyway.
Hold On, Be Strong
A slow-cooked project reflecting on Southern Hip Hop as lived philosophy rather than a category trap. Built through pilgrimages, sound, and collected artifacts, HOBS resists nostalgia, instead centering the embedded wisdom of place, identity, and music. Here, the aim was to not assign the meaning and let resonance surface through the experience.
2 - MODE of WORK: Translate Without Flattening
Sitting at boundaries between disciplines, audiences, or contexts, where clarity is required without distortion
Southern Urbanism
A research, design, and storytelling project that looks at how Southern cities are built and lived in, from the perspective of the people shaping them day to day. We treated citybuilding as a shared responsibility tied to quality of life, with a nod to the practitioner’s point of view.
SC Quantum
A long-term translation and framing effort across research, industry, policy, and public audiences. The work focused on preserving technical accuracy and institutional credibility while making space for understanding across domains that do not share language or frame of reference. The challenge wasn’t to simplify, but to align without distortion.
School for Living Futures
A narrative and visual system for an interdisciplinary education initiative focused on climate, regeneration, and cultural knowledge. This work aimed to channel the energy of the movement and carry the essence of multiple disciplines without forcing them into a single story.
3 - MODE of WORK: Language as Stewardship
Addressing consequences, care, and responsibility in how language and framing affect lived experience over time
Woven on Liberty
A naming and narrative for a downtown Durham development built around affordability, community, and long-term belonging. The work resisted conventional real estate language in favor of terms that reflected how people would actually live in and relate to the space. The verbal and visual language set expectations around use, value, and identity.
Pedestrian Love [HUGS]
A participatory public project rooted in everyday observation and chance encounters. By offering simple gestures rather than statements, the work creates space for connection without explanation. The restraint here was intentional, and now international, allowing meaning to emerge through presence and placement rather than declaration.
ONPointe
A missing middle housing project exploring how communal and individual space is shaped by attention, craft, and articulation over time. Decisions around structure, use, and experience prioritize ease and trust over speed and scale. The development reflects a belief that places grow stronger when they are built carefully rather than by convention. >> onp-durham.com
Heritage, Not Hate?
A mixed-media work addressing a contested symbol and cultural memory without collapsing the conversation into a resolution. By holding opposing narratives in tension, the project foregrounds responsibility in how language frames history, identity, and belonging over time.