Hasta La Ideas

If you haven’t been following the sports pages lately, particularly with regard to college football players readying themselves for the NFL draft, you might have missed the story capturing lots of news outlets’ and blogs’ attention in the form of Stanford‘s quarterback, Andrew Luck. A finalist for the coveted Heisman Trophy, the star player surprised many by announcing that he wasn’t going to throw himself into the draft so that he could finished his last two years of school. His major? Architecture. While an immediate career in professional football might have earned him in the tens of millions of dollars, the industry he’s decided to stick with for the time being has had one of its rockiest patches of the last few decades and is only now slowly (very slowly) starting to inch its way back toward recovery. Hundreds of critics have weighed in over the last couple of weeks (Luck made the announcement on the 6th), with some siding with the player/student, some taking the middle road, and others not just writing negative pieces about him, but often even leading with their disbelief, like in this piece entitled “Andrew Luck is an Idiot.” So divided are people over his decision that even Archinect‘s comments section about the news were fairly evenly split. And who knows in the end? Maybe the decision was helped to boost press, or give him another shot at the Heisman, or maybe he really does want an architecture degree (though how far one at the undergraduate level will take him in the profession is another conversation entirely). In the end, it’s an interesting story, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading a million opinions about it, we encourage you search his name in Google News, because there are more than a few out there.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A rectangular motorcyle; cutlery that sacrifices utility for aesthetics; a phone with holes for buttons; a phone that’s all buttons. These are objects dreamed up by Branko Lukic, the ex-Ideo designer and principal of design firm Nonobject in his conceptual design book of the same name. We posted a capsule review of the book in our Best Innovation and Design Books of 2010 roundup, and Icon Magazine’s William Wiles has an in-depth review up here.

Writes Wiles in his unflinching review:

Nonobject does play a valuable role in critical design, even if that role is somewhat oversold in the introductions. Industrial designers produce little in the way of “paper architecture.” Unlike architects, who are regularly happy to put aside material or practical constraints and doodle away at megastructures and walking cities, moving professional theory forward as they do, industrial designers are in the vice of the cult of use….

…Nonobject is at its best – both funniest and cleverest – when it is at its most critical. One of its highlights is the CUiN5 mobile phone, every surface of which is covered in buttons. No matter which way up it is, it’s the right way up. Of course there’s no screen or anything else – the point is that there are limits to ease of use, it’s not an evolutionary track that stretches forever into the distance….

Here’s the CUiN5 phone in question, which looks even better in video than it does in stills. Practical joke, thought-provoker, the anti-touchscreen phone? You decide.

CUin5 from NONOBJECT on Vimeo.

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A big start to 2011 for the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Late last week they unveiled, to much fanfare, the long-awaited plans for Eli Broad‘s new museum in Los Angeles, adjacent to Frank Gehry‘s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Now they’ve made another big splash closer to home, in their native New York, with the announcement by Columbia University that the institution has selected the firm to build two buildings to serve as the new home for their business school. The structures will go up in West Harlem in an area called Manhattanville, in which Columbia has been cultivating the 17 acres they have there. It’s still early days, given that the commission is just being announced now, so no word yet on what the buildings will look like or when construction will start or (plan to) end, but word will undoubtably come soon enough. Where the money for the project is coming from, however, is known. University board member, alumnus, private equity firm founder, and War on Greed documentary fodder, Henry Kravis, has pledged $100 million for the project, which surely has to be a nice way to start. Here’s from Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, about the commission:

“Diller Scofidio + Renfro have repeatedly demonstrated a deep understanding of how people live and work in a dynamic urban environment,” said President Bollinger. “They have achieved beautiful, important architectural successes that have been thoughtfully integrated into the surrounding urban fabric. This is the essence of what we are trying to create on Columbia’s new, open campus — bringing together different areas of teaching and research, and enhancing the connections between the University and surrounding community.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Considering it’s not even an ID program, Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering department has got a seriously kick-ass facility with their Product Realization Laboratory. Featuring a machine shop, a model shop, a foundry/welding room and a CAD loft/photo studio, the PRL is a place where students of any major can pay for a “shop license” and just start making stuff.

As an article in The Stanford Daily explains,

Professor of mechanical engineering David Beach, a co-director of the lab who has been working at Stanford for 39 years, described the lab as one of the most unique teaching projects in the world.

…Under the philosophy that Stanford graduates should not only be good citizens but also excel in a profession, “making things” has been an important part of a Stanford engineering education, Beach said.

…Final products can range from skateboards, guitars and golf putters to complex machines. While many of the projects are related to students’ research, some are simply an extension of students’ hobbies.

“We don’t tell people what to do here,” said Craig Milroy, professor of mechanical engineering and associate director of the lab. “We help them do what they want to do.”

Check out the rest of the article to see what both individual students and entire classes are doing at the PRL.

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In design post-graduation education the PhD is fast becoming the new Masters. This partly reflects the maturing of design research, but is also a response to the need for institutions to beef up their research quota and the attendant external funding. If you want to teach at a design college, the expectations of some institutions are often difficult to fulfill. Many ask for a PhD and several years of commercial practice, preferably current. It’s a tough call – both are extremely time hungry and it’s hard to do both well.

A Masters is often the terminating degree for a designer heading off professionally (certainly in the USA). For others it is a return the pleasure of self-determined projects having worked in agency life for a few years. But a PhD is a different beast to a Masters. I know of several designers who “fancy the idea” of doing a PhD and there are plenty of Masters students who are attracted to it, either because they want to expand their MA work or because they’re not really sure what to do next.

Having officially become Dr. Polaine earlier in the year as well as having taught post-graduate students for many years, I thought I would offer some thoughts on the journey. As always, your mileage may vary.

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