A lot can happen in one day.

One Day is a design consulting studio focused on neighborhood placemaking, community building, and civic instigation.

OneDay helps people with meaningful, often complex visions move from proposal to reality—especially when those ideas risk being overlooked, misunderstood, or stalled inside institutions.

The work sits at the intersection of design, strategy, and public life. The studio specializes in making the logic of new systems clear enough that others can believe in them, support them, and act on them.

One day at a time.

Emi Day is an architect, strategist, and founder of One Day, a neighborhood placemaking studio rooted in social impact, climate action, and community resilience. Working across civic, technology, and education sectors, she brings a user-experience mindset to the built environment, leading inclusive projects that create more connected, human-centered cities.

As the 2026 Van Evera Bailey Fellow, she will be reimagining Portland bridges into public venues of joy and belonging. Emi has designed award-winning high schools, facilitated international workshops, and has extensive public service field experience, including frontline work with the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic and disaster relief efforts for displaced residents following Hurricane Katrina. 

Emi is a licensed architect in Oregon, a member of the American Institute of Architects, and serves on the City of Portland's Bicycle Advisory Committee. She studied Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University, where she received the Wood Fellowship for her honors research on eco-schools in Europe and Japan. She holds concurrent Master's degrees in Architecture and Education from the University of Oregon, and proudly lives car-free in Northwest Portland.

One day, we will make plans that turn to into places

Many good ideas fail not because they’re wrong, but because they’re hard to explain, defend, or implement. I focus on clarity and alignment: clarifying how a system works, why it matters, and deciding what happens next together.

OneDay provides diagrams, narratives, and processes that make complexity legible—so projects don’t die on the shelf.

This work looks like:

  • proposals and pitch strategy for public activations and civic projects

  • workshops and community engagement that lead to real decisions

  • project and systems strategy for place-based initiatives

  • architectural and urban design

  • experience design for complex services and programs

Current Projects

This project explores how commercial cargo bicycles and light electric vehicles can replace short car trips and trucks that clog neighborhoods and drain local economies. By redesigning delivery, service, and maintenance at the neighborhood scale, cyclelogistics becomes everyday infrastructure for healthier, more livable cities.

Neighborhood Cyclelogistics

No Vacancy works with creative, locally rooted retailers to activate empty storefronts and turn underused blocks back into social and economic assets. The project shows that vibrant streets are built business by business, through tailored support rather than one-size-fits-all revitalization.

No Vacancy

This project develops a block-by-block prototyping strategy for the Green Loop by coordinating multiple community organizations around shared, testable interventions. Focusing on one block at a time allows ideas to be piloted, measured, and refined before scaling across the city.

Green Loop

Bridging Portland reimagines the city’s bridges as civic spaces. By designing public experiences that reflect Portland’s culture of gathering, experimentation, and care, the project treats our most prominent infrastructure as a place to belong, not just pass through.

Bridging Portland

Collaborate

It only takes one conversation to start a plan. OneDay exists to help make your vision a reality. Let’s do it together.