Design Interest Group (DIG) Column: Feb/Mar 2022

The columns for this issue of NAEA News were written prior to the 2022 National Convention. As such, you may find information about Convention sessions and references to past occurrences in the future tense.

NYC CONVENTION
At the time of this writing (December 2021), the NAEA Convention is expected to be delivered in a hybrid format, allowing those of us who wish to be face-to-face to be together once again. I celebrate this and hope that we are living in a safe enough world for that to happen! Please be sure to join us at the Design Interest Group’s Annual Gathering: Speaker Series, Networking, and the awards session on Friday, March 4, 2022, at 8:30 am. DIG has once again invited a highly celebrated designer as our keynote. Scott Henderson strives to create clever yet fresh designs that evoke health and happiness. Henderson’s designs are on permanent display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Brooklyn Museum; and the Alessi Museum. We also will introduce our new DIG Chair-Elect and honor our 2022 Design Educator Awardee.

Scott Henderson, DIG Convention keynote.

The Conference Steering Committee has coordinated a general session with Marc Ecko, a popular fashion designer and CCO of Ecko Unlimited, and Russlynn Ali, cofounder and CEO of the XQ Institute. XQ works in communities throughout the country to help them dream big about what school should be and turn their innovative ideas into action, creating more rigorous and equitable schools. We are also creating a design panel supersession that will include designers from the automotive, interior, and fashion fields! Keep a look out for the DIG session guide, soon to be found in your email.

Marc Eckor, CCO of Ecko Unlimited.

LEADERSHIP INSPIRATION
For our group of passionate design educators, I would like to share a vision that Robin Vande Zande and I share as cochairs of this year’s NAEA Convention. We see our field of professionals—which includes all of YOU—as leaders in education. We ask you to see yourselves in that light too. Some years ago, Deborah Reeve, the former NAEA Executive Director, crowned us all the chief creative officers in our schools. We challenge you to lean into that role with some gusto. Educators spent the past year heroically reacting to enormous challenges. With little time to prepare, we completely reformed our teaching methods and delivery, allowing children to continue their learning against all odds. We came face-to-face with making immediate sweeping changes in our approach to delivering education when it typically takes years of debate to marginally move the needle. As we hopefully exit the COVID crisis, there are many things that we have learned that will likely accelerate the pace of educational reform in the future. We have demonstrated that we can do it! There was plenty of good and bad in how we met the virtual education challenge. Now we are poised to make decisions on how to move forward, and it is likely that we will never be the same.

While school administrators are making important decisions about the future of education, we CCOs are uniquely qualified to LEAD. We are well practiced in creating and designing—we LEAD classrooms of students to create and design every day. This design process needs to be applied to the school reform challenge. Art educators need to lean into their strengths—we ARE chief creative officers—and teach our school administrators and colleagues how to design a better approach to delivering education. See yourselves as leaders. Provide the guidance they need to impact education for the better—no—for the best it can be. You are designers. Choose to lead and create an exemplar model for the nation.

To learn more, please visit http://www.naea-dig.org.

Cindy Todd, Columnist and DIG Chair
Cell: 616-822-0045. Email: cindytodd@ferris.edu

Doris Wells-Papanek, DIG Past Chair
Office: 608-798-1078. Cell: 847-772-9959. Email: doris@designlearning.us