Faculty, too, have garnered more than our share of honors. Laura Musacchio in Landscape Architecture has been invited to join the editorial board of the international journal Landscape Ecology, and Marilyn Delong, our associate dean for research and outreach, has been asked to be the co-editor of a new journal, Fashion Practice, Creative Process in the Fashion Industry. Elizabeth Bye and Karen LaBat in Clothing Design received the Lectra Innovation award for faculty research for their paper, "Optimized Pattern Grading." And James Boyd-Brent, in Graphic Design, had a one-person exhibition "World enough, and time..." at the New York Studio Gallery in New York City. Bill Angell in Housing Studies received a dean's award from the University of Minnesota Extension Service as a distinguished extension campus-based faculty member for his work in the field of indoor air quality. And Marc Swackhamer in Architecture, along with Blair Satterfield of Rice University, received the best of category award in the environments category of I.D. magazine's 53rd annual design review for their project, "Drape Wall + House." Bill Conway in Architecture was part of a team in Arkansas whose study "Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies" won an AIA Education Honor Award, and Renee Cheng, head of the School of Architecture, was elected to be the 2009 president of AIA-Minnesota. Finally Kate Solomonson, our associate dean for academic affairs, was asked to lead the design and architecture collaborative portion of Quadrant, a program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced Study. The list goes on, but these highlights show the outstanding work being done across the college. Congratulations to all!

This year has also seen a number of intercollegiate partnerships blossom. For the first time in my memory, we co-sponsored a lecture, by Roger Martin, with the Carlson School of Management, and conversations with the Carlson about a possible pilot program in Design Management have begun. The dean of Public Health has asked that we form a work group to look at a possible design track for their MPH degree, and our joint MLA/MURP degree with the planning program at the Humphrey Institute continues to attract students. Our partnership with the Institute of Technology has ranged from a joint Solar Decathlon submission to joint research in our shared Digital Design Consortium to a mutually agreed upon focus for the Product Design program on design and health and wellbeing. Meanwhile, the budding effort in Design and PreK-12 education has led to a promising partnership with the College of Education and Human Development, to which we also remain linked through our Buckman Fellowship Program for Leadership in Philanthropy. We continue to have several ties to CFANS as well, ranging from our Center for Rural Design to our Housing Collaboratory. And our connection to the College of Liberal Arts has been strengthened with our involvement in their new GIS minor. These partnerships, as well as others across the University, have helped position our disciplines as increasingly central to the intellectual life of the institution, which has not always been the case. It's been great seeing others realize what we've long known about the value of what we do.

Looking ahead, we have already begun planning our commencement. Kaywin Feldman, the incoming director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, has accepted our invitation to be our commencement speaker. She is an advocate for design, with a husband who is an architect currently teaching at the University of Memphis, and she has a strong community orientation that bodes well for our future work with the MIA. We are also beginning to plan an expanded senior show that we would like to open up to graduating seniors in all of our disciplines. The exhibition would occur in Rapson Hall, along with the thesis and capstone projects of graduate students, during commencement. We are working out the logistics of this show, and will send more details once the heads have had a chance to review them, but I want to emphasize the importance of this effort and to ask that you encourage students to submit work. In addition to the exhibition itself, we will produce a small print catalog and have the work available in a gallery on our Web site, so we want to show the best student work. There are few other recruitment tools more effective than that.

Speaking of our Web site, the identity task force has crafted a request for proposals for our identity and have sent the RFP to a long list of top design firms locally as well as nationally and internationally. We will receive proposals back from interested firms in early January, have the short-listed firms make public presentations on both campuses in late January, have the selected firm conduct a number of focus groups in February, have them present alternative design ideas at open meetings on both campuses in early March, and, taking into account all of your feedback and suggestions, the task force will make the final decision on the identity by the end of March. A final presentation of the identity system will happen by late April, with the goal of getting it implemented and in place over the summer. We want this to be as open and inclusive a process as possible, as well as a learning opportunity for our students, and I want to encourage you to take part in as many focus groups and feedback sessions as you can.

Useful feedback has certainly come from my meetings with the staff and faculty consultative committees. While a number of very good suggestions have emerged from those conversations, the dominant one has focused on the computer-lab hours. We started this year with the assumption that, because our students all pay the same tech fees, the lab hours should also be the same on both campuses -- hours determined by Academic and Distributed Computing Services (ADCS), which runs the McNeal Hall lab as well as most others on campus. With most students having laptops, we also knew from our own headcounts that the number of students needing to use the labs after hours was very small. The negative response to this, however, has been so great, that I have asked the IT staff to work toward making the one major lab that we have control over on the main floor of Rapson Hall accessible after the ADCS labs close. We will be having focus groups with students and faculty early next semester to see how best to make this work, and we will need to have a new locking system installed capable of handling the entire college. But I wanted you to know that I have heard you and that we will find a way to accommodate those students who need after-hours access to a lab.

Finally, I wanted to mention a new initiative that should benefit every one of our disciplines. I've been involved with a national effort to start a new National Academy of Environmental Design. I was in Washington D.C. last week, where we met with some of the leadership at the National Academies, who clearly want -- and need -- our disciplines to be more active on the increasing number of committees at the National Research Council dealing with issues involving design and related areas such as commerce and housing. For example, the Climate Security Act now making its way through Congress calls for zero-carbon emissions from designed environments by 2030 and charges the National Academies to report on progress to achieving those goals as soon as 2012. The Academies are well aware that, given such a charge, they will need the help of our disciplines, and the new National Academy of Environmental Design would help facilitate that effort as well as advise Congress on public policies related to the physical, natural, and social environment. All of the existing National Academies arose out of a national crisis (the Civil War, World War I, the Space Race) and climate change may well be the crisis that launches our disciplines to center stage in the global effort to curb the effects that designed products and environments have on greenhouse gas emissions.

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1907, the Deutscher Werkbund arose in Germany out of a perceived need to redesign everything from "sofa cushions to city building" as their motto put it, in response to the demands of mass production and the potential of machine technology. Today, everything, once again, needs redesigning, in an era of expensive oil, scarce water, growing extinctions, and burgeoning populations. I have no doubt that this will be our central task over the next one hundred years, and it will take all of our creativity and knowledge to prepare our students to help people envision a more environmentally sustainable and socially just future. This will also take more funding than what is commonly available in our fields. When I was in Washington, the news around town was a letter signed by many of the nation's leading scientists calling for a tenfold increase in the $3 billion now spent annually on research in this area. While little may happen this election year, many people I talked to in the capital felt that dramatically more funding would occur, regardless of who leads the next administration. I will do all I can to make sure that our disciplines -- and our college -- are at the table and ready to contribute.

Have a great holiday break!

Tom