Dear colleagues,

I'd like to respond to some of the earlier 
threads in the conference by focusing on the 
relationship between the plan for the School of 
Design, and the possible actual future School of 
Design; while the plan is a platform for starting 
to build the school, it will have to be the 
people that build it that will make the choices 
and contributions that finally determine its 
character.

This may sound like a truism, but my point is 
that when we read and consider the plan, it may 
be a good idea to separate the plan and the 
eventual implementation from each other. A plan 
has requirements that may force it to portray a 
quite different image than what its good 
implementation should eventually realize, and 
maybe if we see this more clearly, we can give 
even more constructive ideas for the process and 
especially the implementation.


As requested by the conference convener, let me 
briefly introduce myself: my name is Kari-Hans 
Kommonen, and I lead a research group called ARKI 
in the Media Lab, a department of digital design 
and new media, at the University of Art and 
Design Helsinki UIAH, in Finland.

Our work attempts to understand the changes ahead 
for people and society as the world is becoming 
more digital and to develop an agenda for design 
in this field. We also pursue several more short 
term goals, such as how to make the potential of 
designing digital systems for everyday life needs 
more accessible to everyone, or how to empower 
people to take advantage of the reconfiguration 
of the media environment brought by the massive 
digital convergence taking place around us, and 
we are trying to move forward in these areas with 
several practical projects.


I have been following the UCI proposal discussion 
with great interest not only because it is a 
great exercise for the field - to together 
envision what we'd all want to see in a state of 
the art design school - but also because I have 
been involved in somewhat related exercises here 
in UIAH, first during the first ten years of 
starting up the Media Lab in 1994-2003, and last 
year, when the university was reorganized, and 
the previous 12 or so departments were massaged 
into 5, and identities, concerns, practices and 
curricula of various areas of design were 
compared, questioned and redesigned.

As I have been to varying extent involved in the 
realization of all of these developments, I read 
the UCI proposal thinking 'what does this and 
that then mean in practice?'. Also, as my work 
involves proposal writing, I have developed some 
sensitivity to the language and arguments used in 
proposals and how they depend on the intended 
audience and how sometimes passionate advocating 
must be buried under business-as-usual text and 
vice versa, based on the political circumstances.

It would be interesting to know more about the 
actual situation now in UCI relating to the 
proposal and expecially what is holding it back - 
that would give us the opportunity to also 
understand the proposal better. Obviously the 
committee practiced some kind of 'contextual 
design' in writing it, and while we can learn 
about the context from the proposal and the 
discussion here, there will be other areas that 
influence the plan in ways that we can't see.


Universities are a very particular species of 
organizations, and starting a new thing in one is 
not easy, especially if it might be new in global 
terms. Universities have strong mechanisms for 
securing the continuation of established 
traditions and for strengthening disciplinary 
territories and boundaries, as opposed to 
experimenting with interesting new content or 
organizatorial ideas.

So to start something quite big, like a school, 
one must build on things that the university 
knows about and that do not sound too alien to 
it, using well known instruments and formal 
procedures and formats, so that the university 
does not reject the new organ with its numerous 
means, or identify it as a cancerous growth. Also 
a large unit needs lots of people for its staff 
and students, so it must have many familiar 
features so that people can identify a role for 
themselves within it.

I think that the UCI SoD proposal does a good job 
in these terms, but in addition, succeeds in 
making a good marketing case, as well as 
proposing means, structures and approaches that 
respond to perceived contemporary needs and give 
opportunities to new developments that may make 
it a very special institution in our field. So as 
a plan, it is very good!


But, as some people have been saying, the nature 
of the school will eventually depend critically 
on the people that will run it, and in my 
opinion, much more than on the plan contained in 
the proposal.

The plan is a framework that will enable or 
disable the next layer in the architecture, and 
its qualities are crucial for the next steps: 
Will the proposal get a green light? Will the 
funding be adequate compared to the ambitions? If 
yes, will the implementers of the plan find the 
right people to lead the process and construct 
the functioning organism? Will the implementation 
process be flexible enough to accommodate or even 
embrace visions and ideas that may be better than 
the original ones? Will it tolerate diversity? 
Will it have a way to evolve dynamically?


I am pointing out that maybe we should not assume 
that the plan as presented to us shows us the 
image of the future institution. I am sure that 
if it gets green light, the result will be 
different in many ways. That is the nature of all 
real  world projects. So the key question 
concerning the plan in my opinion at this stage 
becomes: What can school designers do to ensure 
that the qualities that they, we and the field 
would like to see in the new school, can 
eventually be found there - and did they succeed 
in this in the current proposal? And then: What 
if the proposal gets the green light - what 
crucial issues/stages are next ahead?

I think that the online conference is a 
breakthrough idea for processing just this, and I 
would like to congratulate all involved for 
coming up with the idea, for implementing it so 
successfully and for getting such an enthusiastic 
response from the community.


One of the findings of the conference for me is 
that while the plan is very good, there are 
always several points of view, fields of 
practice, education and inquiry, and qualities 
that may not be represented in the plan, even if 
it might be very good or important. But rather 
than trying to incorporate them into the plan, I 
would place all these directions into a catalogue 
that I would return to when recruiting starts. I 
have not found any flaws in the plan that would 
make me believe that the things I think are most 
important could not be implemented in the school 
that would be built based on the plan. The plan 
is ok, the next steps matter now!


A school that wants to make difference can only 
do that with great vision. Such a vision must be 
brought to the school by people, and their vision 
must be given the space and endorsement it needs 
to be realized, even if it is not the same as the 
original vision of the plan.

As has been pointed out, it really is a great 
opportunity that not many of us can hope to 
participate in within our contexts, to be able to 
start a new school. I think that the UCI proposal 
is a great platform for the project, and that 
many visions could thrive on it, as long as the 
plan is not set in stone and used to build a set 
of predetermined fixed positions that 'qualified' 
people are then recruited to. If leaders with 
good vision combined with good leadership are 
brought in and have enough freedom to follow or 
tweak the plan, it will have the chance to be 
great.

The institution - being a whole school - will 
have to deal with all the issues our discussion 
has brought up as it evolves. The discussion 
presents an excellent map of the terrain ahead 
for those who need to orchestrate the recruiting 
process and make the critical selections. From 
then on, the new organism will - it must - take 
over the search for its own future.

For the rest of us, the 'map' is also very 
useful, as we also may participate in 
developments that may be less massive, but maybe 
even as important, bringing to life and nurturing 
something else, maybe a small project that grows 
to be a 'movement', that we all benefit from 
later.

(So maybe we can all help more consciously in the 
'map making', and instead of trying to come up 
with what all design should be and what the ideal 
school should teach and how, we could try to 
build coherence, identify smaller pieces of the 
pie (oops, a gastronomic) that combine points 
made by like minded contributors into some sorts 
of proto-organizations...)


Best regards,

Kari-Hans Kommonen

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Kari-Hans Kommonen, ARKI research group
Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH
Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 HELSINKI, Finland

email:  [log in to unmask]
web:    http://arki.uiah.fi
tel:    +358 9 7563 0563
fax:    +358 9 7563 0555