Design Revolution Road Show

Today we dropped by Cranbrook, the bucolic Saarinen-designed campus in Bloomfield Hills just north of Detroit (and Matt’s alma mater). The campus sits amidst some of the most ridiculous McMansions that could easily be mistaken for country clubhouses, not 10 miles from Detroit’s city center. It’s slightly disturbing, but definitely makes for an interesting context within which to discuss design for social equality.

We were hosted by Scott Klinker, Artist-In-Residence for the 3D program. Cranbrook is 2 weeks away from installing spring thesis exhibitions, so many of the students (all graduate students) were unable to attend our lecture. We did draw, however, about 30 students from the 3D, fiber, and architecture programs.

Matt shared some of his experience living and working in Detroit, and his thesis in which he built a house for a low-income family (”I wanted to actually do architecture, not make work about architecture,” he said). We presented our usual lecture, then got into an interesting discussion about public policy and design. Specifically, do our small design interventions have the power to take on public policy decisions and actually affect change at a more systemic level? We would like to think so, though we at Project H have up until now taken the trickle-up point-of-view, where we hope to change behavior for the ground up, and give people the tools to help themselves. As for public policy, I do hope that someday policy makers can better create the conditions for grassroots innovations.

We invited the students out to the trailer for an exhibition viewing and additional discussion. The weather was beautiful and frankly we were just happy to be outside, talking to grad students about the power of design. Junebug, our mascot dog, hid under the truck in the shade until 3pm when the students left and we were on our way.