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By the time Eva Maddox had been in business more than 30 years, she had already achieved a significant amount of notoriety for her accomplishments as an interior architect and designer. She had won more than 70 awards for her work. Her creations had been featured in 16 books and in more than 60 magazines and journals.

She had also gained recognition in her profession for coming up with the concept of "branded environments" -- a design sensibility that argues that anyone who walks through the door of a workplace ought to be able to decipher immediately what people do there, who they do it for, and what values the organization stands for. And, having coined that notion, Maddox had helped Ogilvy & Mather, John Hancock, and Hallmark Cards, as well as several hospitals and museums, to adapt it for use in the development of their own work spaces.

In all likelihood, however, Maddox will leave as her greatest legacy not an office interior, a museum, or any other working example of her design aesthetic. Instead, she will leave behind a design school that doesn't even bear her name but that is based in large measure on her philosophy of leadership. It is a legacy that traces its beginning to an idle comment made in 1993 by the then-city manager of Muskegon, Michigan, where Maddox and a colleague, Stanley Tigerman, 69, were working on designs to revive the city's lakefront. The city manager suggested that Maddox and Tigerman open a school to teach the kind of community involvement that they displayed in Muskegon. On the car ride home, Maddox and Tigerman resolved to do just that.

One year later, in 1994, Archeworks was born in Chicago. The mission: to provide an alternative, multidisciplinary education to a dozen students, one year at a time, and to put them to work on projects for nonprofits and other organizations that ordinarily would not have the financial resources needed to acquire good design talent. The Archeworks students immediately found opportunities to apply their craft to a wide variety of worthy projects: making furniture for disabled people who live in single-room occupancy (SRO) residences, designing pillboxes to help AIDS patients take their prescribed cocktail of pharmaceuticals on schedule, and building improved head pointers for cerebral-palsy patients to wear to help them communicate better.

Next, Maddox and Tigerman threw themselves wholeheartedly into the task of giving Archeworks a real home. They found land, they erected a building, they cajoled furniture makers into outfitting the place, and they taught classes to students at night. "We weren't trying to provide a conventional education," Maddox says. "We wanted to provide an avenue for examining unexplored design problems in a positive environment that would produce results."

Maddox makes it all sound very simple, but underlying her approach to design is a basic tenet of good leadership that many people fail to understand. "Eva is all about breaking down barriers," says Tigerman, who remains her partner at Archeworks. "It's one of the central tenets of Archeworks, and it comes straight out of her mouth." The barriers that affect the design world -- those between theory and practice, those between disciplines, and those between the haves and the have-nots -- happen to be ones that confound many organizations in all sorts of industries. Here's how Maddox went about breaking down those boundaries at Archeworks.