When it comes to design’s relevance or efficacy in addressing today’s urgent humanitarian and environmental problems, it is up to us as a faculty to model conviction rather than doubt.

In terms of pedagogy, this means involving our students in our research activities and cross-disciplinary collaborations, but it also means empowering them with the unique capacities of a design education. Making is a form of thinking. Engaging the material and synthetic dimensions of architecture opens up lines of inquiry that aren't available through other modes of learning.

If we are too impatient to connect means to ends (e.g., assessing students' design work as solutions), we as educators might fail to pass along the most valuable forms of learning we can offer; which is how to be curious, resourceful and agile in the face of disciplinary, technological, and global change. Maybe we don’t know what next generation’s solutions look like... 

Designers are generalists. Our greatest strength isn’t our depth on expertise in one area but the ability to cunningly synthesize a panoply of issues from the social to the aesthetic, from the technical to the environmental, and more. Our facility as generalist should make us valuable candidates for cross-disciplinary collaboration in academia, nimble professionals whose work may far extend traditional practice, and public intellectuals who can respect and integrate the diversity of thought attendant to a liberal democracy. We need to value and assert our status as generalists if we expect the outside world to value the products of our labor.  

In 25 years, undergraduate education will look radically different than it does today due to developments in online education, ongoing advancements in computation and media technologies, economic factors, international relations and so forth. In order to be a leader in educating young architects, Taubman College will need to redefine what an undergraduate education in architecture looks like. This should make the program more inclusive, more interdisciplinary, and more technologically invested (as a start).

Architectural practice and architectural academia are always underselling architectural expertise – working long hours for insufficient compensation, looking to the social or natural sciences for external validation of our methods and modes of thought, denigrating our own educational models just as other disciplines are eager to adopt them, and more. In order to secure the efficacy of our discipline for the 21^st century – and for our students – what is needed is a critical recuperation of practices internal to our discipline that might prove resilient, important, and effective in our changing cultural and political contexts and to our colleagues across disciplines. We need to reassess our strengths and then lead with them. We need to make change instead of bending to it. 

All around out us, we see INSERT SPECIFIC SOCIAL, POLITICAL, OR TECHNICAL ISSUE.

To address we should stop INSERT DESCRIPTION OF WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING.

Instead, we should focus on INSERT SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE WHAT YOU ALREADY DO.

Formulas do not work, at least not for long. The future that lies not in the answers to questions we now know, but in possibilities, we are only now beginning to imagine.

The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning should be organized as an interactional space in which to question the multiple points of perspectives that will constitute the future. Our drive for expertise and identity should be mediated by interaction with opposing viewpoints (i.e. debate) and visions (i.e. specific propositions). The work our advancing our fields will come by overcoming our (collective) blind spots (both old and new) and seeing the world in the simultaneous complexity of what it was, what it is and what it could be.

Interdisciplinary problem solving is going to be one of the most critical skills required of professionals of the future. Solving societal problems in professional and institutional vacuums will be a method of the past. Taubman students should have more exposure to students studying the disciplines that they will be collaborating with in the workforce. 

The growing ubiquity and naturalization of digital technology creates new opportunities for cross-disciplinary initiatives and conversations at the University level. As our tools look more and more like those from other fields, it becomes increasingly important to establish a broader conversation about how the digital is changing creative production specifically, and life itself more generally. Taubman faculty can help lead this charge by collaborating with colleagues from other departments who are already focused on digital studies. 

New technologies such as Head Mounted Displays (AR/VR/MR) are set to reshape digital interfaces in the near future, which will inevitably alter creative production. Following recent University initiatives, Taubman College should partner with the Duderstadt Center, Arts Engine, and other units on North and Central Campus to not only use these tools, but to innovate how they’re integrated into design education at a fundamental level.

As Robert Fishman lucidly identified when concluding his tenure as Interim Dean, one of the most exciting aspects of being a part of Taubman College in the near term is our adjacency to an apparently resurgent Detroit. Being in conversation with decision makers in the city is an incredible opportunity to influence the future of the metropolis, but it is not enough on its own. 

1. The mechanics of economic development and gentrification need to be a topic of more explicit study if we hope for the city's progress to avoid further damaging vulnerable populations, let alone provide opportunities to benefit from development.

2. We should not be naive about the type of housing which is likely to replace the blighted residential structures being removed by the city should development continue. If not replaced by luxury condos, this will almost assuredly be low-quality, standardized developments, built as quickly as possible without regard to site conditions or climate.

Could we not engage in this conversation as well, to propose an intelligently affordable alternative to Home Depot Builder’s Grade? Might we imagine a cross-disciplinary studio that engages with the city and Detroit-based foundations to purchase land and prototype affordable housing that is flexibly adapted to site and climate, perhaps even making good on the promise of the tools of digital fabrication? Even if this were a multiple semester studio, students would benefit greatly from engaging in planning, community engagement, design process, and hands-on construction.

  Reconsider the way we teach architecture, urban design, and built environmental activism. Our graduate Jonny Hanna recently wrote, “The end goal is to make tangible the alternative worlds asked for by my community. . . .what does a completely housed future look like? What does a food secure future look like? What does a climate-resilient future look like? What does a world without work look like?” Such are the questions our students are asking. Can we really find answers by teaching design in the antiquated atelier format that architecture schools still embrace—as if the endless hours spent in studio by instructor and student alike inoculate against climate degradation, social injustice, and automation? In fact, students chained to their studio desks are actually training up for their lives as serfs in the architecture firms of the metropolis—where they are subject to low pay, long hours, and strict hierarchies as they claw their way up to the top. Rethink the relationship between studio and subjects! Spend more time thinking, more time talking, more time reading, less time teaching architecture as a craft-based art practice relayed from master to apprentice through desk crits and pinups, bound by the fiction of avant-garde connoisseurship but actually enforcing a slowly-moving status quo tied to rapidly evolving software packages. Studio has long been a hegemonic force in architectural education, the exceptional force, the sovereign subject to which all other classes provide “support.” At the same time, like the sovereign, it may constitute the biggest impediment to producing transformative architecture through collective intelligence. It’s time for a constitutional revolution. What are some new ways to teach architecture?

We can’t overlook the gift of gab.  As audiences read less and watch/listen more, well-coached Taubman students might distinguish themselves through their ability to verbally communicate assessments of- and ambitions for- the built environment with precision, elegance and verve.

Education is a war on ignorance, lest we forget our own.  In educating those less fortunate in comprehending what we hold as evident, we should be wary of what we've missed.  Finding the time to listen, as much as we declare, in spatializing new formalities.

App based interfaces have changed the way we live and work. To reach relevant audiences, garner data and be effective, learning new languages will help our professions thrive

A keen awareness in how to register, design with, and observe our environmental surroundings. Our earth and atmosphere are only going to get more stranded, and the world is (hopefully) going to become more concerned and pro-active in living among what was here and is here now. We have a responsibility to this, but also a necessity.

To ward off irrelevance, architecture school's inward focus will be hybridized with "specializations" - a year spent outside of architecture learning another skill set.

China’s ascendency in global urbanism and architecture is undeniable. Like the United States was in the 20th century, China today is where new ideas and cities are built. Taubman should embrace China’s role in the discipline and in the new international demographics of students coming to Michigan. Further, Taubman should extend its global profile by maintaining a permanent studio site in China as a base for faculty and students to work and research and encourage continuous exchange. 

Taubman students will need critical and qualitative skills to grasp changing conditions in an uncertain future. New paradigms will not emerge from quantifying already-known elements. Training in ethnographic methods is already common in engineering design programs, but far more radical social potential lies in Architecture. 

Speculating on the future, modeling scenarios, embracing the ideation that is used in more science based or technology driven disciplines might open up new modes of teaching and also prepare students for a wide range of possibilities as alumnae. 

I believe that to strengthen our visible presence and to enhance our recruitment for faculty and students in the future, Taubman College should explore various levels and scale of global outreach with partners outside the U.S.  We already have relationships and these could be more fully acknowledged and formally institutionalized. The form this could take would be (1) faculty exchanges with other programs, lasting from long visits of 4-5 days, to semester-long commitments; (2) jointly sponsored conferences and workshops that would rotate from (say) Mexico City to Ann Arbor; (3) joint publications on topics that push the boundaries of what we currently understand "planning," "urban design," and "architecture" to be.

TCAUP IN NEW YORK

By creating a satellite of TCAUP in New York City, the College will:

• Reinforce our academic offerings in the context of one of the world’s great cities
• Provide faculty with new opportunities for research and design
• Leverage the city’s rich architectural and planning communities (including TCAUP alumni) for purposes of teaching and learning
• Enhance our desirability for students by providing the option of a semester or two of study in New York
• Bring us to the heart of the nation’s design community to help raise our profile
• Provide a conspicuous venue for the display of our student and faculty work
• Offer opportunities for ties with other UM schools such as Law and Business
• Enjoy new opportunities for fund-raising

How can the architectural discipline engage in a conversation about automation in our contemporary world? In the last decade, the conversation on automation and robots in architecture has been primarily dominated by a discussion about the capabilities of the tool to facilitate procedures or to create novel formal vocabularies.These predominantly technical conversation just rarely touches on the larger issues at hand, as to how automation might change aspects of cultural, social and political discourse in the architectural discipline.. 

The world is increasingly complex. Design methodologies and pedagogies need to up their game, become more dexterous, and savvy. Locating post-disciplinary questions by de-simplifying the mechanics of engagement. Learning outside the institution. The University increasingly feels the pressure to compete with parallel, often more robust and influential forms of education.

The renewed Culture Wars will continue discharging the regimes of fitness and ableism presiding over architectural discourse. The attributes of performativity and anthropocentrism are replaced with a more radical conception of alterity. 

Over the past 25 years, a substantial event that transformed Taubman College was the initial $30M gift, and $12.5M for the new addition, from our benefactor, Mr. Taubman. Philanthropy impacts education, scholarships, faculty research, and innovation. The philanthropic landscape is shifting. A significant percentage of current and future alumni base is in Asia. Looking to the future, this demographic represents a tremendous and vastly more distributed donor base. Philanthropy in countries like China is increasing, and is having an impact on our capacity to deliver innovative teaching and research. With the exciting appointment of Cynthia Radecki as the new Assistant Dean for Advancement, the College has an opportunity to sharpen efforts on developing new funding models. One pressing concern is the cost of education, and what financial models will enable Taubman to make our program more equitable, or even financially possible, especially for more precarious students, and including international students. What financial models need to be addressed to maintain competiveness in attracting new, and retaining current faculty?

Architecture and urban planning are part of the mainstream discourse of k-12 education, yielding to an equitable representation of different identities in the school and profession in general. 

Technologically-enabled, sociopolitically-engaged, environmentally-mindful, and visually-luring, representation is already a critical component in our curriculum playing as a driver for critical thinking and forming a distinctive Taubman College "brand."

What do we need to nurture this area of shared interests? Could it expand its realm of operation to planning in a more integrated way? 

What is next? 

Taubman College should take leadership by reinvigorating the Spatial Analysis and Visualization Lab, expanding engagement in the campus-wide Urban Collaboratory, seeking external funding for collaborative research, and exploring targeted hires. This work should emphasize values distinctive to our fields, such as aesthetics, design innovation, and social equity.

As the means and methods of design and materialization employed in the design and construction sectors continue to advance toward a near future of intelligent material systems, how does architectural education prepare students to learn, collaborate, and innovate across disciplines?

In an age of intelligent machines, where the necessities of optimization and efficiency demand (?) new approaches like machine learning and artificial intelligence, the ability to understand the limitations, extend the capabilities, and contextualize the implications of emerging methods of design and making becomes critical.

How do we provide a broad design education while enabling the specialization that innovative thinking requires?

Initiate a visible research program for Taubman College that publishes conference proceedings, occasional papers, and small books (in print and in electronic form) on topics that push the edge of the current state of disciplinary knowledge and research.

Thinking ahead toward the next twenty years or so I think that Taubman College could do well to explore the possibility to assist with other partners in re-introducing a Geography program at U of M.  A step toward that would be to work with others to introduce a upper-division undergraduate program straddling LSA and Taubman in urban studies.  If Taubman takes the lead in this effort, we could set the agenda.  This effort would involve working with Residential College, perhaps Public Health, and the former SNRE, in addition to Organizational Studies, PICS [?], Sociology, and more.

In order to have happy and successful adults who are positive contributors to our society (and in this case building and creating policies that are equitable), we need a holistic educational model. Are academics enough? Developing values, understand the world from multiple identity points and critical thinking is as important as skill development. 

Architecture and urban planning work as intertwined disciplines to create more equitable communities through policies and the build environment in partnership. 

Architecture is moving beyond its previous singular definitions of shelter, maturing into a medium of contrasts between disparity and resilience, and therefore must act responsibly as an equitable threshold between the two.

Try to find a new interpretation of what architecture should be. What is the future version of Vitruv’s Firmitas, Utilitas et Venustas? Firmitas: the sustainable and efficient use of space and material by using architects creative and interdisciplinary approach? Utilitas: To create useful architecture and objects by using and improving  new technologies and creating testable prototypes rather then producing fashionable installations? Venustas: The esthetics should never be neglected and separates us from other disciplines. It forms the balance to the Firmitas and Utilitas.

After all, traditional values of architecture like creativity, interdisciplinary, organization and representation should not be sacrificed for fashionable trends or current desperate external conditions.

How do we faculty cooperate to break down the silos among the excellent schools at U of Mi to solve the world’s housing, affordability, and Urban issues? Start with engaging the marketplace and alums in our classrooms. Use  Arbor and Detroit as two of the best labs on the planet to push the envelope in place based, mixed use, transit oriented walkable urbanity. 

With virtual and augmented reality pressing ever closer to seamless interfaces (not to mention middle class market accessibility), our expertise – as architects capable of simultaneously solving technical problems, venturing cultural possibilities, and accounting for political consequences – is completely lacking from the conversation. As the ongoing political train wreck comprised of twitter and facebook (among others) show, when socially disruptive technology is developed by a tech industry that views disruption as its own virtue, catastrophic results can and will ensue. 

It is clear that the ethical and political acumen of our fields must begin to both influence and adjust to a paradigm under which social structures are even further mediated by digital interfaces—interfaces which must be designed.

Jan 20^th will be exactly 25 years since Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Reading his 1993 address, much of it easily applies to 2018, just as the urban life depicted in Mrs. Doubtfire etc. still closely resembles our own. Perhaps this is a reminder to discuss Taubman’s future role in terms of timeless principles as well as quasi-utopian/dystopian possibilities? If Americans in 2043 still commute, buy groceries, struggle with childcare, face injustice etc., then what sort of qualities do we want future alumni to possess? Besides technical expertise and digital fluency, how do we ensure they have the broader ethical and moral confidence to defend things like justice and beauty as they relate to the built environment?

Local food, local energy, and there is even a theory about local politics. Region remains the scale of economies, ecologies, and sometimes cultural identities. Unless indeed against that, how can the architecture discipline spend more time admiring and enhancing the difference between one place and another? How does love of place not only counter the current climate of toxic nationalism, but also push back against the tyranny of commercial wayshowing platforms (Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor)? How can designers contribute to other, more locally curated overlays and augmentations...

Technology progress continues to raise the return to capital, while reduce the demand for labor. It seems that the rising income inequality and the shrinking of the middle-class in much of the developed world will only get worse in the foreseeable future. Even in the rapidly developing countries, these changes also post great challenges.  What do these changes mean for the disciplines of architecture and urban planning? How can our research and teaching inform strategies to proactively address these structural forces, rather than just managing to survive? Would it be possible for the outside world to look to our disciplines for some of the solutions?  

The most important expertise becomes the ability to disconnect when necessary from perpetual interactivity (and perpetual marketing). The greatest danger to the university is the belief that everything should be documented, shared, and promoted. At least some thought and work requires privacy, presence, so-called deep work, and perhaps even occasional idleness. Beware the digital drowning cell...

What are we up to? Is it time for us to reformulate our take on the disparate traditions of Urban Planning, Urban Design, Urbanism, Urban Architecture and all things sustainable and resilient and smart and uncertain???

We could respond to this trend through expanding partnerships with researchers and educational institutions in these countries, engaging with UN-led initiatives like the New Urban Agenda, and leveraging these activities to re-think the architectural and urban planning canons.

For decades the B.S. in architecture has been assumed to be the first part of a 4+2, in other words the pre-requisite degree for a professional Master of Architecture degree. But do all students pursuing such degrees intend to become licensed professionals? Would it not be better for both the profession and the built environment, if the degree could be understood as disciplinary rather than pre-professional and as such, better integrated with the university at large, and a truly interdisciplinary, liberal education?

In 25 years, I expect to be in the prime of my career…

In many schools of architecture, the diversity of the student body exceeds the diversity of the faculty. A more polyphonic faculty and College will locate architecture in the unanticipated spaces.

Research methods will increasingly become more wet, than dry. Architecture gets hooks into Direct Brain Interface. Genetically modified bodies proliferate in multiscalar and mutlitemporal forms of urbanism unhinged from the city. Systems of reproduction [human-non-human] impact modes of representation. We will need to generate a track for a bioethicist.

The renewed Culture Wars will continue discharging the regimes of fitness and ableism presiding over architectural discourse, and replacing the attributes of performativity and anthropocentrism with a more radical conception of alterity.

Normative concepts of beauty are obliterated by more radical concepts of alterity. How will Taubman College engender practices that respect expanding differences in the social body? How might the rhetoric around diversity, equity and inclusion impact and make vivid the intellectual project of architecture?

Will architectural and educational systems permit a more sophisticated apparatus of tolerance? Will it be permitted to dream beyond the reality; cultivate a wildly imaginative beyond the urban imaginary; so speculative as to be considered scarce – yet able to thrive. We will make space at the table for such projects, or will they be forced out of the market?

The world is increasingly complex. Design methodologies and pedagogies need to up their game, become more dexterous, and savvy. Locating post-disciplinary questions by de-simplifying the mechanics of engagement. Learning outside the institution. The University increasingly feels the pressure to compete with parallel, often more robust and influential forms of education. Don’t let school get in the way of your education. Extreme conditions, demand extreme responses.

Given the plethora of digital artifacts and order-of-one constructions, what types of landscapes and geographies are being cultivated by the post-digital strata? How are current trends in translational research and disruptive technology going to substantially transform the production of architecture as it navigates the viscera of matter and ephemera of media? Ford invented the automobile; and, at a distance global climate change. What is the current project simultaneously inventing for a distant near-now future?

The upward tick of aging populations living longer will challenge intergenerational interdependence. The cultural metrics or mantras, such 30-under-30, are counter-pointed by 700 over 70. An aging population will need affordable, hip, new housing in a post-medicalized environment. 

Gender fluid, trans-queer-crip, inter-speciation > Urbanism.

Uncanny bright green retrofit of North America will drive widespread rediscovery of the built environment, and demand for a different kind of architects. For instead of operational efficiencies, life cycle models, or other familiar soft green paths, this will be about economic and political reconfigurations. Cultural value change takes provocations as much as problem solving, in social fiction and not just science fiction.

At the societal and global scale, climate change is a categorically new, fast-moving and profoundly disruptive challenge, which our college must face head-on and immediately. Social justice is also critical to our agenda, but like the chronic problems of poverty, corruption, racism, disease, war, etc., set-backs and losses can be made up and compensated for, but lost time on addressing climate change cannot be recaptured.