TED Community » Emily Pilloton

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Design chutzpah. Public education. Marathon training. Dogs.

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• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: Thank you so much for setting this up. I hope the story of Studio H inspires people - it continues to inspire me. I think we can all invest in youth, and design-based education is just one way to do so. I really see creativity and building as these two secret weapons that light people up, especially young people, and I hope we can all put in the work to make more opportunities available to our youth.
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  A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: Michelle- YES! I think it goes both ways - design as a process can be integrated into math, science, etc, and we can also do a better job (when I say we, I mean Studio H, design courses, and the arts) of integrating math and science. The STEM-to-STEAM initiatives are starting to look at this critically - that some of the science-driven education we see is actually not so far off from more creative design-driven education. Creativity seems to be the common denominator. I think the creativity it takes to solve a calculus equation is not all that different from the rigor you see in a designer or artist or architect's practice.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: The similarities are actually more shocking than the differences. Their interests may be different (skateboarding vs. hunting, for example), but the things they are dealing with in their lives, their challenges, their brilliance, and their history of school not serving them well enough, has been constant. Each student is different of course, and I have loved getting to know them all as people. The reason it's so tough to standardize Studio H is because we want to always be nimble enough to respond to each student and the dreams and challenges they bring to our class.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: We have since moved our program to REALM Charter School in Berkeley, CA. We taught two full years in Bertie and a total of 26 graduated from our program. In Berkeley, the heart and soul of Studio H remains the same: we design and build projects that students initiate, based on the context of the place and people. So we may not be building a farmers market, because Berkeley has plenty of those, but one need our students identified at REALM was the shortage of space. We only have 8 classrooms and need 9. So they said "let's build it ourselves." We are in the process of building an 800-square-foot space on school grounds for our school community, because as one student said so eloquently, "the first community we belong to is our school community." We also just finished concrete public furniture, and individual hand-holds for a rock climbing wall. We may take on a skate park and skateboard-building lab next!

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: A good number of them did enroll in a 2- or 4-year college program, which is awesome. Most of those students are the first in their families to go to college. Kerron is at NC State studying computer engineering. Stevie, who was instrumental in the final design of the farmers market, is also at NC State studying agriculture. Others are employed locally. I still talk to many of them and miss them all. Recently one of my students posted a page of his Studio H sketchbook on Facebook - it was amazing to see where we started, and how far they have come, and how we've all been changed because of the year we spent together.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: Vocational education has historically been, as it name would imply, about vocation. It's about skills that lead to employment. Design is about skills, but also about learning how to think and create. If vocational education is learning carpentry skills so you can build a birdhouse, design-based education (like Studio H) is surveying the local birds, thinking about their habitats, designing a birdhouse that will best accommodate their habitats, learning an array of skills (maybe carpentry, but maybe also welding or 3d-design, CNC and laser-cut fabrication) to build it, and then putting it out into the world for that local bird to use, and for people to learn about it.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: Once the end of the school year came around, we were exhausted. But we were ready to build. We hit the construction site ready to go, having thought through all the processes of how we would build things, in what order, which tools we would need, which materials to procure at different times. A lot of design is about foresight.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: Then we present it publicly. We put everything up in a downtown building and invited everyone to come and give us feedback. From there, the hard work began - putting these beautiful crazy ideas through the filters of real-life construction. The zoning, the ADA codes, the fact that we had only 3 months to build the structure with a construction crew of teenagers and limited budget. We rely on critiques and constant prototyping to arrive at a set of working construction documents that could be approved by the building inspector.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: From there, we just start purging ideas. The more the better, the crazier the better. We get it all out on the table in sketch models and drawing, and then we sift through it - we co-critique each other. We tear things in half and put them back together with other models.

• A comment on Conversation: How can design-driven and vocational education improve our schools and communities? Join our live Q&A on Feb 5th at 3PM

  Feb 5 2013: We always begin a design project with a precedent study: in this case, students looked at pavilions that were open-air and in some way inspiring as architectural examples. They had to understand the building inside and out so that they could take away lessons that would inform their own design. For example: structure, circulation, ventilation, siting, vernacular material, etc.