Linda Keane, AIA is Professor of Architecture and Environmental Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She and her husband, Mark Keane, founded Studio 1032, an architecture firm based in Milwaukee and Chicago. Linda is co-creator of NEXT.cc, an award-winning website that teaches young students about design.
Why is it important to teach young kids design?
Only one out of one hundred people in the world goes to college. So if you only teach design in college, what does that mean for the other 99? They are the design denied. In this country it’s 36 out of 100, but still there is this huge gap.
We lived in a designed world. Everything around has been designed by someone, somewhere. We realized that teaching design at the university level was too late to introduce design to the public. In our work, especially when it comes to green architecture, we realized that the public did not have adequate knowledge to make the best choices. At the same time we found that the public mostly thought of architecture as buildings, maybe as construction, but they really had no idea about the complexity of architectural planning and envisioning, which is so important to the health of our cities.
What’s the history behind NEXT.cc?
We have children (4!) and when they were going through public schools we went into their schools and did career days. We talked about architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning. We had hands-on, quick, little thirty-minute lectures and projects. They built a skyscraper or drew a garden design or made column capitals, and they loved it. And we realized that, with our children going through the public school system, that basically, environmental design and design education did not exist. The art teachers and the drafting teachers that were teaching it were teaching it much more formally or technically and not at all as the messy, complex, creative and innovative, propositional field that it is.
So, we decided that we needed to bring design into K12 education. With students, we designed 16 initial journeys published in a little book. We piloted it in Racine County with inner-city kids and they ate it up. Some of the students did all 16 journeys in two weeks and asked for more!
The journeys are accessed online, but why is it important that what students learn about design is ‘place-based’?
Our children know that the rainforests are being depleted, yet cannot walk out of their school building and name the tree on their front school yard. They can name artists and musicians but not architects and designers of their town or city. So there is a gap in knowledge. A concentration and emphasis on place-based activities is really key, we believe, to the future of diversity. Children need to learn from the place that they live in. They need to connect both to the natural and the built world during the k12 experience.
How can teachers incorporate design in their curriculum?
We lead workshops for teachers. In thirty or forty-five minutes they design chairs with found materials. They struggle to create and construct and experiment and that’s good. In the process they learn a lot about materials, about comfort, function, structural stability and the design process. We’re trying to show teachers that learning through design does not have to be a huge undertaking. It can be a short, quick, wake-up, hands-on activity before traditional book and test learning.
