MEXICO CITY — When the architect Tatiana Bilbao was commissioned to design a house for Mexico’s poorest rural communities, her team was three months into the work before she realized that something was missing.

“I said, ‘You know, guys, this sounds good but we really don’t know one single person that will live in a space like this,’” Ms. Bilbao recalled. “We’re figuring out this is what they want — but why don’t we ask them?”

And that’s what she did. The group interviewed hundreds of people to guide their model for a structure that would cost less than $8,000, and built two prototypes in the forests of Mexico’s south. They then adapted the plan to build houses for 23 families left homeless by a 2015 tornado in the city of Ciudad Acuña on the Rio Grande.

It is that empathy that distinguishes much of Ms. Bilbao’s work, infusing a vision of architecture as a platform that people can use to improve their quality of life according to their own needs, rather than those mapped out for them by planners and developers.