Computer-aided mind

Visit the College of Design and you'll see computers everywhere: students working wirelessly on their laptops, faculty PowerPointing their way through lectures, and staff engaged in all sorts of electronic efforts. Likewise, you will see the future of computing in our labs, from body scanners helping us to create custom clothing, to head-mounted goggles allowing us to enter into virtual designs and manipulate them in real time.

Less visible, but no less important, are the conceptual changes that have come with computers. The human mind evolved, in part, as a result of our toolmaking, and that process appears ongoing in this era of powerful computer tools. Evidence of this computer-aided mind exists everywhere in our college, especially among our students. They may not look much different from students of a generation ago, but they seem completely different in the way they get information, communicate with each other, and think about the world that they will one day help create.

For example, in an honors seminar I am coteaching, an undergraduate senior mentioned that she had checked out a University library book for the first time, after nearly four years in school. When I asked her how she had done her schoolwork before, without books, she lifted up her laptop and smiled. Such stories would have made faculty members shudder not too long ago, but with the exponential rise of reliable information on the Web, coupled with electronic library resources like digital journals and Google books, it no longer seems implausible that a high-achieving senior might no longer need to take out a book.

The real computer revolution, however, may lie not in how students study, but in how they think. Walk around our halls and you will see students making presentations of work that defies definition. You will see architecture students studying material and structure through clothing, product design classes learning from biologists, interior design students drawing from environmental psychology (via our homegrown research database, InformeDesign), housing and retail students diving into cultural studies, and design communication students looking at landscape-scale graphics. And all of this work now gets presented in ways that would have taken teams of people weeks to prepare in the past.

Although faculty members have long discussed the value of such interdisciplinary work, the computer has enabled it in ways unimaginable just a few decades ago. Moreover, students today expect to study and learn in this manner, with the Web serving not only as an information source for students, but also as a metaphor for how they now see the world. This has begun to transform our teaching and research, and it will eventually alter the ways in which our students practice. But it has certainly placed disciplines such as ours at the very center of the intellectual life of our times. The computer-aided mind most closely resembles that of designers and environmental analysts, constantly making creative leaps and lateral connections. And applying that way of thinking may be the most important skill our students acquire.
Thomas Fisher
Dean