Last month OWP/P | Cannon Design hosted Open Hand Studio Meet and Match, an event designed to introduce designers looking to make a difference in their communities to non-profit organizations in need of design services. The event included structured presentations, highlighting past successful partnerships between designers and non-profits, as well as informal mingling, meeting and matching.

Here is a video of Homer Bryant, the founder and creative director of the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center, talking about working with OWP/P | Cannon Design on promotional materials and design concepts for the center’s new space:

In 2006, Josh Thompson, an avid surfer and father of two, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Josh and his family turned their personal pain into proactive community-mobilization; the Thompson family organized an annual fundraiser at the Virginia Beach oceanfront, dedicated to curing the disease that Josh fights every day. Their fundraiser has broken ALS fundraising-records, raising over 3 million dollars in their first two years.

This year, building on their previous success and overwhelming community support, the family designed a beachfront playground that is 100% handicap accessible – the first of its kind in America. The idea came to Josh’s Dad, Bruce Thompson, when the family wanted to go to the beach, but Josh has to stay behind because of the difficulty of safely getting a wheelchair across the sand and to the water’s edge.

Bruce Thompson approached the City of Virginia Beach with his idea for a beach park and playground for every’BODY.’ Land, design services and construction fees were donated to create the park, including signage design by Chris Hayes, vice president of environmental graphic design at Cannon Design. The park's grand opening took place May 22, 2010.

“I just feel it's inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we're going to do it starting now, or whether we're going to wait for catastrophe.” – Alvin Toffler

We live in a global economy, unquestionably. The common metaphor, pioneered by Thomas Friedman is that “the world is flat.” Technology and a less expensive knowledge-based workforce in countries like India, Brazil and Vietnam have leveled the economic gap between the developing world and western countries. An alternate view, held by urban theorist Richard Florida, seems more compelling to me. He argues that the world is not flat but “spiky.” The “spikes” are the world’s cities, and these urban centers are the critical components that will lead to a better balance between our limited planetary resources and the rapidly expanding human population.

More than half of the human race lives in a city. This figure will rise to 70% by the year 2050. Florida cites the statistic that together New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston have a bigger economy than all of China. These urban centers are supported by a diversity of interconnected systems and infrastructure that enhance the human condition (i.e. employment, culture, housing, education, transportation, public safety, healthcare, energy and technology). Given the population density and critical mass of economic, social and intellectual capital in cities, they naturally become innovation hubs. Furthermore, hubs like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles are dynamically interconnected with each other.

But there is always a weak link, and in this instance, the weakest link in many of the leading urban economies is preK-12 education. Education is critical to a thriving urban center, so why are urban education systems in distress? Better yet: What can we do to change this fate? What does an urban preK-12 physical environment look like in the third millennium?

Read Le’s suggestions for redesigning education within an urban fabric on Fast Company’s website, here.

I have a few comments on The Third Teacher, especially regarding Idea 9 "Let the sunshine in. And the gray skies too...."

Of course you remember the famous Louis Kahn quote, about schools beginning "with a man under a tree, who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realization with a few, who did not know they were students."

But you might not recall that he went on to say (more than once, I'm sure – he often repeated himself – but, apparently, in his 1973 Pratt Institute lecture, “Between Silence and Light”):

"You get an order from the school board that says, 'We have a great idea. We should not put windows in the school, because the children need wall space for their paintings, and also windows can distract from the teacher.' Now, what teacher deserves that much attention? I'd like to know. Because after all, the bird outside, the person scurrying for shelter in the rain, the leaves falling from the tree, the clouds passing by, the sun penetrating: these are all great things. They are lessons in themselves. Windows are essential to the school. You are made from light, and therefore you must live with the sense that light is important. Such a direction from the school board telling you what life is all about must be resisted. Without light there is no architecture."

The Third Teacher is a beautiful book, and it appears to be a finished product, in that we have an attractive black and "Revolutionary red" cover (not unlike Vignelli's Oppositions covers, for example), wonderful graphic design of both text and of visual images – some of which (like the butterflies and goldfish) are just there to pull the reader into the text – and an apparently stable framework of concepts, chronicles, reports, case studies, guides, interviews and workshops interspersed with the "79 Ideas".

So, I began to think about the presentation of all of the stuff in between Ideas 1 and 79 (I didn't read every word; I read large chunks of it and skimmed almost all of the rest) and I realized that, on the first 10 pages of The Third Teacher – with text-as-frame/text-as-infill (or subtext-within-text) – most of the "infill" consisted of quotations, or else statements of some statistical facts (essentially, a quotation as well). Then I noticed the two-page spreads with a central graphic (butterflies, goldfish, a wad of paper, a "school-crossing" sign) were also filled with quotations or statements of statistical fact. Then I realized the workshop pages had quotations from the kids. Then I noticed that most of the context/concept/guide/precedent "folios" were quotations from other sources. Of course, the interviews consist of quotations, in a less fragmentary form.

So maybe it's not really a finished product, but, rather, a work-in-progress.

Therefore, one of the things that struck me about the book is its kinship with The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's incomplete, posthumously-published work-in-progress that was never formally organized into a finished book; the 30 or 40 or so "folios" found together were, however, organized by theme/topic (by Benjamin). As is, it is a collection of fragments – 90% quotes and 10% Benjamin's commentary, more or less – a work-in progress, a research project for a book. But who knows what the finished book would have been like?

So, in many ways, it is a Benjaminian research project, a work-in-progress. Which is fine, because the subject matter is continually evolving and, education is, by its very nature, a work-in-progress – an ongoing research project.

And having Bruce Mau involved is especially clever because, as I well remember from the Massive Change exhibition at the MCA, he and his colleagues are very good at making the infinite seem finite (and vice-versa).

So, it's a very clever book and, ultimately, in concert with the website, The Third Teacher is, I think, a very useful and important book, much of which, like Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language (which is referenced), or Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, is really just common sense – stuff that should be obvious to any K-12 architect, teacher, student or principal. But the brilliance of the book is in its stating the obvious.

And so, I return to Idea 9, "Let the sunshine in." How did we ever get to the point where the school boards (and the parents and voters and taxpayers that comprise them) thought it made sense to have schools without windows? The fact that that idea took hold, however – all over the U.S., in suburbs as well as the inner city, regardless of region or climate – shows the urgency of stating the obvious and trying to restore common sense to the conversation.

Which is probably as revolutionary an idea as the "Vignelli/revolution red" color scheme might indicate.

Check out Sir Ken Robinson’s comedic and significant follow-up to his 2006 TED Talk (the most watched of all TED Talks). His argument: personalized learning. We couldn’t agree more.

"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science."
- Carl Sagan

Not since the Soviets launched Sputnik into Earth's orbit in the 1960s has there been such urgency for America to redesign science and math education programs. Now, in the third millennium, the initiative takes the form of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. Research demonstrates that interest among American students in STEM subjects has greatly declined, a major issue given that the STEM labor force is an indicator of a nation's ability to sustain itself. The new STEM initiative will launch with a bold mission: to reengage students in the joys of learning science and mathematics at all levels of education.

Read more about the STEM initiative and what Trung Le believes a STEM environment should look and feel like on Fast Company’s website, here.

Staff at Cannon Design created this quick video on sustainable design and what the environment would say to us if it could talk:

Dan Schnitzer is the Director of Sustainability and Operations at the Academy for Global Citizenship. Here he writes about teaching students to be environmental stewards as they design their dream school.

If you asked a child to build their dream school, what do you think it would look like? How do you think a designer, engineer or architect might react? Would you laugh if the child told you that they wanted sheep grazing on the roof?

The Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC) is a unique Chicago Public Elementary School located on the southwest side of the city. Dedicated to academic achievement, global education and environmental sustainability, AGC knows that the creative wisdom of children can inspire. Working with OWP/P | Cannon Design, AGC has embarked on designing their new school, a net-positive energy living building.

AGC instills within its students the knowledge that they can positively impact their community and world by making responsible choices and bettering everything that they touch. The facility will be designed and built with the same philosophy.

Sheep on the roof? How would they get up there? They will meander to the roof when you design the building into a landscape where the building creates hills and pastures for livestock. How can ecosystems exist to support diverse native plants, vegetables and animals within an industrial urban area? They can support biodiversity when the facility is surrounded by acres of concrete converted into rich organic soil.

If it is our job to create a world that supports our children and to raise children that are stewards of the land, the question isn’t “how,” the question is “when.” The answer is now. Come along for the journey as AGC uses the design, fundraising and building process to further global collaboration and begin educating a generation of students who will be prepared to thrive in their world.

Have you ever thought of the power of 24 million voices talking about education and the environment? Have you ever considered how far a single dollar can go?

To support AGC in their effort to create a thriving, net-positive energy building, please visit their site and click on the ‘Donate Now’ button in the upper right corner.

If you were to page through The Third Teacher and select a handful of ideas: Make it new, Build neural networks, Multiply Intelligences, Form follows function, Unite the disciplines, Think hands-on,Expand virtually and Unleash learning, and then design a space that reflects and promotes these ideas, you would probably design something that looks a lot like ThinkeringSpace.

Created by students and professors at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, ThinkeringSpace is a freestanding installation, designed to be “places within spaces” in libraries, museums and other content-rich institutions. ThinkeringSpace is designed to “encourage school-aged children to learn through self-directed discovery and social interaction.”

In July 2006, the Institute of Design began a funded research project, now part of the MacArthur Foundation’s five-year, $50 million Digital Media and Learning Initiative, to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. ThinkeringSpace is a “physical and virtual environment” that tailors to a library or museum’s focus, while remaining flexible and promoting open-ended learning through play.

Chantelle Brewer is an Architect at OWP/P | Cannon Design in Chicago. She recently helped organize a field trip for the students of the Academy for Global Citizenship to visit our office. She talks about that experience here:

It was morning and the office was quiet. People sipped their coffee and tapped at keyboards. We knew they were coming, but we couldn’t have guessed how much energy and knowledge they would bring with them. Then, at 9:45 am fifty students from the Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC) arrived at our office for a tour and to present their work to us.

The children had been working over the past several weeks on designing a classroom of the future. They brought models, drawings and writing that illustrated their visions of a redesigned classroom. The classrooms they created were inspired by delight in learning as well as knowledge of how they learn best. Students designed places for fun and movement as well as places for quiet, thoughtful moments. They proposed hammocks for resting and "calming down," tree house libraries for a quiet place to read and "fireman's poles" for getting from one floor to the next. One student designed a math trampoline; you could bounce on the answer "so you could exercise while solving math problems."

Many students designed ways to connect with nature while at school. Their models showed skylights or roof windows to provide natural light in the room and let students "see birds flying by, clouds passing" and "to see it rain." One student's classroom included a bubbling fountain with a fish pond; she explained that "the sound of the water would be soothing and we can learn about the fish." Another student offered an idea about a trickling waterwall that would help to cool the room when it got too hot.

AGC students designed classrooms that reflect that they learn everywhere, not just in the classroom, not just while sitting at a table or desk. They created active learning environments. When do we start to separate work and play? Why can't we play while working and learn while playing? Somewhere between kindergarten and 2nd grade, we start asking students to do focused work and to save the play time for the 20 minute recess break. The students of AGC showed that they want to learn everywhere: in their classrooms, at home, outside and even in an architecture office.