Today RISD Trustee Dick Haining sent me this link from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I have personally observed Daniel Pink’s message from his popular book A Whole New Mind have had a resounding din in a variety of sectors for the past few years. We know that right-brainedness is important, and yet our traditional K-12 educational system is gradually shifting society towards more left-brainedness due to the way that national and other standardized testing systems like the SAT grade younger people. It’s easy to measure how many math problems a child will get right; it’s not as easy to measure how well they understand or can emulate Caravaggio.

I now increasingly feel that it isn’t a matter of a preference for the left- or right-brained approach to an issue. Instead it’s a matter more of how well and how nimbly one can shift between their two hemispheres and come to a set of possible solutions that lean left (logic), right (feeling), and smack dab in the middle.

I’m certainly not alone in my comfort for the middle-brain approach. In the book Governance and Leadership by Richard Chait et al he names an extremely constructive mode of collaboration called “generative thinking.” Relatedly Roger Martin at the Rotman School refers to a mode of thought where “ambiguity is okay” as integrative thinking; David Kelley at Stanford refers to a kind of experiment-provoking line of breadth-first problem-solving as design thinking. Essentially the world is converging towards a divergent mode of thought — today we can do both. We can be an artist and an engineer; we can be an accountant and a graphic designer; we can be a computer programmer and a CEO; we can be one thing and another even when we’re using diametrically opposed thinking styles.

Given that I grew up in a large family where I often had to sit in the back seat squished in the middle “on the bump,” I am now glad that I was pre-conditioned to being a middle-ish kind of guy.

Devotion to excellence in teaching is a way of life at RISD. I know perhaps the greatest joy as a teacher is when you experience your students grow to surpass your own capabilities. It’s a humbling experience when it happens and puts your entire creative life into perspective.

When my former student Peter Cho sent me an update on his recent piece it made me smile in that way you feel when you’ve been bested by your child in a running race, and at the same time being proud that they have won the race on completely fair terms.

The joy of life is the opportunity to learn. If not from your students, from the people around you, and also the people that came before you. Books. Lifelong university printed on pulp and available in large quantities everywhere. Everything is connected. Peter’s work reminded me of one of my “professors on the bookshelf” — Calvino.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium changed my life. I know for many students at RISD, if it is not Calvino it is some other book they have read … that shapes how they see, touch, smell, taste, and consummate the creative acts in which they engage. Literature has the quality of making that which is abstract stay abstract and thus open for more interpretation than most.

I wonder if Peter had read Calvino and if it influenced the way he thinks. I read Calvino, and touched Peter’s mind when he was younger and perhaps Calvino went in that way. Forever I could imagine what Calvino thought, but could not see it as reality and am so glad that Peter was able to take a step in that direction. He made it real. For it is the artist and designer that can take raw imagination and make it into something real to admire, or criticize, or simply ignore. I thank them for their courage.

Professor Dean Snyder is showing his lusciously organic work in a one-man show at Skidmore through August 31. If you’re in Saratoga, NY do check it out! If you can’t go ahead and visit virtually.

I sat for lunch the other day with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo who designed the soon-to-be-opening Chace Center here at RISD. During our conversation we spoke about street grafitti with RISD Museum Assistant Director James Hall. A variety of ideas to stem the growth of grafitti were proposed, with Rafael presenting the most radical idea. He suggested that by simply putting the name of a building on a building … that the building would be less likely to be defaced. In essence Moneo was saying that that once an anonymous artifact becomes “outed” as having an identity that it somehow becomes more invincible to an external challenge.

An abstract object is easy (and free) to interpret by nature of its being abstract. Once it becomes concrete, it loses its interpretability. One might say in defense of objects left “un-texted” that they remain as free citizens without prejudice or constraints imposed by a perceived norm.

Open to criticism versus closed to opinion. It’s better to be labelless … is how I summarize this free thought today.

This week was a particularly saddening one upon hearing of my friend, Professor Randy Pausch’s departure from our world. Thank you, Randy. You’ve given all of education and academia great hope for remembering what teaching and mentoring is really all about.

I visited GM’s headquarters for design in Michigan where I saw one of the most ambitious projects out there — the Volt. In our current climate of high gas prices, any sign of possible relief is an important one … I recall a few years back coming close to buying a Toyota Prius to join the hybrid revolution. The Volt differs from the Prius in that it is not a hybrid gas-electric vehicle, but instead it is a purely electric vehicle with a gas-engine that can charge the battery when it’s supply goes low. You can also recharge the Volt by simply plugging it into the power outlet of your garage. So whereas in the Prius the electric engine runs at low speeds while the gas engine kicks in at higher speeds, the Volt runs purely on electrical energy for 40 miles and then the gas engine kicks in to recharge the battery as needed. Although the Volt (and Prius) are miracles of technology, they survive and thrive on their design and I was impressed with the design thinking that is going into the Volt and other projects ongoing at GM.

My takeaway was that even the most advanced technological companies today need new perspectives on our world that can benefit from the powerful conceptual framing power of an art and design education.

Last Friday, Professor Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab invited me to speak about the challenges in crafting an intersection between technology and art+design together with Prof. Geetha Narayanan of Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. The context was his new programming system called Scratch and the question I left with was how we might craft a new understanding of the possibilities afforded by Scratch in the context of core studies that can develop new thinking in art and design based upon fundamental/non-digital principles.

I was particularly struck by what Prof. Narayanan reiterated in her talk, “Seeing is not knowing.” To me it epitomized the challenge that is faced by the fact that the computer is an entirely non-visual medium, yet by the images we see on our computer screen we are fooled into believing that it’s just what we see. But it’s not. Her talk was deep, human, and filled with possibilities for the use of Scratch in changing children’s lives in India and the entire world. I was especially heartened when she mentioned one of my favorite writers, Italo Calvino.

From feedback by e-mail related to my own presentation, it is clear that some of the audience wondered if I was being critical of Scratch and its relevance to art and design. I think it was then that I realized that my tendency of sitting with creative people is to engage in critique as practiced at RISD — critique being the act of forming an open opinion subject to debate and discussion:

“A common misconception is that the chief point of a critique is to pass judgment on the work presented. There could be some value or fairness in acknowledging that someone put in a great deal of effort on an assignment or accomplished something very skillfully. The real point, however, is to dig deeper, to gain an understanding of why a drawing is powerful or moving in some way, or to suggest stronger emphasis of a given quality.”
— Prof. Fritz Drury / RISD Illustration Department

Artists and designers are first and foremost self-critical, so some of the time during my lecture was spent in my own head evaluating my own work within the same critical framework of questioning the way we do here at RISD. Also in general I tend to really wonder what the role of technology is in our evolving world. The questions continue to get more complex, and I continue to ask them out loud. All answers are welcome as part of the ongoing conversation.

So in short, I left the Scratch conference believing more than ever that Scratch is “powerful and moving” in important ways that will transform our future. That Geetha’s vision is one of empowerment, and that Scratch is a real enabler. Look out Adobe! Here comes Scratch!

I had an alum visitor suggested to me by Colonel Dean Esserman of the Providence Police. JR Songwe collaborated with the Providence Police department on an innovative approach to vehicle design that he developed while a student in Industrial Design. Here is a 15-minute excerpt of our conversation.

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

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 …