By Joel Pett, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate, for USA TODAY
A few days before Christmas I went shopping in Harvard Square to pick up a few stocking stuffers. As I came out of the T I was greeted by a group of college girls bearing posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache superimposed on his face and the canned line, "The climate sure has changed for Obama hasn't it?" Their demonizing is stupefying and revealing of this age's fickleness. It's not just the libertarians that are upset though — it seems like the whole world has decided to point its finger to the West for Copenhagen's failure. It's easy to see our fault in sidelining the issue for an overdrawn debate on marginally improved health care while the rest of the world moved on an agenda that's been years in planning. But that's politics, and as I learned this summer, the same self-serving agendas play out the world over. While we were infighting, China played their cards well and got what they wanted. The Guardian has posted an excellent account of how it went down here.
Yesterday I spent the day in Boone, North Carolina at Appalachian State University. Boone is about 50 miles from where I grew up so I jumped at the chance to inspire students in my old neighborhood. I was invited by Associate Professor of Interior Design (and fellow Elizabethton High School alumni), Tim Dolan, on behalf of the Design Council, an inter-college faculty group organized to promote multidisciplinary design, for their third annual Power of Design symposium. One cool thing Tim and I learned from one another yesterday was that we were both separately inspired to study design by our drafting teacher, Mr. Fink!
I led an afternoon workshop with about 140 students to design a campus that relied exclusively on human-powered transportation. Students from the Interior Design, Architecture, Graphic Design, Industrial Design and Fine Arts programs got a crash course in Design Thinking and a basic IDEO design process then went to work. The photos below showcase the exciting energy from the afternoon and the great enthusiasm these young designers have to change their environment — from prototyping means to harvest kinetic energy, to making the campus more pedestrian and bike friendly, to outfitting people with better climate-neutralizing gear.
After a quick dinner with ASU faculty I presented a lecture called "Big D, Little D" which shared my own professional evolution from discipline-based design to inter-disciplinary design thinking using Tricycle and IDEO projects as case studies. Thank you to the 300 of you that showed up despite the halo effect of 24-hour rain from Ida!
