Teaching Philosophy
I
believe that design and making are active
not passive. We must be present, committed, thoughtful and directly involved in
the world in order to become agents of positive change. To this end, I believe that a solid design
education has three parts: inquiry, making, and aspirational thinking.
Inquiry
When I Socratically
ask a student why they made a particular choice, they must unpack their own
motives and assumptions. This helps them
to be more critical, more aware and more thoughtful as they engage in the
design process. So often we can be unaware of the questions we are really
asking, and this is especially true in young designers. Students in our senior thesis class (a
two-semester required course), determine for themselves the subject of their
individual projects. The only
stipulations are that the thesis must be applicable in Syracuse NY and respond
to a demonstrable need in this locale.
This encourages them to directly engage local communities, to research
existing social and cultural conditions and to think critically about their
response to those conditions. Students
guide their own studio work through discussion with each other and with the
other stakeholders in the project.
One
process that I began implementing three years ago as a research tool is a
volunteering requirement. Each student is required to volunteer for at least 25
hours with a group or organization in Syracuse. This gets them “out of the bubble” of our
University and into the community that surrounds us. For many of our students this is the first
time that they have spent any time with people from a socio-economic background
that differs from their own. By adding
this set of first-person experiences to their academic research, they are able
to create richer and more responsive designs as a part of their thesis
work. One student wrote in an
end-of-semester evaluation “I had no idea about the assumptions I was making
until I spent time with [a client at the Food Bank]. It really changed my design and it also
changed my life.” This is slightly grand
perhaps, but this student’s ultimate design did shift from a relatively shallow
redesign of a community center/soup kitchen into an examination of food systems
in Syracuse and an exploration of food inequities.
This
act of asking, this process of inquiry is not an isolated step in the design
process or the learning process. All the
way through it is imperative that we step back and look critically at the
questions we are asking. I create
opportunities for our students to present their questions to their peers, to me
as a faculty member, and to visiting lecturers as a way to ask, “are the
questions I am asking really the questions I should be asking?” This process of research and evaluation is
carried through the entire design process.
Making
Making is important and relevant, and
irrespective of discipline everything we design must be made by someone
somewhere. I love making of all types, and I am vocal about that. The deeper
each student’s understanding of which making, manufacturing, and building
processes can be drawn upon to realize their design, the more complete their
design approach is. To this end, whether it is in my interior design first-year
studio, my senior thesis studio, or my furniture design classes, making is
built into the syllabus. There is an attention to detail and a respect for
precision that is taught better through the end of the finger than through the
eye and the ear. Though cutting
cardboard may seem trivial in the grand scheme of a design education, there is
a patience and precision and response to material that is learned by doing
that can not be adequately communicated with lectures. In the process of making models in first-year
studio the students learn these skills (patience and precision) as well as
learning that there are limits to and possibilities provided by each
material. These limits and possibilities
are a part of our design lexicon, they enable us to do the work that we do and
to do it beautifully and well.
This
process of practice extends beyond objects and spaces and into
relationships. Every design is about
relationships, and cultivating those relationships is an important part of our
job as a designer and as a teacher. When
the students are doing their volunteer work, they learn by experience this
first-hand: They must listen
respectfully and critically, often having to go to great lengths to tease out
information that they can apply to their design. This making
of relationships is an important skill that is (like cutting cardboard)
best learned by practicing, inside and outside of the classroom.
In
my own work I have spent years learning to be keenly aware of the material I
work with, its origins and its story. It
is important to me to put that story into the finished piece somehow, and to
communicate it to the clients or users.
I believe that this helps the user connect to the finished piece and
gives it a higher personal value, and it is my hope that a higher value leads
to a diminished chance that the object will be cast aside and added to the
waste stream. This awareness of our place in the cycle of creation (as users
and waste creators) colors every design decision I make, from materials to
processes. It drives me to seek out
methods that have the smallest possible negative impact environmentally,
economically, and socially, and the greatest positive impact. It also drives me to communicate this thought
process to my students. This method of
thought spills over into my teaching of course:
There is no shred of knowledge, no bit of experience that cannot be
utilized as an educational tool. The way
that leaves fall off of a tree in autumn, the way two people pass each other in
a hallway, the relationship of bone to muscle to skin in our hands, all of
these are clues to the way the world works.
We can use these as signposts when we engage in our creative process; we
can let them lead us to a more thoughtful, appropriate finished piece.
Aspiration
I
believe that what we do as designers and makers is important; it will change
the world. Even something as simple as
making a mark on a piece of paper changes the world from a world without that mark to a world with that mark. If this is true, if
every design perforce changes the world, I believe we have a responsibility to
do that in a positive way. I believe
that by teaching students the art of inquiry and the craft of making I am able
to help widen what I call the student’s “field of view.” We can easily fall into the trap of thinking
too narrowly, of ignoring the interconnected nature of the world around
us. But every choice we make has effects
that ripple outward, and choosing one material (for example) over another or
one construction method over another can have profound impact on all manner of
other disciplines and industries. To this end, I pursue projects for my
students that respond to that agenda, seeking out socially and environmentally
responsible real world clients like e2e Materials (a local sustainable-product
business), or community gardens and other community centers.
As
field of view broadens, as we become more aware of the interconnected nature of
the things and processes and people in the world around us, we are able to
identify and mitigate the relationships that we are working to improve in a
much more sensitive way. Sometimes this
process is simple: Critiquing a
first-year student’s drawing and noting the lack of crown and base molding in
the drawing can lead to a discussion about the role of molding in an interior
first as way to keep out the cold, then as a status symbol, then (by doing away
with it altogether) as a Minimalist statement about æsthetics. Other times it is more complex: a discussion with a thesis student about
generational poverty leads to insights about the role that government-built
housing (built cheaply and often with little thought about the relationship of
the residence to the end user) can play in underlining and even creating
attitudes about class-identity and self-identity.
These
three components (inquiry, making, and aspiration) are not steps in a process, rather they are twisted around each other like
strands in a rope: they start together
and support each other and run concurrently all the way through the process
arriving together at a student who graduates engaged with the world, looking
critically at that world, and ready to make positive change within that world.
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