In an effort to continue my attempted journey to becoming an open president I have started Twittering as inspired by my hero Jason Kottke.

RISD’s 2008 undergraduate and graduate admissions catalogues, produced by RISD’s Communications + Design Division, have both won awards recently. Director of Admissions Ed Newhall BArch ‘74 and Gilbert Design, the Providence-based firm run by Joe Gilbert ‘74 GD and Melissa Gilbert ‘76 GD, jointly accepted the Mohawk Windpower Partnership Award for printing the undergrad book on FSC-certified Mohawk Options, which offsets 100% of the energy used to make it with Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) from non-polluting windpower projects. Competing against 4,700 entries, the grad admissions catalogue designed by Isaac Gertman MFA ‘07 GD was selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of 255 “examples of outstanding design produced in 2007.” It will be included in 365: AIGA Annual Design Competitions 29, which will be presented as both a print annual and a traveling exhibition that opens at the AIGA National Design Center in NYC on December 10.

I’m currently attending “summer camp for new university/college presidents” which is a 5-day intense program to teach me everything I need to know to do this job. Much of the content is kind of like what would you see in an Exec Ed MBA seminar so it allows me to wax back to my days of joyously taking accounting and financial analysis as part of my MBA education. I’ve always enjoyed numbers, visuals, and people so I think I’m in my element here.

A common thread I see in presidents I have met here is an intense love for their new home institutions. I also found an interesting expression from the rector that “a president is the human logo for their university/college.” Which made me think maybe I need a RISD tattoo of some form … but figure the Board wouldn’t go for that (smile). And so my/our learning continues …

Trustee and RISD parent Dick Haining reports that there is an upcoming exhibition of work by alumni Bill Hall ‘70 IL and Kenn Speiser ‘68 SC at the Greenleaf Gallery in Duck, NC. The exhibition is on view August 1-31 and will feature watercolors and oils by Bill and a series of handmade prints by Kenn. So, if your summer travel plans include a trip to the Outer Banks, be sure to stop in!

Thanks, Dick, for keeping us informed!

I was at the White House yesterday for the National Design Awards as a program of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum where I am a Trustee. Fortunately I was able to personally celebrate the bestowment of the honor of the Communications Design Award with winner and RISD alum Scott Stowell with whom I am comfortably pictured here. Congratulations Scott! I enjoyed how Scott told me that when he got the call that he had received the award, he told his studio, “Okay guys. We’re all done now.” Which is of course a joke as now as 2006 Communications Design winner alum-founded company 2×4 well knows — the work never ends because it just gets more and more interesting. As someone who received the 2001 award, I now know (smile).

Summertime is vacation time in New England, and there are few better places to visit than Newport, RI. If you’re in the area, you might want to drop by alum Didi Suydam’s [RISD ‘85, Jewelry + Metalsmithing] gallery which is featuring new sculptural work by Prof. Peter Diepenbrock [RISD ‘83, Industrial Design] of the RISD Furniture Design department from this Saturday. The exhibition closes August 12 and it’s an event I certainly don’t want to miss.

As I have completed my first month as President of RISD, I have begun to get a rough sense of the what I have to do. Given that I have roughly three years to get something done I figure that the best way to proceed is to be reflective. It’s something I’ve done with random pre-blog scribbles since around 2002, and then more regularly on roughly the topic of “simplicity” but I did tend to stray and talk about professional life’s complexities.

What do I have to do? Well quite simply I have to understand every aspect of RISD. Given that normal freshmen get four years to become RISDoids I do acknowledge a slight advantage on their part. But I do have something of a competitive streak in me so where I can walk, I will run instead.

How does one understand an entire institution? In comparison, let us diverge to the topic of the Web. When the Web was first invented, it was fairly useless until search engines were invented. Imagine the Web with absolutely no Google or Yahoo! or Ask.com. There. Unimaginable, huh? So the challenge in this first year, I believe, is one of developing a search algorithm to understand the vast majority of RISD-ness I will need to communicate RISD externally and internally.

Google, and any search engine for that matter, leverages hyperlink structures to figure out the importance of a web page above other similar pages. For instance if I have a page about cats that is linked to by a dozen people, versus my friend’s page on cats that is linked to by nobody at all, then my cat page is significantly more “important” and it shows up on the list of top hits. Certain pages might be naturally more important than others. For instance, a web page on cats hosted on the National Feline Society’s website is more likely to be important than Dave Bottomdorf’s page on his 3-year old cat. Thus the popularity and status of a web page matters in the game of search, as could be said about the challenge of understanding a community of people by using popularity and status as a means of assessing individuals or groups. As we know however, Google is not always right. Although popularity and status are excellent correllants to the “importance” of information or a person, there is always room for error.

So although it’s possible to find concentrated ways to pinpoint the right source or nexus in a classic “depth-first” strategy, there’s still something to be said about a more laborious “breadth-first” approach as well. So in the spirit of breadth-first, I continue to chat with random RISD students, faculty, and staff in the cafes, stairwells, lobbies, and elevators around campus to increase my understanding of RISD. I’m also developing the communication links at the highest levels of RISD to enable greater teamwork, shared strategic thinking, and a zest for innovation as we all understand what having a new president can really mean in this new day. Do both and Only connect meet.

I am often told that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and although I wasn’t there I figure that stat is likely correct. So with all of you I continue the search

Today I was reminded of how computers can just sit there and seem to do absolutely nothing, but still can be entirely doing something. When a computer crashes or becomes unresponsive, it’s not that it’s died or anything. It’s usually because it is stuck in what is called an “infinite loop.”

The concept of doing something forever seems foreign to mortals like you and me. Yet the computer really isn’t human and can do things that we could never imagine doing. The photo above will flip back and forth, back and forth, forever. If allowed to do so. The computer is working fairly hard to make that action happen, and yet it doesn’t tire at all. It can do that action a thousand times. A million times. A billion times.

The computer never gets bored of a repetitive task like you and me. I ask you to stare at this image and determine when you get bored. And then as you stare at the image, you discover so many things. The swaying of the trees, the pivoting of the man’s knee, the reflections in the windows differ, and a myriad of things begin to stand out as subtle differences between two points of time that are so narrowly separated you wouldn’t expect so many changes to be visible. Perhaps I won’t get bored and will outlast the computer this time. We shall see.

I was pointed by RISD Director of Public Engagement Peter Hocking to this essay on The Goals of a Liberal Education by Prof. William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Cronon’s essay outlines ten qualities in people that come from a well-composed liberal arts education:

1. They listen and they hear.
2. They read and they understand.
3. They can talk with anyone.
4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.
5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.
7. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.
8. They understand how to get things done in the world.
9. They nurture and empower the people around them.
10. They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howard’s End: “Only connect…”

His tenth point on “only connect” is the magic secret sauce of what he describes as the key — which is “to see the connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways.” It is about establishing the ability through mastering 1 through 9 to achieve “the freedom to connect.” This feels like true intellectual freedom to me.

**2008 RISD Honorary Degree Recipient Yo-yo Ma’s 4 tenets seem to dock well with Cronon’s framework.

Erica Gerard Di Bona and Brian Lefler have recently been appointed co-chairs of the Parents’ Council, starting in July, 2008. Both are parents of students who have just completed their Foundation Studies year and both have been on the Council for the past year.

Through the Parents’ Council, the co-chairs hope to encourage other parents to support RISD with their time, professional experience, connections in the world of art and design and through financial contributions.

Erica, a television producer who lives in Los Angeles, recognizes the particular challenges parents living on the West Coast (and other distant places) face in being closely involved from a geographic distance. She plans to take a role that will connect her to the school in meaningful ways despite living in LA, 3,000 miles away. By serving as co-chair of the Parents’ Council she hopes to help form a large network of parents around the US and the world.

Brian is a vice president in the corporate office of Fifth Third Securities in East Lansing, MI, where he supervises the development and financing of public, commercial and nonprofit projects. Translating his understanding of investment to the RISD landscape, he sees an opportunity for expanding the participation of RISD parents in supporting RISD. He hopes to increase awareness of the college among parents and would like to encourage support and ideas for increasing representation in Annual Giving.

Lefler sees that his son Lucas Lefler ‘11 AR has found his niche. Lucas tells Brian again and again that he is so glad to be at a school that’s putting him ahead of his peers in terms of education and training.

Di Bona’s daughter Jamie Goldstein ‘11 PT has had a similar response to studying at RISD. Erica is thrilled that Jamie is in “exactly the right place.” In her first year at RISD, Jamie reported that she had three of the best teachers in her life.

If you have any questions about the Parents’ Council, please contact Pat Thornton: pthornto*AT*risd.edu