Ep. 74 THE COMPLEX AND EVOLVING WORLD OF DESIGN EDUCATION with Trevor Bullen, Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology

ABOUT TREVOR BULLEN:

LINKEDIN PROFILE:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-bullen-6b55b615/

DUNWOODY COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY: https://www.linkedin.com/school/dunwoody-college-of-technology/

TREVOR'S BIO:

Trevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience. He has significant international experience; working on a wide range of architecture, landscape architecture and planning projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. In addition to his role as Dean, Trevor has taught architectural design at the Boston Architectural College, the City College of New York as well as the University of Minnesota and is a frequent guest critic at schools of architecture nationwide.

Prior to joining Dunwoody, he was a Senior Associate and Director of Operations at Snow Kreilich Architects, the recipient of the 2018 AIA Architecture Firm Award. From 2000 to 2016, he co-founded and led an architecture and planning studio on the island of Grenada, completing more than 30 built projects. The work of his firm has been published extensively in journals and books as well as being exhibited at the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. 

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 74… and my conversation with Trevor Bullen. 

On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

Trevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience who believes that design and teaching architecture is synonymous with discernment.

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

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When I think back to my architecture education, it seems like another universe to today’s practice. And then again, in some ways it is much the same.

Architecture school was 4 long years of hard work and all-nighters that, at the time, we wore as a badge of honor. It seemed that there was never enough time to do what we were being asked to accomplish. Or maybe I was trying to do more than was necessary to fulfill the learning objectives. 

I certainly felt I had a lot to prove since it had taken me a couple of years to finally get accepted into the program after not doing particularly well at calculus and linear algebra in junior college. I also took extra math in fifth grade. 

Yeah… math wasn’t my thing.

Or at least it wasn’t my thing until I had a good tutor in second year who helped me understand that I was visual spatial learner and if I could draw or make models of the problems they would all make sense. 

Seeing algorithms… my eyes would roll back in my head.

Anyway…I stuck with it, took every drawing class I could, loved design studio and managed the engineering. 

I was proud to graduate from the McGill School of Architecture school, go on to study for my licensing exams - another series of all-nighters – pass and be able to enter the profession of reserved title and call myself an “Architect.”

I was proud to wear the traditional pinky-finger white gold ring with 7 notches in it representing the 7 Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin. Ruskin was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. The Seven Lamps were seven principles which Ruskin viewed should be reflected in a building: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. 

The white gold ring was a tradition of McGill 4th year architecture graduates, as symbols of having legitimately put the time in, done the work on the design thesis and survived it. 

In those days we drew our projects by hand and built models in the workshop. We got our hands dirty. There were 4 years of design studio projects that, in the real world, would take months or more, and we were trying to get them done in weeks. 

Back in those days, the mid 80’s, Computer Aided Design was emerging as a new tool. I remember that we had to take a class in computer programming – I think it was Fortran or something – and we had dinosaur computers that some students were playing around with to create drawings.

In the mid-80’s email didn’t exist, or not to students in any case,

Cell phones had just arrived with the Morotrola DynaTec 8000 which was the size of a brick and weighed almost the same, 

We used this thing called a fax machine that magically sent images across the telephone wires and could print it out on the other end on thermal paper (which you didn’t want to leave on the window sill, because it would fade away),

The blue print shop was an ammonia fumigated workplace where diazo prints, as they were technically called,  were actually blue hence the term “blue prints.”

We used pencils or ink pens on paper or mylar, and if you screwed up you actually used an eraser to rub the error out and you drew it again.

I remember one of my first summer jobs in an architecture office, I was quickly assigned renderings due to my love of drawing. I had made some mistakes when plotting out a perspective using the Plan Projection Method, and I was erasing what I had drawn. One of the principals came by my desk, stopped, watched and then remarked “hey… we hired you to draw not erase…” and then walked away.

Nice…

Our go to reference books were by Francis D.K Ching – ah… the drawings and hand lettering in “Architecture Construction Illustrated”, or “Form Space and Order”

And… the social media, google, Ai and computer generated 3D modeling didn’t exist.

It wasn’t until around 2005 or so that Facebook became popular and the iPhone came out in 2007.

Then the world seemed to shift on it axis and life as we know it was on the path towards Artificial General Intelligence and all of the miraculous - and scary - things we are now so familiar with shaped our everyday lives. 

The world sped up and the way I learned in university was both a thing of the past and then again it wasn’t.

Many of the ways architecture is taught are similar to my experience. Courses are taught as individual, disaggregated subjects, that graduates have to piece together in actual life experience. A wholistic approach to learning the discipline of architecture is not generally the norm. 

Which when you consider all of the components of a building it is a challenge since everything is connected to everything and the amount of ‘everything’ in a building can indeed be overwhelming if you try to consider it all at the same time.

The number of professional and skilled labor disciplines is enormous. And most of us simply see buildings as ‘fait a complis’ – completed works - with no idea what actually had to be wrangled to go from concept to completed construction.

Going back to social media and the internet for a moment, students now have never known a time without ubiquitous access to the world’s information through the internet. 

The tools for designing buildings have changed.

One could say it is easier to some degree now. 

Computer programs manage all of the interrelationships between engineering, architecture, building systems, interior design elements, as well as the cost estimating, construction management and more.

It is also easier to rely on tools to think for you and disconnect you from discernment – one of the key features of the architects’ role in puting a building together.

And this is where my guest on this episode comes into the frame. Trevor Bullen is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. 

Trevor is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience. 

He has significant international experience, working on a wide range of architecture, landscape architecture and planning projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States.

In addition to his role as Dean, Trevor has taught architectural design at the Boston Architectural College, the City College of New York as well as the University of Minnesota and is a frequent guest critic at schools of architecture nationwide.

He believes in introducing real world problems into the architecture curriculum so that students begin to understand the relationships between theory and practice as well as that good projects are built on good relationships between architects and their clients.

He suggests to students that new tools should not supplant their discernment – 

That key to their success as a professional will be their ability to consider the multitude of factors in building design, determine what matters and to not let the remarkable tools that are afforded us through the development of computer aided design relace their voice.

Trevor pushes the idea that great advances in visualization with Ai should not be and end in itself but a means to that end. 

The tools should be a part of the process not the end point in the evolution of a concept and that their personal voice, point of view, vision should not be lost in the use of the app.

And in Trevor’s experience, oh what a voice students of today have. 

Projects are influenced by subjects of racial equity, restorative justice, indigeneity, political orientations, sustainability and climate change and more.

And this, it seems to me, is what architecture has always been partly about – the 3-dimensional representation of cultural ideologies. 

Architecture and ideas are inseparable. 

Buildings stand as testaments to what we believe, want to influence and aspire to. They are much more than the materials that bring them into being or the space planning at accommodate human interactions. They are epicenters of human relationships imbued with stories and meaning. 

That said, it brings to mind the famous quote by Marshal McLuhan - "The medium is the message." 

McLuhan suggested that the way information or an idea is communicated, like in a television broadcast, newspaper, social media post or I dare say architecture, has as much impact on the message itself as the content of the message.

I think that this suggests that the form of communication, even if the form of architecture, significantly influences how the message is perceived by the audience.

In architecture parlance – I think Mies van der Rohe phrased it as “Form Follows Function.” 

If beyond utility, architecture is made to convey ideas, then its Form, Space and Order are brought together as a 3-dimension embodiment of them.

Thinking back to my architecture education, the tools of today’s professional practice have drastically changed and some of my classmates when on to other careers other than being architects, 

but the education we got then gave us a understating of the interconnectedness of things and the ability to solve multilayered challenges while wielding stone, steel, glass, light all forged into a unified whole by learned discernment. 

Teaching discernment is not just in the service of good building design and construction, it is a life skill as emerging students navigate the volatile, unpredictable, complex and often ambiguous world that face them beyond their architecture degree.

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ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.com

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.