Public Engagement

The Opinion section of Sunday’s Star Tribune carried an interesting interview with Thomas Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. This is a new college, formed by combining the former College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture with the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel in the former College of Human Ecology. This new configuration has led to a broader mission for the College, grounded in a conviction that design—in all its manifestations—is crucial to the quality of our lives.

An example: In response to the question “So design has a chance to liberate us?”, Fisher responds:

Yes, from this highly engineered, inhumane, ugly, heartless and low-morale environment that’s based more on the efficiency of systems than compatibility with people. We’ve been doing work with homeless teenage mothers. In wondering how to make things better, I asked if the problem was housing or training or transportation. They said it was all of those. They can’t get from affordable housing to day care to a job and back again because we’ve designed a bus system for the benefit of the operators, housing at the behest of zoning codes and jobs that require a car, which people can’t afford. This is a classic design problem

Tom Fisher has been an advocate of design in the service of people for a better society for all of his career, an advocacy which he shares with many of his faculty and students. The new College of Design is a great opportunity to implement this vision, and for the University of Minnesota to be in the vanguard of devoting university-based scholarship, teaching, and creative activity to the most important public purposes.