Dear Colleagues,

We just received the latest ranking of design programs in the U.S, put out by the ratings organization Design Intelligence. In a survey of deans and department heads across the county, our architecture program tied for seventh place with Cornell, Yale, Berkeley, and Georgia Tech, and tied for fourth place among public universities. It also ranked fourth among graduate programs in the Midwest. Unfortunately, our interior design and landscape architecture programs did not rank in the top 10, and the other fields in our college were not included in the survey. We need to take Design Intelligence's rankings with a big shaker full of salt, since it mainly surveys the partners and principals of major design firms, who may or may not know much about schools other than the ones they attended or hire from, but we also can't ignore it, with its having become, de facto, the major national rankings of design schools. Because of this, we have started to work on developing a more factually oriented ratings system, with a dozen schools around the country, and we have begun to send print material about our college to the firms who regularly respond to this survey, whether or not they attended or hire from our school. I also wrote an essay about our new college for the current issue of Design Intelligence. With all of these efforts, plus our ongoing work to move our college forward, I'm convinced that the recognition will follow.

Over the last two months, I have held a series of listening lunches with alumni and donors to the college, as well as with faculty and staff, and I wanted to share some of the ideas that have come from those conversations. All of our alumni and friends have spoken of their enthusiasm and support for our efforts, and several have observed how much the convergence of disciplines in our college parallels that going on in business and professional practice. Many of our alumni report that they increasingly work with a greater diversity of fields in organizations and on projects, and several of them urged us to find ways to cultivate, in our students, the skills of working in teams across disciplinary lines. As one alumnus said, the building of collaboration and communication skills among our students may be as important as any specific technical skill they acquire.

Other conversations with alumni have focused on the changing demand for their services. Some report being involved in strategic thinking with clients and communities, leading in very different directions than first anticipated. One architect told me that his firm has gotten involved in a client's organizational transformation, triggered by the need for new space, but not directly related to it. This has led the firm to partner with organizational consultants, industrial psychologists, and others from the social sciences to meet the client's needs. A graphic design alumnus also mentioned doing films, exhibitions, and entire events for clients in response to their communications requirements, managing the work of everyone from movie producers to event planners. Those examples, they said, reveal the importance of our students all having some design management skills.

This relates to what I have heard at the listening lunches with faculty and staff at the Campus Club over the last two months. Almost everyone has expressed a strong desire to get to know each other and, in response, we are preparing for the staff retreat on January 10 and for the faculty retreat on January 11, a visual "yearbook" of the faculty, with summaries of their work. We will follow soon afterward with one of the staff. Many faculty and staff have also spoken of their eagerness to start taking specific, concrete actions to examine our various curriculums and research and outreach activities with an eye to coordination and collaboration. As one group of faculty put it, we have a window of time to rethink what education in our college should be in the 21st Century, and we shouldn't miss the opportunity. We will start moving through that open window on January 10 and 11.

Speaking of getting to know each other, the University wants to know more about us as well, asking us to contribute ideas related to our work as part of the "Driven to Discover" campaign. Most of the features in the campaign so far have focused on the hard sciences and engineering, but our more applied approach to problems and the more visible results of our work lend themselves to this effort, so please think of what the public might want to know about your work and how you might answer a simple question about it. Laura Weber, our director of communications (l-webe@umn.edu) will forward your suggestions to the University, which will start a second round of television and print adds next year. Who knows, you might just be on TV.

On the subject of communications, I just received this e-mail from Provost Tom Sullivan about our new magazine, Emerging: "I had a chance to read your new college magazine and thought it was terrific. It's a really first-rate job in all respects. Congratulations." Let me add my kudos to the communications staff and everyone who contributed to the magazine. Emerging shows the amazing array of activities going on in the college and it represents the quality of design that will characterize everything that the college sends to our various communities and constituencies.

In the meantime, I hope everyone has a "first-rate" holiday and New Year break. We have accomplished a tremendous amount of hard work these first six months and we have much to feel good about. Thank you all for your efforts.