Ep. 123: Learning During a Pandemic
In this special program, presented as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online Conversation Series 2020, we discuss leadership insights, best practices and innovative ideas that can help sustain art and design schools through the new realities of the global health crisis and beyond. A conversation hosted by Amy Devers of Clever, with Rosanne Somerson, President of RISD; Samuel Hoi, President of MICA and Lorne Buchman, President of ArtCenter.
This episode is presented as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online Conversation Series 2020, presented by Clever and Design Milk. Visit wanteddesignnyc.com/online to view the program and watch replays of live talks.
Read the full transcript here.
Lorne Buckman: We really are trying to ask the question on the greatest level of not, should it be online, should it be in person but what in the future is really going to be the right combination.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today we’re discussing the unique challenges, innovative ideas, and complex decisionmaking of art and design colleges and they adapt to the new realities brought on by this global health crisis in this special program we’re calling Learning During a Pandemic and Beyond. This program was recorded via a live zoom panel in May as part of WantedDesign Online 2020, a conversation series presented by WantedDesign Manhattan, Clever, and Design Milk in response to this year’s COVID related cancellation of NYC by Design. To see the whole program, visit wanteddesignnyc.com/design. Now, here’s the show.
Claire Pijoulat: Hi everyone. I’m Claire Pijoulat from WantedDesign.
Odile Hainaut: Hi everyone. I am Odile Hainaut co-founder of WantedDesign. Thank you for joining us.
CP: This is our second week of our online series presented with Design Milk and Clever. We hope you had a chance to listen to the Clever Podcast with Ayse Birsel, Humberto Compana, Giulio Cappellini and if you haven’t go to cleverpodcast.com and add the podcast to your favorites. It’s a particular time for all of us, especially today, we have been, the last day of WantedDesign Brooklynthe second day of WantedDesign Manhattan for the first time online. So, it’s a little bit nostalgic but we’re also very happy to be celebrating with all of you today. It is the 10th anniversary of WantedDesign this year and we are thrilled to be able to bring a little piece of it online.
OH: Yeah and we want to thank our partners from WantedDesign conversations for a few years now. Jaime Derringer at Design Milk and Amy Devers at Clever. I have to say they didn’t hesitate one second to join force with us when we decided to bring this program online and it was a lot of fun to build this program for you today. Design education is a very essential focus of WantedDesign and we are thrilled to include this discussion today, learning during a pandemic and beyond. So please let me turn to the host today of this discussion, Amy Devers, co-founder of Clever.
Amy Devers: Thank you, Claire, and Odile. Welcome everyone. I am delighted to introduce our main speakers. Rhode Island School of Design President Rosanne Somerson. Maryland Institute College of Art President Samuel Hoi and ArtCenter College of Design President Lorne Buckman. We’re here to break down and address some of the complex challenges and considerations art and design institutions of higher education are facing with the rapid shift to remote learning and the potential ongoing necessity of learning from a distance.
As we all witnessed, this semester involved a harrowingly urgent shift to complete remote learning and now, with uncertainty being the only constant, leadership is attempting to plan the unplannable. So, with the intent of distilling out and sharing the most usable knowledge, we’re going to dive right in.
I’d like to start with one of the primary concerns, obviously the primary concern is the health and safety of students, faculty and staff and with that consideration in place, education and learning had to go completely remote this semester and there’s the very obvious problem for art and design education, of taking studio based hands-on learning into the realm of the remote.
Now a lot of people sort of assume that this can’t work or that it’s impossible but we know that artists and designers have learned to think nimbly and have come up with non-obvious, innovative and inventive ways of navigating this new territory. So, I’d love to start by hearing some examples of how faculty and students at your institutions have risen to this challenge. Rosanne, do you want to start? I’d love to hear how some of the RISD faculty interpreted this new educational paradigm.
Rosanne: Sure. Well as you can imagine at a place as complex as any of our institutions, it varied across the spectrum but many of our faculty, because the change happened so quickly and I do want to emphasize your earlier question. But the speed at which we had to make the change, had a dramatic impact and I was so impressed with the way our faculty rose to the challenge. Many of them made kits of parts or material or equipment that they kind of ad hoc through together so that students could take things home. One of our animation faculty made a popup animation studio from a cardboard box.
Someone teaching optics in the glass department sent students home with prisms and laser pointers and a number of parts for experiments. The fashion design department or our apparel design department created a platform of working with local materials and inhouse sort of bespoke processes, you know I could go on and on and on, there were really dramatic innovations that happened immediately.
But some of the most exciting stories have been things that have emerged as artists and designers through this semester, have interpreted the challenges in their own ways. I don’t want to sugar-coat it and say that it worked for everyone and I don’t want to say that it wasn’t really hard on the students and the faculty and staff but mostly on the students who had everything upended very suddenly and were forced to adjust, you know not by choice but by circumstance but there are many examples and we have assembled them all in sort of a website of some of the real surprises and discoveries of remote learning.
Amy: President Buckman, Lorne, do you wanna add to this?
LB: I'll echo one thing that Rosanne said for sure in that people certainly did as uneven as it was, and that’s true, people did rise to the challenge and it was both compelling and even moving to see how it all evolved and how quickly it evolved.
I was called to this wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit called Paradise Built in Hell, in which she studies all these disasters and finds how the human spirit is able to triumph and how community evolves and how people are looking out for each other in all kinds of interesting ways in moments of challenge and disaster. And we have our kind of own version of that at art centers as people rallied and as an energy kind of grew.
The switch to remote, I like to think about it as having certain kinds of guiding principles. One is I think it’s always a mistake if the effort is to try to replicate the person to person experience. I think what you need to do educationally to be as strong as possible is to find what in that particular environment, that online environment, what kind of learning can happen that is unique to that environment.
The parallels I look at are, you know, social media didn’t replace the dinner party, social media was a different way for people to touch in with each other and interact, that was unique to that environment. Film didn’t replace the [feeder film 0.13.39] found its own way of storytelling and of dramatic presentation.
And so, if you sort of begin with those, then you, I think you’re able to find and to explore, and to innovate and to experiment to find all kinds of things that are, that can be pretty exciting and really interesting, which led to this kind of fascinating thing which was, these comments that people would make. We had a virtual graduation at the beginning of May and there were all these comments about how it was, it gave me pause of course, but the best graduation yet.
Or some of the faculty and chairs have reported with the students final work of the spring term, it was the best work I’ve ever seen and trying to explore like, what’s that about, is it just a kind of novelty, are people, or is that we were so kind of terrified and desperate that we simply wanted to, you know, the fact that something worked just became exciting and it took on, it was magnified in terms of its success.
But I think it’s just an interesting question to explore. There’s an intimacy that’s coming, with all the problems or all the challenges, there are elements of this kind of engagement that is really unique to this environment, there is an intimacy. In that graduation, seeing each one of those graduates in their space, we did a whole kind of parade of them, surrounded either by family or being alone or being within their own context or being dressed up as they did or creating the background that they did, seeing their excitement, seeing their engagement, seeing their kind of way of almost in a kind of kiss cam way, it was fabulous. It was exciting and people were deeply moved. So, some kind of intimacy happens there, the students in doing this digital work, some of them claimed that they’re actually more comfortable, that the shy student is experiencing, a kind of learning or ability to come out of his or her shell in a way that doesn’t always happen within the context of the live classroom.
There are ways in which the pandemic itself becomes a topic of focus, in a kind of laboratory in an of itself and create a certain kind of energy. Some faculty are speculating there’s a greater demand on precise communication. So, there were all these elements that were really really interesting. The specifics went from the simple environmental design class that displayed the idea or the project on film instead of a physical model.
Color, materials and lab classes that had used resourced items in people’s living quarters for color, palette and foreign study. ID work became much less about the product itself and more about the business model and the proposition, the business proposition, manufacturing details etc etc.
It’s things that could happen again with that environment and one interesting film class actually used stock footage to kind of create the narrative instead of, because they couldn’t do the shoot with actors on a film stage. And so, they actually used stock footage to tell the story and apparently the quality of that work and the originality of that work was really really strong.
So, there’s something, again I don’t want to sugarcoat this either, but there’s something that triumphed, there’s something that came through, through these constraints, which constraints and creativity are an interesting relationship, but I think was really very very powerful.
AD: That’s really inspiring to hear. Sam Hoi, what was your experience at Mica?
Sammy Hoi: So just like at RISD and at ArtCenter likewise at Mica, I’ve seen incredible responses from both faculty and students, not just to the adjustment to remote modes of teaching, learning and making but also in the specific context of the pandemic and I’ll offer one very concrete example.
In our first-year experiences for our freshman right, first year students, it’s a project called Pandemic Polyamory. So, the students examined both their personal and larger social condition, shaped by the pandemic and addressed them through art and design and through their personal lens. The outcomes have been wide ranging, ranging from parodies of western master works as a humorous antidote to the fear and uncertainty in society and advocacy website that’s been built for Indian migration workers, communication kits that use the kind of dynamics of chain ladders but to promote both health practices and social connections in the time of social distancing to an app to connect isolated international students in the US.
A key educational outcome of the app, firstly experience program is for students to connect themselves to the communities and to the larger world and explore the power and responsibility of artists and designers in that connection and the remote modes of education and the pandemic have just offered new angles for that work. So that’s really interesting, again reinforcing everything that Rosanne and Lorne have said and the faculty also worked double and triple time to build new ways to showcase their classes projects.
I think Rosanne gave some examples, in our cases they have simulated virtual galleries, they have presented student collections now, not only through websites and images, but also doing individual podcasts with all the students that are just so wonderful and informing.
So, I would say, again echoing something that’s been said, we are now gonna go back, we’re going to harvest a lot of these more inclusive, innovative and vibrant practices and build that into, kind of the new normal when we return to, kind of post COVID-19.
I also want to kind of emphasise something that Rosanne and Lorne said which is not true, really diminish actually the shock, the disappointment and the difficulties faced by, especially by the students, they were basically cast out of campuses, not with our desire [0.20.00]. And that shock and trauma in some way overcome by the vibrant outcomes that we are seeing, I would say is a tremendous testament to the creative nature of our students and faculty. I think the more traumatic it was, in a way, the more victorious it is now at this end as well.
AD: I love to hear this and I wanted to start off with some good news, to hear some stories of resilience and creative adaptation to this challenge but this abrupt shift to a new mode of learning probably also revealed some hidden inequities, things, cracks below the surface and I want to get your take on what are some of the things… You know as designers we see that as an opportunity because now we know where certain systems are failing and we can address them. I wanna know what are the new things that emerged and you became aware of during this transition to remote learning and how you’ll be factoring this into future educational strategies. And we’ll start with you Sammy.
SH: That’s a great question. I think I would say that, I suspect that Rosanne and Lorne will agree with me as well, as you say when things been kind of cracked open, every moment is a soul searching moment to say you know, is the past correct, you know what’s the opportunity in the present and how can we construct the better future.
So, regarding new perspectives that should inform future education strategies, I’m gonna actually quote the very eloquent words of one of our current students, I don’t think I can top him, his name is Miguel Aparchelli, he’s a MICA MFA student who is a social practice artist and educator and also an advocate for alternative educational models. And he was interviewed just as luck had it, by a local magazine called BmoreArt magazine, at the time of campus closure and he was asked, I’m gonna read this now.
How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect your education at Mica? And he responded ‘My education is stimulated by the crisis, the art schools have been stripped of galleries, events, laboratories and other resources and we only had two things left, knowledge and community. Schools became only schools, putting in check both the students and the institution itself. What remains to be seen in these months is whether our pedagogical systems are solid enough to approach education from another place, more sensitive to reality outside our bubbles and inhabiting a global crisis.’
I think Miguel is spot on, going forward I think we have to make sure that art and design education has to connect even more to the real world and you certainly have three exemplary schools that do that already. So I'm challenging us to do even more and become more accessible.
I think the social inequality, the high tuition, I think the mode of education that we have, I would challenge us to say that, we are not being as accessible as we can and very importantly, I think the value of artists and designers are in our hand to prove to the world and we have to also make our education even more understood and embraced by, not only policy makers but really a lot of segments in society and industries so that we can exercise the power and the influence that we should have.
AD: Wonderful, I love that you read that quote from one of your students. President Buckman, Lorne, what’s your take on some of the fractures and the additional challenges that emerged during this that you’ll have to factor into future learning.
LB: Yeah, I just wanna echo that, that’s just a beautiful bit of writing Sammy, thank you for sharing that yeah. I think I’d take this question by talking about some of the personal issues that our students are facing and some of our faculty as well. First of all there’s just the huge burden of what it costs to go to college and what our students are bearing and they’ve got it down to a kind of precision. And when they’re trying to work their way through college and they lose their jobs, there’s a whole level of vulnerability that emerges and a lot of students have written to me about their families, and their families being out of work. And this kind of system of support that they had developed and now their families are out of work and not able to support them.
So the college has had to rally with emergency funding to help students to deal with food insecurity, housing insecurity, a lot of tuition delayed payments etc etc, a lot of challenges that students are facing which of course as that stress builds, it affects their learning, their capacity to open, their capacity to engage in the most, in the fullest possible way.
Other kinds of interesting ways in which students, you know as much as some students felt more comfortable, other students felt embarrassed. They felt embarrassed that people would see their environment, that it was too humble or that it was something that they felt like they didn’t want to share with their fellow class mates and that they also felt too much of the gaze on them and that they became very self-conscious in this kind of Zoom environment.
And for however they had constructed mechanisms to kind of hide from that a little bit in a person to person environment, within the context of Zoom it became very intense and they became self-conscious I think and felt that that too kind of interfered with the learning.
Some of them expressed a great fatigue, all of us have talked about Zoom fatigue, but when you think about it within the context of the classroom and what happens and how can faculty ensure students are engaged but at the same time kind of let them free and just trying to balance those personal and social dynamics has become a really complicated pedagogical challenge.
And then finally I would say that just facing all of the obvious challenges of you know, they don’t have access to shops anymore, they don’t have access to labs anymore, how do they accommodate that, how do they switch, how do they use what they have. How do they create makeshift studio spaces. We have a service bureau so they can send in a file and we can make it for them and send it back to them but that becomes a very complicated process as well.
So trying to get all of these issues, to be sensitive to peoples different kinds of positions, peoples different kinds of sensitivities and also sort of the resourcefulness that they need to be able to gather up different ways of making and different context and spaces and materials of making, has all become a very interesting but very difficult challenge.
AD: What I love about this discussion is all of the things that you guys are attempting to navigate with empathy and sensitivity and real thoughtfulness in terms of the ecosystem of the arts and design education world, can also be a template for greater society, moving forward and Rosanne, I would love to hear what was revealed to you at RISD or how you’re thinking about these new, this new awareness that’ll be factored in to strategic learning.
RS: I’m glad that you connected to the larger societal issues because I think when making these same discoveries in different fashions at different levels across the globe. Specifically, in our student population we saw immediate social equity differences in terms of having to ship a lot of computers and software and even set up hotspots for students that didn’t have access to the internet. Things that were logistical that in some cases as one of my colleagues said, could feel embarrassing but we had to face them head-on to make it work.
But there are also subtle things like sharing bedrooms with siblings who are also doing remote learning at different levels of their education. So these assumptions that we might have made at the beginning that students would be able to work in these remote forms across the board became challenged right away and we had to realize that there are very different levels of socio-economics in our student body.
A lot of the students who are first generation students who were trying to do projects within their family apartment or you know, in a public space within their family, felt it was very difficult to have people questioning what they were doing because they couldn’t understand all of the implications or the purposes of everything that the students were doing, so then they were juggling you know various factors.
Another thing I think that became really difficult and I can’t imagine doing this, but on the one hand you are, your art schools student in your class on Zoom with your peers and on the other hand you know the back of you is your childhood home. And for many college students, there is a tremendous evolution of their identity in all kinds of ways and so you almost have one face to who you are in your art school world and another to who you were you know when you left to go to your art school world. And navigating that for students was highly anxiety producing as you can imagine and for good reason.
So, I think some of the anxiousness was, I mean we found ways with continued counselling and numbers of others of support but just seeing that head-on is kind of a microcosm for what a lot of people are experiencing around the world and as Lorne said, some of these students were worried because their parents had lost their jobs. We had huge emergency funds, our own students created a GoFundMe fund which helped as well. We did a large push for financial aid which was a challenge financially for us because of the financial implications about this but we felt an obligation to our families and our students.
And that is going to be an ongoing challenge but you know, when you bring it to the larger society we see it in terms of who has access to safety equipment and gear, who has access to good medical plans, who has access to even safe spaces where they’re not clustered with large families or other groups of people. Who has access, who can afford delivery services, who has to go out and interact in the world, there are all these different issues that really became exposed across, not just education but across all the societal implications of this pandemic.
And these are things that designers and artists care deeply about and I think there are huge opportunities for us to look at in terms of our commitments to just societies and to designing more humane futures, there are tremendous design opportunities in all of the obstacles and problems that were uncovered by this pandemic.
AD: Absolutely and one of the things that I read in researching this is, you know Sammy had mentioned that we’re thinking a new normal but on the MICA website, you’re not rethinking a new normal, it says that you’re thinking of a better normal. So, we’re faced with this opportunity to sort of distil out all of the really keeper, all the good things to keep and to improve the things where we see weaknesses and fractures and then to set that as an example that can be implemented at other educational institutions.
But also in civic design strategy, in policy making and in society at large but in order to do that, you guys have to stay afloat economically and this has been an incredible challenge for the institution. For the students both and I want to talk quickly about how we can manage the economic challenges for both the students and the institution moving forward.
Obviously, you took a big hit this year but now we’ve gotta look at the future. So, what does that look like for the students, let's start with the students. Actually, let's start with you Sammy and if you can talk a little bit about the student and the institutional prospective, that would be great.
SH: Sure, yeah. So I think we are all looking from caring for our students, not just education but their personal well-being and their physical well-being and as you know, physical health is actually part of mental health and physical health as well.
So, the MICA board and administration are truly aware of the financial stress on our students and their families and we wanted to and we have kind of assisted where we can and should. So I think both RISD and MICA I think have a similar measure, we gave $150 out to all students on financial aid from the get-go as soon as the crisis you know onset, just to put some cash you know in their hands and there was no application process.
And also we prorated the room and board of our students in the dormitory very quickly and did payments in two ways so we can get cash right in their hands and then calculate the balance later on and not hold the balance, you know and delay and like RISD and Rosanne I’m sure, ArtCenter too, we have an angel fund at MICA that we have raised money to enhance and then also we got federal care money as quickly as possible to fuse that kind of you know funding to students.
So, I think we need to also address the question head-on as part of institutional care. Many students right now across the country and certainly our three institutions also want tuition refund, so that’s the one expect that we basically had said no, we cannot do that without ruining the institution because I think students and the families knew that we were saving a lot of money by moving to remote education.And the fact is that actually we are retaining all of the faculty and staff who were working even more to deliver a different kind of education and the facilities, while being idled, actually still have carrying costs and this actually came in the last quarter of the fiscal year for many of us, so the saving is really not that much.
So we have to explain very carefully to students and families that despite our care and wanting to help, that’s the one area that we feel that we actually have provided continuous education that allowed them to complete the semester and finish their degrees. So we are not offering you know tuition refunds. But aside from that, the institution itself is also planning for taking care of ourselves, just like an airplane, if you put the kind of oxygen mask on you have to have actually the institution do that first.
So, we are looking ahead to say how can we look at, not only the very difficult this year but next year actually is even more difficult. At MICA we believe actually we can scrape by this year and maybe even have a balanced budget year which is amazing. But next year, it’s going to be tremendously difficult and this is not just us at the art schools, but the entire higher education sector.
So how do we go forward with the whole campus team coming together as one single unit to say, we’re going to endure some pain and sacrifices but at the same time, knowing that we are also doing it in a strategic way that we’re gonna actually come out of it better and more resilient and bolder and for that better normal.
So just very quickly, at MICA we have put together what we call the R Five road map. The R5 stands for 5 Rs, respond, reopen, recover, reimagine and remake. So, we actually, combined together into one single thread, this kind of actions that we’re gonna be very responsible and do, very agile and respond to immediate prices. We’re gonna aim to get through, strive through with minimum harm but at the same time harvest from it all the lessons that we have learned, all the productive ruptures and make sure that we think about the future in a positive way.
And that road map has been shared with everyone on campus including parents and the response has been actually incredibly positive and people are really looking, we’re still building those teams right now going forward. So, the proof is in the pudding, they will send out details but as a framework of actually getting the college going forward as one team has been very very useful
And that's our goal, is to not be a fringe from the short-term sacrifices and pain, but make sure that the longer term are positive outcome, not just for the school but for society. Like Rosanne said, this is a great opportunity for us to rethink how can we have a more just society and more just education going forward as our larger aim.
AD: I’m sure that transparency is appreciated by all, so they can see how your decision making is working and being implemented and they understand.
Sh: Right, yeah, I have never conducted as many town halls and I just came from one (laughter) into this meeting and I think Rosanne and Lorne are doing the same, I think right now communication is absolutely key.
AD: Rosanne, what would you say about the economic challenges from the student perspective and from the institution perspective?
RS: It’s huge, I mean I won’t beat around the bush, this is an enormous component of things we have to solve here, you know. In addition to the added expenses, we lost a lot of revenue, we had to cancel a lot of programming, all of our continuing ed, our museum had to close and we had no admissions and you know we have a lot of events that were scheduled that generate revenue.
And you know we’re always trying to come up with a model for education, knowing how hard the formula is, to augment the dependence on tuition with other forms of revenue, which pretty much all got cancelled. We also paid all of our, you know everyone including all of our student workers, even though many of them weren’t doing campus jobs, just because we knew they relied on that money and we did give prorated housing refunds.
So, our immediate year, this year and next year is already challenged, moving forward we’re really going to have to look at what higher education means post COVD and there are going to have to be some very tough decisions. I don’t think that the module that we are used to operating under, will still be the model that makes sense moving forward and it’s not just financially speaking.
I think, you know, I've been talking about it as the new abnormal, I don’t think we can ever go back to where we were, everything, every industry has changed, every kind of work has changed. I’m on an executive advisory board with business leaders and our government officials and hearing the changes that are happening in every industry and every work force and in the way that property is used and leased and work from home challenges and the way that jobs are going to be configured and thought of, the way that food is delivered, the way that transportation will happen, everything is going to change.
So, it would not make sense at all if education which is sort of leading the future, educating the next generation, also didn’t make massive changes. So the big question is going to be, how to decide what those changes are in a very positive way, using the brain trust of faculty and students and staff and board etc, to figure out what education can contribute to defining a future landscape which doesn’t just respond to the pandemic, but actually takes our creativity and our empathy and our passion and helps to move it forward in a way that will affect, certainly society but also the whole construct of art and design education. I think to do anything less at this point, in some ways is irresponsible.
LB: I think that’s really well said and I would only add to your comment Rosanne, that it often gets confined in a language of online or face to face, but it’s not that binary. I think we need to be much more expansive in the way we think about it and the kinds of questions we ask, in the ways we conceive of that kind of relationship to get the most creative, most exciting, richest, most meaningful new structure, new architecture if possible.
AD: Yeah, I love that you’re framing it as not reacting to a crisis, but actually mobilizing to create a situation in which we can thrive in the new post pandemic situation. And that’s really where I think art and design and nimble thinking and creative thinking can set an example and be a real asset to society at large. And any time there’s a mass retooling of anything, it’s incredibly economically expensive and turbulent and now we’ve got to think about the fall semester and the summer semester and how to move forward in a situation that’s still unfolding and that is still very uncertain.
And what I'm seeing from all of you, you’ve talked about it a little bit, is you’ve put together these sort of systems for planning, that have to be fine-tuned and taken to account new data from the brain trust, almost every day and those systems have to be flexible and agile and very responsive. Can you talk about those systems because I think there’s a lot to be learned from that, both for other institutions but also for just general, everybody out there is trying to navigate uncertainty and I think creatives know how to do that with a little bit more flexibility. So, I'd love to hear how you’re planning the unplannable. Let's start with you Rosanne.
RS: Sure, so I think all of us probably have task forces and working groups in every kind of configuration one could imagine. And, in our case, we created six working groups initially that were each taking and analyzing a particular part based primarily on the academic programs. We set up a framework first that said that there were three priorities that had to be addressed in order.
The first was the health and safety of the entire community and our, the communities that we impact. The second was our academic integrity of all of our programs and the third was institutional sustainability. So that became a, you know we tested some things and they worked in one but not all three. So, we were coming up with plans that actually addressed all three of those issues and we had a number of groups that looked at specific aspects of what makes sense moving forward.
And as we got further into that work and actually, we just had a draft of that plan, I just received it last night in its, with all the committee working together and we’re analyzing it today and tomorrow to come up with an actual response. But one of the things that we realized is that we also needed a decision-making framework. So we developed that to say, how are we going to make decisions and one thing about a community, a successful functional community, is that the voices at every level are so important, it’s not just administrative, so all of these committees included students, staff, faculty, academic administrators and senior administrators and we’ve been checking in regularly with our board. But you know there's, there could be one little comment that a student would make that will just turn the whole planning process in a new direction because it’s something that we hadn’t experienced or considered.
So, the time-consuming nature of being so inclusive is a little bit exhausting but it is absolutely necessary to come out with results that actually are meaningful to the community and then the second piece which Sammy touched on is the communication piece. You know we’re doing; I was originally doing a daily which was a summary every day, now it’s three times a week, we’ve also done a number of town halls and specific you know communications through alumni, parents to board etc.
And the fact of making a community feel like one community, even in all of its disparate parts, is so important to making us be able to take this enormous challenge and move it forward in the best possible way. So, engaging everyone in both the brainstorming level and the kind of communication and outreach level has been essential to the success I think of these planning process.
Having said that, we’re still not decided about what we’re doing, we will have a decision by June 15th but we were hoping that there would be more clarity from external you know sources. But those have in fact in some ways impeded our ability to move forward. We have very good relationships with our governor within this state and our federal representatives but beyond that, you know, access to testing, numbers of health protocols, those are so sporadic and changing so much that we had to actually hire our own consultants and rely on our own sort of data driven research to come up with how we were going to figure out the processes that made sense for our institution.
AD: Lorne, what are you employing at ArtCenter as a strategy?
LB: Well it begins with kind of echoing something that you suggested in your comment earlier and that is that artists and designers do know something about the space of uncertainty because it is ultimately a very creative space. And the work that artists and designers do is so often going into places of the unknown and they create and they make and they do in order to discover what it is that can be born of that work and of that making.
And so, I do think that artists and designers hold a kind of special perspective in all of this that because they know the richness, as scary as the space is, uncertainty is, they know the richness of it and all the potential that can come from it. And so, we really are trying to ask the question on the greatest level of not, should it be online, should it be in person but what in the future is really going to be the right kind of, the right combination. What are the learning modalities that are going to make a difference? What can be online, what needs to be person to person? How do we explore a very nuanced kind of configuration of ways of learning and different kinds of approaches that we want to take.
I think the other thing that, I certainly think ArtCenter is up against and I'm pretty sure RISD and MICA are as well, and that is you know these small art and specialized tuition dependant institutions are facing and have faced for years but man the day of reckoning seems to have come. Of, we just can't continue this model; we just can’t keep on creating that tuition increase every year and students borrowing more money and all of the expenses that are associated with it.
Not only because its unsustainable and border line unethical in terms of the amount of debt that our students have to take on, and all of the deep worries that are associated with that but also because It's just gonna all blow up. I mean we don’t have the means to keep that module going and there was a horizon out there that we were thinking about. How do we build a model that mitigates tuition dependency?
Because right now we are limited, it’s an old fashion model, it doesn’t work anymore and we’re coming to the end of it and what happened with this pandemic as far as I'm concerned, is that it accelerated that process and that horizon came and found us. And now we need to respond and now we need to be innovative and now we need to go into those places of uncertainty and we need to create and we need to make and we need to experiment and we need to innovate.
And so far, the little tastes of that, the hints of that, that have come through our process, students are picking up on it and they’re engaging with us and they’re getting excited about it and we just started our summer term and we are fully enrolled, completely online and most of that had to do with the energy that was coming from faculty and chairs, about their excitement of this experimentation. Their excitement of what it means to go into this place of uncertainty but we need to do it on a larger scale of the institutions as well and really get at this tuition dependant academic module which I think has come to the end of its days.
AD: I think you touched on something that I hadn’t really internalised but that students are part and parcel of this whole program in terms of having a sense of urgency to create what that better normal is. What the new module of education is and because they have that investment and ownership, they can get excited and inspired about. It’s not been fed to them by the powers that be. They’re the architects of it alongside with the institutions and I think that’s a really powerful space to be in.
LB: And they know something and they understand something that we don’t and Rosanne is absolutely right, one word from a student can shift perspective in the most important way.
AD We’re gonna take questions from the audience in just a little bit so make sure to go ahead and submit your questions via the Q&A button, either at the top or the bottom of your Zoom window. And before we wrap things up, did you have anything you wanted to say on that topic? Sammy you were pretty clear in your planning process through the five R’s.
SH: Yeah just to add that Amy, I love the word, planning for the unplannable, I think the only way to go forward is really work with multiple scenarios and strive to achieve the best while ready to cope with other you know possibilities. And as Lorne and Rosanne pointed out, that is so akin to the creative process, we are all about iteration and reiteration based on you know, the stimuli that are coming.
So because of that as a community, I think we do have the opportunity to shape with that and in terms of our five R’s roadmap going forward, I think the one that really excites me the most is the reimagine and remake and I think we will have a chance to remake not only ourselves, our model but hopefully contributing to remaking our society. In large of course we are not in such power we can remake society at large but I think we can put forth a change agents, creative change agents who can help with that remaking process.
AD: Well with that in mind, I’d love to talk to you about how the various institutions are networking together to share this brain trust, to share what’s working what’s not working. The insight of a student at RISD would obviously benefit you know the ArtCenter community, the planning committee at MICA. And there are a myriad of multiple smaller institutions that are, maybe don’t have as much access or resources that could benefit from being part of a larger network. Is something like that happening? Is there a special council where you (laughs) can all compare notes, share information and sort of strengthen numbers?
SH: I volunteer Lorne to start that because he’s actually the chair of the Association of Independent College of Art and Design, the current board that Rosanne and I both belong to. (Laughs)
LB: Yeah one of the great joys of this work is really having colleagues like Rosanne and Sammy and being able to share our ideas and to, there’s so much creative possibility in the ways in which we can talk to each other and we can collaborate and we can share our, both our achievements and our war stories. And really be able to discover what the possibility is and I’ve learned an enormous amount from both of them.
And that extends to the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design called AICAD in which we’ve had regular meetings of presidential leadership, the CFOs have met, deans and students have met, admissions teams have met, all of them collaborating on these questions of what might be possible. How we can share best practices, how we can share the kinds of questions we’re trying to address to get as deep as we possibly can into what our challenges are and how we’ve come up, each come up with different kinds of solutions.
I will say and this is just a kind of delight of the world somehow but I’ve always wondered the power of the the network because I will talk to Sammy or to Rosanne or to another president about a certain idea, convinced that art centers come up with the original great new idea right, (laughter) and it’s already going on at RISD and MICA you know. And this kind of thing when we don’t even talk to each other and yet we are, [0.55.00] there are so many different ways in which very similar kinds of things are emerging and that becomes you know really fertile ground and really exciting and a really wonderful way for us to learn and to collaborate and really thank goodness for colleagues like this and for our ability to connect in this particular way. I find it energizing and as I said quite nourishing.
RS: I was just going to add to that but I think one of the reasons it works is that we all really know who we are as institutions and all really respect each other’s institutions, it’s not competitive. And I think because we are sort of a specialized group of educators in terms of the art and design genre, there is enormous respect across the board so that, and we need each other and there is a wonderful opportunity to learn from one another.
And I think in this pandemic, the community has really expanded to a number of things like, venues like this, podcasts, conversations across professionals, across educators, across employees, all looking at how we can take that sense of sharing knowledge and learning and growing through this together. We’re all sick of the word ‘unprecedented’ but it really is the most extraordinary challenge we’ve ever faced in, certainly in my professional life anything and I think a lot of people are feeling that. So that sense of really knowing who you are, respecting your peers and feeling that you have, that the only way this is going to work is with hands out to one another, that is something we can all take from this particular moment in time.
SH: Yeah, I’ll just add that I think one of those exciting developments at AICAD is that, Amy, you correctly identify students being the center of everything that we do and I think since our last year because of our diversity and equity inclusion effort, students are now connecting across you know campuses and so we are actually building pipelines for more diverse students to come into our, you know, teaching force and they’re having conversations, I think that’s gonna be in hands a lot of our learning, in another way a kind of going forward.
AD: Well I’m so excited that we were able to put this conversation together and I want to get to questions. We have one from anonymous attendee: How should students keep their creativity and studio environment alive in a digital learning environment if COVID-19 causes campuses to stay closed for the upcoming fall semester, especially for students in majors that use physical deliverables as a critical part in the design process?
SH: First of all I think it’s been amazing, I think all three of us gave some examples. I think faculty and students have found a really creative way to find existing resources within the home. We had students who replicated over two or three days in time lapsed videos of how they actually turned their home into a thesis exhibition you know environment.
So I think there are ways to do that but at the same time there are certain elements of an art and design education that really cannot completely be replicated and therefore we are also looking really our hardest to say, what are the stopgap measures but how can we return to a new kind of better, more thoughtful, more accessible kind of environment in the future, that definitely will provide some of the essential elements of art and design education which is, you know, a studio and facilities.
We do not have time to talk about you know how does that work in a physical distancing environment but as soon as we’re allowed to reopen, even if there are public health measures in place, health and safety comes first. For example we are already rearranging all the ceramic wheels so that they are, you know, distant enough that we can have classes, classes may be shifted in you know, two shifts instead of one whole class etc.
So we are very eager to return to the kind of art and design education that will allow for kind of that in person and access to facilities but in the meantime, because we are a resourceful and creative community, I think we will be able to find meaningful ways that will challenge students creativity and have them rise to the occasion but I don’t think it can be forever.
AD: Understood. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for cross pollination of technique, technical information as well. I know as a furniture designer that I learned just as much from sewing and garment construction about forum and composition. And so I think there are ways that students can engage at home with different materials but still apply it to a different discipline because that cross pollination is also for me, that’s where the magic is, that’s where you find unforeseen connections.
SH: I’m sure Rosanne and Lorne have things to say so I won’t dominate but I think virtual reality is a really really huge asset. So we had actually product design classes now where students actually created kind of, almost tactile, you know visually tcctile elements that could place in a real environment. So everything is actually simulated to such a degree that again it would change us as to think about how do present projects and think about you know productions kind of going forward. So I think there are alternatives as you mentioned.
AD: Okay here’s another one from Christine Goldman: Wondering what campus housing will look like in the fall in particular, how do you plan to keep students safe in dense living environments such as dormitories? Let’s throw this one to Rosanne.
RS: Well as I said we’re still in the planning phase to decide what we’re doing but if we do have students on campus, they will be in single rooms. And part of one of our task forces is developing a whole strategy around distanced campus that includes housing and dining and you know, we have 162 students on campus that weren’t able to leave for various reasons who are still on our campus.
They’ve all been following the protocols of all the health recommendations that are in the state which, you know, I don’t have to repeat them, everyone knows them, you know the disinfecting, the social distancing, the masks etc and we’ve done food delivery service and the whole thing has worked beautifully. And you know I’m really proud of the fact that with all of this upheaval with no warning, all of our students either got out safely to places where they were safe without having COVID or remained on campus safely and without having COVID.
So there are a lot of things that one can put in place to ensure, to the best of our abilities, that we’re following health protocols, which are the same protocols that they’re using in other context, not just housing, to ensure that the health commitment is there. And that it’s expressed in the systems and structures that were put in place.
I think the idea of the keg party which is not something that we all have very much in our schools anyway. I think that’s going to the wayside for a while but you know it’s more, I think in our instances, even more than housing which is somewhat easier I think to regulate, it’s more the notion of students in facilities who were collaborating before all the complexities of the work spaces that are really the things that need careful thought. I think the housing is a little easier in a way.
AD: So we’re running out of time, so I feel like we should wrap things up. We do have a ton more questions though, so we tried to get to all of them but there are a lot more. So I want to invite everyone to continue the conversation with us on Instagram at @wanteddesign. And I want to thank President Somerson, President Hoi and President Buckman for this really compelling conversation but also for the thoughtful way you’re leading your institutions through this crisis. And of course I want to thank Design Milk and huge thanks to Claire Pijoulat and Odile Hainaut, the organisers of WantedDesign and this conversation series. Thank you for listening! To view the replay or check out the rest of the Wanted Design online 2020 conversation series go to wanteddesignnyc.com/online. Our website is Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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