I’d like to think that those of us in Higher Education here in the United States felt the tremors of the pandemic a little bit earlier. Many of our institutions have a high percentage of international students and alumni in our ranks. It’s not improbable then, that we didn’t hear the anecdotal or see on social media that our colleagues and their families were quarantined or ill or incommunicado… and that was at the end of 2019.

And so, the Spring 2020 semester began in late January and there was already tension in the air. Tensions continued to mount as word of the virus along with contagion and quarantine moved from Asia to Europe, and to Italy especially, and finally reached the shores of New York. Nevertheless, work continued, and plans were made for the usual semester’s worth of academic events and end of term activities – all with the caution that this might shut down at any minute.

Among those plans was an early March conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
At week’s end, I flew home with 9 fellow passengers; the self-quarantining had begun. A week later, the Institute announced it was going remote immediately for the remainder of the semester.

Other schools and departments at my Institute may have scrambled at that point.
But Interior Design did not. And Architecture did not. Our training is to solve problems, to design better solutions, solutions that consider the present and the future and their previous manifestations. Solutions that inherently take into account human interaction.

When people talk about ‘online learning’ as the catch-all moniker for education in a pandemic, I bristle. That’s not what we do. Our pedagogy is based in studio culture and depends on the interaction between student and critic. It is not online learning with a student at a computer monitor at whatever time suits her best working independently with no critical interaction. What we do is ‘remote teaching and learning’ where we as critics are very much in real time dialogue with students and their work.

Some of us in this profession have been working remotely for decades; e.g., with clients in London, bankers in New York, and structural engineers in Los Angeles for a project in Tokyo. Therefore, today, we can take those exercises from our practice, and along with the ever more sophisticated and intuitive software, now cloud based for real-time access anywhere, and programs like Zoom and Miro and Milanote that have made our work easier – and turn those 6am or 10pm meetings into more productive classes. We can still meet face to face with our clients, now our students, and review the work as well as have group discussion and engage in constructive critique.

Most importantly in the current situation – and the most eye-opening obvious lesson to learn from this – we are able to expand the circle of critics and jurors we invite into our studios: from our local cohort of extraordinary talent to the farthest reaches of our extended networks. A colleague and I were invited to sit on reviews in New Delhi in June. Another review had critics from London, Istanbul, Berlin, Philadelphia, and San Luis Obispo. The benefit to students is immeasurable – to have their work reviewed and critiqued by a global panel of academics and professionals not only enhances the educational experience but simultaneously in this remote mode still allows for the interpersonal dialogue.

What is to be learned?  My take is the world that we occupy – large and expansive – can suddenly become small and intimate. Conversely, the intimate spaces that we occupy with family and loved ones are now filled with the voices of strangers. Our public spaces are now zoned and distanced to make them private and our private spaces have become so active and dynamic due to our being closed and quarantined. The individual view expands from the personal to the global.

Again, our training is to solve problems and design better solutions that consider the present and the future relative to their previous manifestations. We will design the new normal through solutions taking into account our evolving complex human interactions.

picture credits: “Airocean World Map”, R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, 1954