Q: What’s the current approach of your school?
Scott Klinker (Cranbrook): If the world is filling with “things with attitude,” then we explore “the attitude of things”—informed by a critical look at modern change. As part of an excellent graduate art school, Cranbrook 3D is a laboratory for experimental thinking and making. Most of our students already have some professional experience and have returned to a research setting to develop a unique voice within the field. Like all of the 10 disciplines here from painting and sculpture to jewelry and architecture, we experiment with new connections between form and meaning by actually making things. A designer’s creative autonomy and authorship is equal to a painter’s or a ceramicist’s. Innovation culture calls this a “traditional, arts-based model” of design education. We simply call it design.
Design should be mastered as a liberal art before it is considered as a business tool. Great design comes from an artistic or cultural impulse, not from a focus group. Great design starts by creating meaningful stories with a POV, not by building a bulletproof business case. Great design creates new culture, not just clever new utilities. Great Design is about meaning first, the market second....
