Dear Colleagues,

As the end of the semester and the holidays approach, I wanted to update you on a number of things.

Several committees have met, with much work underway, and I want to thank all the faculty, staff, and students involved in this important work. I want you to know, however, that the deans decided to suspend the identity committee for the time being, until other committees get further along in their work, since it is hard to define our identity until we all have a better sense of who we are as a college and what we want to be. Meanwhile, other initiatives have begun to move along. A group of faculty and researchers involved in the MS in sustainability have outlined some creative ways of generating student support and additional space. Searches for a new position in interior design and a new and a replacement one in retail merchandising are also underway.

To give you a better sense of all of the amazing work going on in the college and to get your thoughts about priorities and next steps, we plan to hold two retreats in January, one for the faculty on Thursday, January 11, and another for staff, on a day yet to be determined. While it is good for us to meet as a single group, as we did in October, there is real value in the faculty and staff also meeting separately, to focus on issues relevant to each. For example, the faculty has much to contribute in terms of intellectual synergies and aspirations, and much to discuss on moving the academic agenda of the college forward. The staff, in turn, has much to offer in helping make our processes and operations as efficient and effective as possible. These meetings will help in defining our collegiate priorities as we prepare to draft compact requests for discussion with the provost early next semester.

I want to convey my thoughts about the next phase of the Metropolitan Design Center. As many of you know, Ann Forsyth has accepted a position at Cornell in their planning program and will be leaving us this coming summer. She has done a terrific job moving the MDC in new directions and she leaves it in good financial shape. There are two chairs in the center we need to fill. Meanwhile, Brian Atwood and Ed Goetz, the dean and associate dean at the Humphrey Institute, have a position to fill in their planning program, and they have asked that our two colleges think more holistically about planning and urban design at the University as both of us develop job descriptions this spring semester and begin national searches next fall. I have asked Lance Neckar, with his extensive knowledge of urban design, to move the Metropolitan Design certificate program forward this year and to serve as interim director of the MDC next year, after Ann leaves and before the positions are filled.

Design is pretty popular these days. Other colleges increasingly want to partner with us, which shows how much interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of thinking now pervade the University and how much design and related disciplines have become more central to other fields. A group of us will be meeting with the leadership at the Carlson School of Management in January to discuss some new alliances, all part of the growing recognition in the business world of the importance of design to success in a global economy. An effort to coordinate the activities of faculty working in the area of human factors has also begun, joining our college with the College of Education and Human Development and the Institute of Technology. The potential of partnerships with other colleges in the areas of housing and of K-12 education also remain promising.

From a series of luncheon discussions I have had with alumni, practitioners, and donors, I've learned that almost everyone is looking for graduates of our programs who are strong in design, communication, and representation, with good leadership ability, collaboration skills, and creative thinking. Despite all of the changes in technology and practice going on in the design professions, the fundamentals still count heavily among employers. At the same time, many of our alumni have spoken about the new kinds of requests clients have begun to make of designers, asking firms to help with a much broader range of issues, often involving the integration and coordination of a clients' facilities, operations, products, and promotion with its organization and brand. The demand is apparently extremely high for designers able to organize and lead large, interdisciplinary teams to do this innovative work.

The more collaborative, hybrid, and holistic nature of design practice today has already begun to have an impact on our programs, as several units in the college have started strategic planning exercises and self-examinations of curriculum. Another set of factors affecting what we do emerged from panel discussions I took part in last week, sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Last Wednesday, I was in Las Vegas, on a panel at a conference entitled "Strategies for Campus Leadership," in which we talked about the impact on campus facilities of the mobile technology used by the "millennial generation" of students currently in college. Not only have students begun to seek out more varied, flexible, and comfortable places to study and learn, but the students at the conference report that what they seek from faculty is less information per se, but instead what that information means and how it might be used. Their eagerness to engage in hands-on, participatory forms of learning made me think of how newly relevant the design studio has become as a model for educators across the disciplines.

On Thursday, I served on another Chronicle panel, in Boston, on the "Sustainable University." There we talked about how institutions such as ours have the responsibility and opportunity to look holistically at our environmental impacts and to lead in changing our practices to become more sustainable. Design wove all the way through our two-hour discussion, as a key discipline in helping universities envision alternative futures and rethink everything they do in terms of the energy used, waste generated, and water squandered. In the next 25 years, universities, like the private and public sectors, will have to figure out what it means to have "zero emission design" in everything they buy and build. What that means for us isn't clear, although it can be an organizing principle around which much of our teaching, research, and operations might be organized, as a group of faculty and researchers led by Mary Guzowski and John Carmody have begun to define.

On Thursday afternoon, I sat on yet another panel -- the third that day -- focused on design research. What I heard continually from the audience of academics and practitioners was the difficulty they had in accessing research information, which gave me an opportune time to tell them about our ASID-funded database InformeDesign, delivering research findings directly to everyone's desktop. The audience in Boston eagerly took every brochure I had with me, making me think how much, in this instance as well as in many others, our college is already a major player on the national and international stage. The opportunities to continue along the path to being the best of our kind in the country are enormous, so let's look at this year and next as the time to do just that: to understand our strengths, to seize our opportunities, and to take our aspirations to as high a level as we can possibly go.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Staff members who do not have critical work to do after 3 p.m. today should feel free to leave early and get a jump on the holiday.