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?