Let's make and think

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...