One way to find the pulse of design education today is to attend commencement ceremonies. I went to three this past May: Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, MI; Parsons School of Design in New York, NY; and Archeworks in Chicago, IL.

Architecture and design
are collaborative
mediums and should be recognized
as such at the earliest
undergraduate level.

Graduation at Kendall coincided with the news of a merger between this private college founded in 1928 in memory of Grand Rapids furniture maker David Wolcott Kendall, with a current enrollment of 450 students, and Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI, with an enrollment of 11,000. Ferris wants more visibility in the arts; Kendall needs an infusion of money -- at least $2 million -- to bring its facilities and computer equipment up to date and attract future enrollment. This year's commencement speaker, Arthur Gensler, hit the right note for the Kendall transition. "People talk about the good old days," he said, "but I am not sure that they were that good. We have many things to feel good about today and in the future. Life and business will be better. It's good to focus on today and not the past." Whatever Kendall loses in its intimate size and autonomy, it stands to benefit from the support that a larger institution like Ferris can bring in terms of professional marketing, administration and financial support.

Kendall College of Art and Design

Parsons School of Design
At Parsons School of Design, which is celebrating its centennial year, president Jonathan Fanton told the assembly that more than 37 countries on six continents were represented in the graduating class. "More than any other which has gone before, this generation will live in an interdependent world where communication and commerce race across national boundaries," he remarked, emphasizing that the ability to understand different cultural nuances will be paramount for the work force of the future. As the 600 graduates filed up to receive their degrees from Dean Charles Olton and Fanton, it was evident that 50 percent were from Asia. To maintain this high rate of admission, the associate dean of Parsons, Timothy Gunn, travels to Asia every month on a recruitment mission to sign up students who generally pay the full tuition, without the financial aid required by so many of their American counterparts. In addition to Asia, Parsons attracts students from all over Europe and is currently investigating South America as a resource for future enrollment. Given this global constituency, Timothy Berners-Lee, the British Oxford physicist now at MIT who wrote the software program for the World Wide Web while working in the CERN Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, was an appropriate commencement speaker. His talk focused on the increasing momentum toward a global society through cyberspace technology.

Archeworks
Archeworks, the alternative design and architecture school founded by architect Stanley Tigerman and interior designer Eva Maddox in 1994 (see "Designed to Help," January/February 1995, Interiors & Sources), presented a third view of the changing face of education. This courageous new "do tank" was initiated with two objectives: to bring good design to people who are not normally exposed to it, i.e. the under-privileged and physically challenged members of society, while at the same time building bridges between all the design disicplines. Archeworks graduated 10 students including three from Europe.

The work showcased at the school's open house demonstrated the breadth of the mission. Urban homelessness, neighborhood improvement and assignments from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) were all tackled with "hands-on" involvement by the students. In each case, credible and do-able solutions were arrived at through interactive teamworking. Team One rewrote the Chicago Building Code in an effort to allow disused structures to be renovated for live/work/recreation uses by homeless people, which would give them shelter, plus a place to retrain and learn new skills to enable them to enter the work force. Team Two, working in the African-American West Humbolt Park neighborhood of Chicago, IL, successfully introduced a far-reaching neighborhood "pride" program. Team Three designed a headpointer for the physically handicapped with cerebral palsy, and a mobile work station for people in wheelchairs. The headpointer design received praise from the engineers at RIC and cerebral palsy users, and has been introduced on the market in a catalog of products for the physically handicapped. The mobile work station is waiting for a socially-responsible manufacturer to prototype and put into production. As Tigerman and Maddox note, the school is simultaneously about ethics and the risk-taking involved in meeting a sponsor's often difficult realities "in order to implement designs for those most in need of them." In his commencement address Tigerman said, "Ultimately design is most potent when reified by ethics and ethics is not simply an autonomous abstraction, it is a passionate pursuit . . . to be wrestled with day by day throughout life, win or lose."

The Relevance of Design Education
In a panel discussion held during NeoCon debating the value of the unorthodox program at Archeworks and its relevance to design education, Martin Moeller, executive director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), noted that The Boyer Report, a recently-published study reviewing 103 accredited schools of architecture, emphasizes the isolation and alienation of most architectural students in the programs at conventional universities today. The report calls for the schools to become more connected to real life, and for academia and practitioners to have more interaction. These issues have been prevalent for years, but nothing has been done to change the system.

So what conclusions can be drawn from these three different pictures of design education today? While Kendall can be praised for seeking a merger in order to survive, and Parsons can be congratulated on its global reach to maintain a profile as a world-class institution, the activities at Archeworks should send important signals to the academic community. Archeworks' unconventional, cross-disciplinary program suggests that there is room for an alternate methodology in design education. It is the lone example of a paradigm shift.

With its hands-on projects and assignments from community institutions and other organizations, Archeworks' program requires a cross-disciplinary capability in the composition of its interns. And it is this unique interface of architects, industrial designers, interior designers and sociologists that enables the school to pursue its solutions and investigations to successful conclusions. Today, the notion of teaming and partnering is paramount in any endeavor. The lone expert, the independent hero, is no longer the role model as in the past. Architecture and design are collaborative mediums and should be recognized as such at the earliest undergraduate level. The Archeworks program builds on this notion in ways that have not been seen before, and its contribution is seminal in these changing times.

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