alex bitterman design.intelligence
this is alex's online home for design-oriented stuff.Archive for Place Branding
Holy Cow
My Design Applications II graduate students made their presentation to the Hertel Avenue community in Buffalo today. Their work was exceptionally well received, so much so, the presentation was featured as the afternoon headline buffalonews.com, and was also featured on NPR-affiliate WBFO, NBC-affiliate WGRZ, and even the afternoon Shred and Regan show on WEDG. What a day!
You can read the whole article from the Buffalo News at http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/569302.html
6 pack and snow
About 30 years ago, the then mayor of Buffalo, Jimmy Griffin, said to the media, that when snow hits Buffalo, the best thing to do is get a six-pack and wait it out. He was ridiculed in the national press for appearing incapable and unprepared. He was ridiculed in the local press because everyone here knows a six-pack doesn’t last more than an hour on a snowy night.
Every winter, Buffalo gets socked with a winter storm or two, and truth be told, that’s about it, we rarely get much more snow than most of our Great Lakes sister and brother cities, but when we get it, we get it. This seems to be that weekend, and Mayor Griffin’s advice has never been more helpful — especially considering that our new Mayor, Byron Brown can’t seem to keep the streets cleared. We’ve had more than a foot of snow in three days, and as of this writing, my street, and many streets in my neighborhood still haven’t seen a plow. Typical of the new Mayor, he instituted (to much fanfare) a 311 “one stop” line for Buffalo residents to call for questions and answers — and to complain about unplowed streets. However, in VERY typical Brownian fashion, the line is closed for the weekend, and closed early on Friday because of bad weather. Calls to the Mayor’s office are forwarded to the 311 service. Nice. I’m glad to see that my tax money was used to pay for something that works, as clearly, the plows aren’t.
About a month ago, The New York Times ran an article about Buffalo and our rich architectural heritage. Fine piece, that highlighted a few of the better-known architectural gems of the area (and ignored many more of the more gritty and less tourist-friendly.) You can read the full text of the article at NYT.com, or click here.
As I was trudging through the unplowed streets and toward the curiously pristine and cleanly-plowed sidewalks on Elmwood Avenue this morning (thanks, Elmwood Village Association), I snapped a few images of my neighborhood — one to contrast some of the images shown in The New York Times article, two, to show Byron that our streets still aren’t plowed, and three, to celebrate one of the several days we get in Buffalo each year to kick back with a case or two, and just watch the snow fly. Enjoy!
Buffalo on AlJazeera
A show that is hosted and produced by Avi Lewis, husband of my hero, Naomi Klein.
Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?
By Lara Farrar
For CNN
(CNN) — When Shaun Yandell proposed to his longtime girlfriend Gina Marasco on the doorstep of their new home in the sunny suburb of Elk Grove, California, four years ago, he never imagined things would get this bad. But they did, and it happened almost overnight.
“It is going to be heartbreak,” Yandell told CNN. “But we are hanging on.”
Yandell’s marriage isn’t falling apart: his neighborhood is.
Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.
In Elk Grove, some homeowners not only cut their own grass but also trim the yards of vacant homes on their streets, hoping to deter gangs and criminals from moving in.
Other residents discovered that with some of the empty houses, it wasn’t what was growing outside that was the problem. Susan McDonald, president of a local neighborhood association aimed at saving the lost suburban paradise, told CNN that around her cul-de-sac, federal agents recently busted several pot homes with vast crops of marijuana growing from floor to ceiling.
And only a couple of weeks ago, Yandell said he overheard a group of teenagers gathered on the street outside his back patio, talking about a robbery they had just committed.
When they lit a street sign on fire, Yandell called the cops.
“This is not like a rare thing anymore,” he said. “I get big congregations of people cussing — stuff I can’t even fathom doing when I was a kid.”
For Yandell, his wife and many other residents trying to stick it out, the white picket fence of an American dream has faded into a seemingly hopeless suburban nightmare. “The forecast is gloomy,” he told CNN.
While the foreclosure epidemic has left communities across the United States overrun with unoccupied houses and overgrown grass, underneath the chaos another trend is quietly emerging that, over the next several decades, could change the face of suburban American life as we know it.
This trend, according to Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, stems not only from changing demographics but also from a major shift in the way an increasing number of Americans — especially younger generations — want to live and work.
“The American dream is absolutely changing,” he told CNN.
This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.
Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls “walkable urbanism” — both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything — from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.
The so-called New Urbanism movement emerged in the mid-90s and has been steadily gaining momentum, especially with rising energy costs, environmental concerns and health problems associated with what Leinberger calls “drivable suburbanism” — a low-density built environment plan that emerged around the end of the World War II and has been the dominant design in the U.S. ever since.
Thirty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, according to Leinberger, has been invested in constructing this drivable suburban landscape.
But now, Leinberger told CNN, it appears the pendulum is beginning to swing back in favor of the type of walkable community that existed long before the advent of the once fashionable suburbs in the 1940s. He says it is being driven by generations molded by television shows like “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” where city life is shown as being cool again — a thing to flock to, rather than flee.
“The image of the city was once something to be left behind,” said Leinberger.
Changing demographics are also fueling new demands as the number of households with children continues to decline. By the end of the next decade, the number of single-person households in the United States will almost equal those with kids, Leinberger said.
And aging baby boomers are looking for a more urban lifestyle as they downsize from large homes in the suburbs to more compact town houses in more densely built locations.
Recent market research indicates that up to 40 percent of households surveyed in selected metropolitan areas want to live in walkable urban areas, said Leinberger. The desire is also substantiated by real estate prices for urban residential space, which are 40 to 200 percent higher than in traditional suburban neighborhoods — this price variation can be found both in cities and small communities equipped with walkable infrastructure, he said.
The result is an oversupply of depreciating suburban housing and a pent-up demand for walkable urban space, which is unlikely to be met for a number of years. That’s mainly, according to Leinberger, because the built environment changes very slowly; and also because governmental policies and zoning laws are largely prohibitive to the construction of complicated high-density developments.
But as the market catches up to the demand for more mixed use communities, the United States could see a notable structural transformation in the way its population lives — Arthur C. Nelson, director of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, estimates, for example, that half of the real-estate development built by 2025 will not have existed in 2000.
Yet Nelson also estimates that in 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes that will not be left vacant in a suburban wasteland but instead occupied by lower classes who have been driven out of their once affordable inner-city apartments and houses.
The so-called McMansion, he said, will become the new multi-family home for the poor.
“What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe,” said Nelson. “There will probably be 10 people living in one house.”
In Shaun Yandell’s neighborhood, this has already started to happen. Houses once filled with single families are now rented out by low-income tenants. Yandell speculates that they’re coming from nearby Sacramento, where the downtown is undergoing substantial gentrification, or perhaps from some other area where prices have gotten too high. He isn’t really sure.
But one thing Yandell is sure about is that he isn’t going to leave his sunny suburban neighborhood unless he has to, and if that happens, he says he would only want to move to another one just like it.
“It’s the American dream, you know,” he said. “The American dream.”
The Buffalo Mega-Region: Bigger Than We Know
From Today’s Buffalo News This is the most accurate and most interesting opinion piece I’ve read in a very long time. — AB
A mega-region needs to think and act like a mega-region, not like a bunch of separate cities with empty space between them.
By Richard Florida – SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 06/15/08 9:14 AM
There’s great excitement brewing in Toronto, where I live, over the fact that the Bills are coming to play eight “home” games (five regular season and three preseason) there over the next five years.
As a longtime Bills fan and former Buffalo resident — I lived off Elmwood Avenue and taught at the University at Buffalo in the early 1980s, during which time I braved the cold Buffalo winters to have some of the greatest football experiences of my life — I have to admit I was one of the first in line to get my tickets. Rumors swirl that Toronto interests eventually will acquire the Bills and move the team north. For some, this is a signal that Buffalo, once the wealthier and more vibrant of the two cities, will lose not just its home team but its big-league status — yet another signal of the once-great industrial mecca’s fading glory.
Instead of bemoaning Buffalo’s loss or cheering Toronto’s gain, the binational Bills actually point the way to a better future. In fact, when asked at a major meeting of Buffalo area leaders several years ago (and well before I moved to Toronto) what I would suggest to revitalize the region, I blurted out, “become a part of Tor-Buff-Chester” — a clunky moniker for the economic powerhouse region stretching from my new hometown to Buffalo and Rochester.
The reason so many commentators and urban experts are down on Buffalo is that they are looking at it from a highly local perspective. Looking only at Buffalo and its surrounding suburban areas, they see the loss of manufacturing and the outward movement of young and talented people.
In a recent essay in the City Journal, Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser, the brilliant young urban economist, argued that Buffalo should stop cooking up mega-projects aimed at revitalization and itself go about shrinking in the smartest way possible. In a vibrant and engaging talk to Buffalo community leaders in April, Glaeser stressed that it would be nearly impossible for Buffalo — or any region really — to counteract the powerful economics and demographics that are shaping the globalization of manufacturing and causing the shift of young and talented people to bigger, more vibrant cities and metro areas.
All of this sounds reasonable when you look at Buffalo as an isolated island. But the picture changes dramatically when one begins to think of Buffalo in the context of the economic powerhouse that is the mega-region.
The fact of the matter is that Buffalo is a key node in one of the world’s most economically potent mega-regions — stretching from the high-tech center of Waterloo on the west, through Toronto, Buffalo and Rochester, over to Ottawa and on to Montreal. Tor-Buff-Chester is currently home to about 22 million people and more than $530 billion in economic output, making it the fifth-largest megaregion in North America and the 12th largest in the world.
This is important, because mega-regions have replaced the nation-state as the economic drivers of the global economy. These are places like Bos-Wash (the Boston-New York-Washington corridor), Chi-Pitts (running from Chicago through Detroit and Cleveland and over to Pittsburgh), Nor-Cal (around San Francisco and the Silicon Valley), Cascadia (which stretches from Portland through Seattle and Vancouver), Europe’s Am-Burs-Twerp (from Amsterdam to Brussels and Antwerp), Lon-Leed-Chester (around London) and Asia’s greater Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai.
Clunky sounding or not, the 10 largest mega-regions account for 43 percent of the planet’s economic activity and more than half of its patented innovations and star scientists. They generate all those pioneering breakthroughs while housing only 6.5 percent of the planet’s population. And to take an even broader overhead view, the top 40 mega-regions produce 66 percent of the world’s economic activity and more than 80 percent of its patented innovations and most-cited scientists, still while being home to just 18 percent of the world’s population.
Tor-Buff-Chester is one of the world’s very biggest mega-regions, bigger than the San Francisco-Silicon Valley megaregion, Greater Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and more than twice the size of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest. Its economic might is equivalent to more than half of all of Canada’s. If it were its own country, it would number among the 16 biggest in the world, with economic output bigger than that of Sweden, the Netherlands or Australia.
Being able to run a great think tank — the Martin Rotman Prosperity Institute — in this great mega-region is what moved me back to it. I know both Buffalo and Toronto pretty well. During my time in Buffalo, I endured some large snowstorms, lived in the terrific Elmwood neighborhood, ate my share of real chicken wings and beef on weck and took in as many Bills and Sabres games as I could.
At that time, Buffalonians always would remind me of how, during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, it was Buffalo with its manufacturing muscle and exciting downtown that was the more energetic, stronger city while Toronto rolled up the sidewalks at 10 p. m.
Times change, and these days Toronto has become the engine of the mega-region. Greater Toronto is growing at a fantastic clip, adding thousands of immigrants and 115,000 people a year. But it’s also clear that Buffalo’s economic hemorrhaging has stabilized. Despite shedding 17 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2005, the region’s manufacturing sector actually expanded its output by 3.5 percent, according to a study by UB’s Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth. The same report shows an increase in creative-class jobs in information technology, financial and business services, which I define as ones where people use their minds to create economic value.
What this means for Buffalo is simple: It needs to develop its position in the mega-region. The fact that the largest group of the 6,300 immigrants who arrived in Buffalo between 2003 and 2006 were Canadian is an indication of the already growing connections within it. But Buffalo more and more needs to define its advantages and its niches.
One of them is surely affordable housing. Housing prices in Toronto have skyrocketed in recent years, and young people, artists, musicians and immigrants have begun to be forced out of the city. Buffalo has the urbanity, the edginess, the authenticity and the cheap space that can and does appeal to younger creatives.
A mega-region needs to think and act like a megaregion, not like a bunch of separate cities with empty space between them. For instance, Tor- Buff-Chester needs regional investments in transportation. Mega-regions benefit from having global hub airports like Toronto’s Pearson or New York’s JFK, but the best way to get around one once you’re there is not by plane or car but by fast rail. Europe already has this one figured out.
More important, it is imperative for local leaders to band together to get a handle and fix growing delays at the border. Making the border work efficiently and without delay and hassle will only make the megaregion and the Buffalo region stronger.
Internally, there are several things that Buffalo can do to improve its economic status and bolster what I refer to as its people climate, making the region more attractive to people as well as to industries and businesses. In a large-scale Place and Happiness Survey we did with the Gallup Organization in 2005, my research team surveyed more than 27,000 people in 8,000 communities nationwide and found that where you live matters as much as your job and personal life when it comes to determining your level of happiness. Place — the “where” of your life — even scored higher than financial health and educational attainments.
The survey also zeroed in on five key characteristics of our communities that matter to our happiness. What we found can be thought of as the urban equivalent of the psychologist Maslow’s classic “hierarchy of needs,” where as people and our societies become better off, we progress up a ladder from basic security to self-realization. I call it the place pyramid.
At the bottom of the place pyramid are the basics — a great region needs to have good roads, solid infrastructure, low crime, good schools and health care.
The next level is opportunity. Regions need to provide jobs, economic opportunity, civic and social opportunity, a healthy economy and the ability to plug in, meet people and make friends.
The middle level is leadership — not just a visionary mayor and a business community that invests and cares, but a place where citizens and residents can engage in community efforts and contribute.
But there are two additional factors that form the apex of the pyramid.
One is openness to all kinds of people. In our Place and Happiness Survey, we asked people, “How would you rate your community as a place to live for the following kinds of people: Families with children, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, immigrants, seniors, people living below poverty, young singles and recent college graduates looking for work?”
With every amount of tolerance extended to these groups, the overall happiness of the community increased! This is not because we value diversity as an abstract value per se, but because many people are drawn to open communities on the assumption that these are places where they can be themselves and prosper.
What surprised me most about this survey was the following: Guess what group came in at the bottom of the list; what group was deemed to have the toughest time? Not immigrants or gays. At the bottom, alongside “people living below the poverty line” was “recent college graduates looking for work.” Nearly 45 percent of people surveyed nationwide said their communities were either “bad” or “very bad” places for recent graduates, while just 7.3 percent said they were “very good.”
This is startling because people are most mobile when they’re young. Recent college graduates in their early to mid- 20s are three and a half times more likely to move than people in their 30s, and five times more likely to move than people in their 40s or early 50s. Numerous studies have shown that places that attract young, educated people not only tend to retain them, but get a considerable economic boost. Greater New York, for example, attracted some 285,000 young college graduates during the early part of the 2000s, a number roughly equivalent to the entire population of the City of Buffalo.
But Buffalo has considerable assets here. For one, it is a college town. UB, Buffalo State and Canisius are talent magnets, attracting young people from greater New York City and across the country. In fact, colleges and universities are the Ellis Islands of the creative economy, attracting young talented people from all over the world.
What has driven the development of high-tech Silicon Valley over the past several decades has been its ability to attract and retain entrepreneurs from all over the world. Anywhere from one-third to half of all Silicon Valley start-ups over that period count a foreign-born person among their core founding team. Buffalo needs to increase its efforts to attract, retain and place the students who are selecting it as a destination.
A recent Buffalo News article by Charity Vogel mentioned the problem of young people leaving town, and she quoted one as saying, “Most of the time it’s jobs, but a lot of the time it’s nothing major. They just go.” This impulse to skip town has a lot to do with how welcoming and vital a place feels — or doesn’t feel.
But to get them to stick around after college, a city must stay ahead of the curve in the competition for talent. Once people reach the age of 30, they tend to settle and have kids; it’s much easier to retain them after graduation than it is to lure them back once they’re gone.
At the top of the pyramid is quality of place. This includes the “look and feel” of a community — its natural environment, its lakes and waterfronts, its green space, its trails and parks, its built environment, its historic architecture, its authentic neighborhoods, the energy of its various neighborhoods and communities. We found that the higher people rate this aesthetic dimension of their community, the higher the level of community satisfaction overall.
Buffalo has a spectacular waterfront, some of the most stunning urban parks, incredible arts and cultural institutions, remarkable architecture, historic homes and authentic neighborhoods. This is an area where — with the appropriate leadership, focus and upgrading — Buffalo can really sing. And the region can offer that alongside housing prices that are still affordable for artists, creative young people, empty-nesters and working families.
The key to the future is to focus on and strengthen your internal assets while linking to and leveraging your position as the key American hub of one of the world’s largest and most dynamic mega-regions. If you can do that, Buffalo can move beyond the current debate on how much it should shrink and begin to grow and prosper again.
Toronto Star Article
New signs for the TTC: Can you tell the difference?
SUPPLIED IMAGES
The TTC is testing a simplified revamp of its street-level subway entrance signs. The proposed version is on the left, and the existing version is on the right.
May 30, 2008
TESS KALINOWSKI
TRANSPORTATION REPORTER
Take it as a sign of these brand-conscious times.
The TTC is piloting a simplified revamp of its street-level subway entrances that uses the TTC’s traditional red pylon logo in silhouette.
The new design will be installed and tested at the northeast corner of the Osgoode station in April so the TTC can gauge public reaction.
“We have such an iconic image for the TTC, so we wanted to make sure when we do replace it we do it right,” said TTC chair Adam Giambrone.
The pylon design dates back to the 1920s and was the visual cue that designers and TTC officials recommended following a brainstorming session at the Design Exchange in September.
It made no sense to replace the pylon given the public’s emotional attachment to the symbol, he said.
If reaction to the sign is positive, it would become the standard for new stations as the subway is extended, and at new entrances such as one planned for Queen’s Park station at the MaRS Discovery District on College St.
The pared-down pylon is meant to be easily seen and reduce the visual clutter that has grown along with the transit system, said Susan Reed Tanaka, TTC manager of engineering.
“What we would have is the TTC logo on the signpost, which attracts your attention to the location. And then the door, which is adjacent, has the station name, the line colour and the mode logo on it,” she said.
It’s still unclear whether the TTC would survey riders, the general public or design experts on the effectiveness of the new sign.
Whether out-of-towners recognize the TTC insignia “is something we’d probably have to study,” said Reed Tanaka.
There’s a lot riding on a strong TTC brand, Alex Bitterman, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, told participants at the Design Exchange session. A well-designed brand can give a big boost to transit ridership.
Santa Monica, Calif., for example, increased ridership by 400 per cent when it rebranded its system as the Big Blue Bus.
Toronto Knows (that Buffalo is the place to go.)
I remember being at a party in Toronto about 5 years ago, and having my friends in Toronto laugh at me because I lived in Buffalo.I went to the D|X Gala this past October in Toronto, and fully expected a similar reception by Torontonians. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only were my friends now fully interested in Buffalo, but actually seemed to find it a desirable place. Any Buffalonian can attest that this holiday season was like no other. We fully experienced a Canadian Invasion — and for the first time in a long time, it felt like a real city. We had reached critical mass.I was walking down Delaware Avenue the other day, and CityTV was doing person on the street interviews. Yesterday, the Toronto Star ran a high profile piece about Buffalo, and noted that it is a city on the rise. You can read the article here: http://www.thestar.com/Travel/article/292052Maybe as the vision for a public transit-rich southern ontario will make the link between Buffalo and Toronto a reality in the near future. I’m looking forward to that day.
Ed Clearly Hasn’t Read MY Book!
Buffalonians are a hearty bunch. Kind of like New Yorkers, with an amped up edge and minus the cultured sophistication. Nonetheless, Buffalonians are honest, hardworking folk, and though their city is not quite a shining city on the hill (or the lake for that matter), it’s not a half bad place to be. The endlessly upbeat and energetic <i>Buffalo Rising</i> chronicles the new mood of a younger, hipper Buffalo, that is more concerned with moving forward than trying to recapture its days as an industrial hub.
Ed Glaeser’s recent commentary in <i>City Journal</i> about Buffalo is out of line and academically timid. While some of his observations may be accurate, his comments are most certainly mean-spirited and read more as an indictment than as a productive proposal for future betterment of the Queen City. I wonder when Prof. Glaeser last visited Buffalo? Its also evident that he has never scanned a copy of my book, <i>Buffalo is a Cool Place to Live</i>, otherwise, I am quite certain that his perspective may have been at least a bit less brusque.
Much hub-a-baloo was made in the Buffalo press about Prof. Glaeser’s recent article. That hubbub more than likely because he’s Harvard professor than because his comments article brought to light neither any truly new information nor fresh perspective. Prof. Glaeser predicates his argument on “bigger is better” (or at least, “bigger is more desirable”) which is hardly the case in present-day Buffalo. Buffalo, in my lifetime, has always been a city that is losing population, it is a city with an image problem. However, Buffalo also provides a high standard of living for its residents, more affordably than most cities of its size, and isn’t quite, as Prof. Glaeser asserts, a hopeless case.
Prof. Glaeser’s insinuation that Buffalo is a city living on the federal dole is inaccurate, and incorrect, and context through which he frames his argument is a bit unfair. The federal allocations and appropriations that have been made to Buffalo are not out of line with those made to other cities of similar size in the Great Lakes region. Prof. Glaeser makes it seem as if Buffalo has received an inordinate amount of federal funding, and moreover, makes it seem as if Buffalo has repeatedly squandered these funds. His consistently negative spin (and jibes at Senators Hilary and Schumer) reveal more of his political posturing than his academic insight.
Arguably Buffalo for some time had a bit of a collective obsession with recapturing its glory days as an industrial city. Those days, however are long gone, and Buffalo as a city has moved forward. Prof. Glaeser’s commentary neglects this fact, and his argument comes up woefully short in this regard. His narrow perspective is limited to colloquial accounts and murky data, that even fellow economists would likely question. His comments, in this regards, pack little punch, and pay no mind to the qualitative aspects of the City.
While Buffalo as a municipality and a regional entity has a long way to go before it’s a vibrant thriving city, I truly believe that Buffalo is at a crossroads, ardently striving toward a more manageable, dynamic, and well, different, path. It’s unfortunate that Prof. Glaeser felt it necessary to use Buffalo as his soap box to draw attention to his pro-industry and anti-democrat attacks against Senators Schumer and Clinton. While I don’t fundamentally dispute Glaeser’s position per se, I do question both his tone and motive.
In the most recent edition of Artvoice, deputy county executive Bruce Fisher reacts to the Glaeser piece, and lays out a thoughtful, productive, objective, and realistic proposal that could potentially move Buffalo past its current civic myopia, and toward a healthy, and sustainable city. Fisher’s piece is proof that Buffalo has struggled, but with visionary leadership can and will revitalize the city, notwithstanding the passive (and careless) judgements of a politically-motivated Harvard professor who has clearly only observed Buffalo from a distant and jaded ivory tower.
Design Survey Textbook
I am pleased to announce the publication of a new design textbook that I have authored. Design Survey: a Workbook Introduction to the Design Professions will be published in late November by the Pearson division of Prentice Hall, ISBN-10: 0536517363, $26.00.
Design Survey: A Workbook Introduction to the Design Professions aims to ameliorate the challenge faced by many design educators by setting forth a clear and functionally precise course of study for the beginning design student and future design professional.Each chapter of the text is intended as an introductory overview of each design profession, and is suitable for pre-major students in first-year foundation programs, or for third- and fourth-year students as a capstone survey of the interdisciplinary nature of the design professions. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive principles of design text or studio manual, but as an introductory text to the interrelated nature of the design professions.
The book would be best serve instructors teaching large lecture courses, introductory and foundations courses, and design electives that cross disciplinary lines. The text is a workbook that encourages students to interact with the designed environment with the aim of building professional awareness and critical analysis skills.Please contact your local Pearson or Prentice Hall representative. Find yours at: http://vig.prenhall.com/replocator.
In Canada, please contact your local Pearson Education Canada rep. Find yours at: http://www.pearsoned.ca/highered/main_content/repfinder/index.html
If you would like further details, or have questions about the text please feel free to contact me.
Please feel free to forward or share this announcement with your colleagues.
Upcoming Lecture in San Antonio
There’s a little blurb in the local college paper about my upcoming presentation at San Antonio College (not suprisingly in San Antonio) in late October. You can read the entire article at The Ranger.
