Korean DESIGN magazine interviewed myself and Peter Chomowicz about the future of art and design education and how this related to our collaborative, interdisciplinary, client-centered courses. We had developed medical and business classes where we focused on working with Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and produced design strategies for many translational health research studies, Black and Decker and DAP.
We were fortunate to be invited, by the Korean Department of Culture to develop cultural design responses where we took a group of students from the United States and partnered with students and faculty from the Interaction Design Department at the Korean National University of the Arts.
We were also invited by the city leaders of Taishi Town, Osaka and Osaka University of the Arts to develop cultural responses to an ancient trade road. We took a group of students from the United States and partnered with the students and faculty from the Graduate Architectural program at Osaka University of the Arts.
We created an educational structure were design students and MBA students came together to develop creative business strategies for real-world international clients and were taught by design and business instructors.
Finally, we took female students from the United States to Dubai and partnered with Zayed University to address cultural stereotypes and misconceptions.
The focus of the interview was to talk about the projects listed above and how they related to our views on the future of education. Student tuition is constantly increasing. The world is becoming more interconnected and more fragile and paradoxically, in many ways, becoming more isolated and therefore more dangerous. Art and design students need to be prepared to become leaders, creative thinkers, big picture thinkers and market innovators in this world.
Institutions who focus on art and design educational delivery to the individual student and not the multidisciplinary team will become redundant. Institutions who do not take the academie into the local and global communities will fail to prepare students with the skills to engage and thrive in the global economy. Institutions need to understand that there is a fundamental difference between taking groups of students to distant lands as tourists to look at the vistas as opposed to taking students to different cultures to work with those people to develop interventions and responses that promote cultural understanding and tolerance.
