Today marks the first official day of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention, a three-day trade show taking place in Washington, DC. In addition to electing its future leadership, the AIA is also taking the opportunity to look back at the 45-year history of its Regional/Urban Design Assistance Teams (R/UDATs). In the five-minute video above, we hear from several of R/UDAT co-founders, among which there is not a single woman or person of color despite an expressed interest in serving communities of color.

Since 1967, R/UDATs have helped more than 140 communities nationwide to become more livable. They have addressed a wide variety of community issues, including urban growth and land use, inner-city neighborhoods, downtowns, environmental issues, waterfront development, and commercial revitalization. More than 500 professionals representing over 40 disciplines have donated more than $3.5 million in services as members of R/UDAT teams.

Click here to watch the R/UDAT 45th anniversary video.

T’is the season for commencement addresses. Following-up on yesterday’s post about Emily Pilloton‘s commencement address at UC Berkeley, we’re happy to share that our own John Cary gave this year’s commencement address at his alma mater, the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. A video of his talk is posted above, and is available in text form here at MetropolisMag.com.

Graduates, you are the next generation of designers. But I think you can be much, much more: You can be the pioneers of an entirely new way of designing for the public good–at a scale and a pace that we’ve never seen before–at a scale and pace that the world needs and deserves. If we’re going to achieve this, you all as the next generation will need to be far more entrepreneurial and think far more systemically than designers ever have before.

Click here to read or watch John Cary’s University of Minnesota College of Design commencement address online at MetropolisMag.com.

This Saturday, May 19, California College of the Arts (CCA) will host “Catapult Labs 2012,” a special day-long series of labs organized by Catapult Design, a Bay Area organization profiled here previously. The nine lab topics or titles are so refreshing that each is worth recounting here:

Lab 01: “Democratizing Design: Co-creating With Your Users”

Lab 02: “Creating Better Futures: Foresight and Insight for Social Change”

Lab 03: “Change: the good, the bad, the ugly”

Lab 04: “Sustainable Design with Intent”

Lab 05: “Creating Interactive Visualizations”

Lab 06: “Measuring Social Impact: How to Integrate Evaluation & Design”

Lab 07: “Game Mechanics: Designing for User Engagement”

Lab 08: “Three Cups, Rosa Parks, & the Polar Bear: Telling Stories that Work”

Lab 09: “A Top Ten List for Aging By Design”

Click here for more information or to register for Catapult Labs. The cost for professionals is $125 for an all-access pass (or $95 for a half-day pass), and $62.50 for students.

Emily Pilloton, Founder & Executive Director of Project H Design and author of Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, gave this year’s commencement address at her alma mater, the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Her talk is available here in text form at MetropolisMag.com.

As architects and designers, it is in our fabric to believe in possibility and in building a better future, so in the challenges of our changing profession, we should see only a context in which to find new solutions, to trade in new currencies, and to rewrite our own job descriptions. With our skill sets, what else can we do? Where can we contribute? Can we carry our toolboxes into unexpected roles, architects disguised as high school teachers, public policy makers, and strategists, where creative thinking would be an untapped resource? The thing that will ground us and help us define the next phase of our profession is our citizenship, both personal and collective, and this is why I believe it is the only place to start.

Click here to read Emily Pilloton’s 2012 commencement address for the College of Design at UC Berkeley, now online at MetropolisMag.com. Caption: Photo of Studio H’s farmers market by Brad Feinknopf.

Nonprofit Public Architecture will be celebrating its still recently-formalized partnership with the The American Institute of Architects during the organization’s annual convention, this week in Washington, DC.

Among other festivities, Public Architecture founder John Peterson will be interviewing Jennifer Yoos and Vincent James of VJAA, 2012 AIA Architecture Firm Award winners and participants of The 1% Habitat initiative. Peterson will also be participating in a leadership forum developed by the AIA Young Architects Forum and the AIA Center for Civic Leadership.

Click here for details on the Public Architecture events at the AIA National Convention.

Voting is now open for the “People Choice” category of Shaw Contract Group‘s annual “design is…” awards. Fourteen projects are presented, with a Steelcase WorkCafe currently way out in front with 41% of the votes. But there’s another beautifully designed and uniquely important project to be found here in the Ed Roberts Campus, designed by San Francisco-based Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects.

The project is the first building of its kind in the nation–a nonprofit community center serving and celebrating the Independent Living / Disabled Rights Movement. Located at a regional public transit hub in Berkeley, Calif., and integrating advanced strategies of Universal Design and sustainable design, the project is designed to welcome and support people of all abilities. Commemorating Edward V. Roberts, it has become the foremost disability rights service, advocacy, education, training, and policy center in the world.

Click here to vote for the Ed Roberts Campus in the People’s Choice category for the annual Shaw Contract Group design awards.

buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, “a Dallas-based nonprofit architecture and community design center seeking to improve the livability and viability of communities through the practice of thoughtful design and making,” has issued a new call for fellows. “bcFELLOWS,” as they’re called, “work to develop new and progress established efforts through bcWORKSHOP’s three areas of focus: planning, making, and informing.” A PDF with brief profiles of the three 2012 bcFELLOWS can be downloaded or viewed here.

Funding for these positions, four of which are available, has been made possible by a grant from the Corporation for National & Community Service. Selected applicants will need to enroll full-time in AmeriCorps VISTA program for a one-year term, starting in July. Although no deadline is specified, it appears that the selection of fellows is expected by the end of this month.

Click here to download or view a PDF of bcWORKSHOP’s call for fellows.

As profiled here at the time, PublicInterestDesign.org‘s own John Cary penned an op-ed, titled “Why ‘The Death of Architecture’ May Not Be Such a Bad Thing,” for GOOD Magazine back in February. The article responded in part to Scott Timberg‘s earlier Salon article, profiled here and titled “The Architecture Meltdown.” In the latest of several pieces stemming from Timberg’s original piece, a writer named Guy Horton is taking issue with the aforementioned GOOD piece, going to far as to scribe a 1,400-word analysis of what was only an 850-word op-ed, while calling for “The Death of ‘The Death.’”

A contributor to some of the same publications as Cary, Horton is the co-author of The Real Architect’s Handbook: Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School, published last year and self-described as “An incisive and hilarious examination of the underbelly of the architecture profession.” With this knowledge base, Horton appears at times to acknowledge some of the opportunities and challenges facing the public interest design field that Cary lays out, while other times simplifying complex issues and complicating simple ones. Nonetheless, it’s important for public interest design advocates to understand perspectives like Horton’s, just as it is a Democrat to understand a Republican’s and vice versa.

Click here to read “The Death of ‘The Death’” at ArchDaily.com.

Piggybacking off of its namesake, the legendary design and strategy firm of IDEO, it’s not hard to understand IDEO.org‘s meteoric rise in only its first full year of operation. But as its beautifully designed website and other communications illustrate, IDEO.org represents “simplicity on the other side of complexity,” expressed so beautifully by Oliver Wendell Holmes when he wrote, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

So, true to form, Fast Company‘s Co.Exist has distilled “3 Lessons from IDEO.org for Designing the Best Social Enterprises” into these gems: “1. Understand the community you’re serving; 2. Make a measurable impact; and 3. Work with the right people.” They’re all far easier said than done, but exemplified by IDEO.org’s “‘Clean Team‘ initiative, which has provided a hundred toilets to residents of Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, and plans to scale that to 10,000 toilets over the next 18 months.” The toilet product itself as well as the crucial corresponding sanitation system is represented in the graphic above, which will enlarge here or when clicked on.

Click here to read “3 Lessons from IDEO.org for Designing the Best Social Enterprises” at FastCoExist.com.

In his latest column for The Huffington Post, titled “SEEDing a New Kind of STEM,” Thomas Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, takes a look at efforts to grow and expand the “STEM” disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan frames it in terms “to ensure our competitiveness.” John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, meanwhile, is leading a national effort to expand STEM to STEAM, with the added “A” integrating art and design. Fisher, however, turns to another acronym, SEED, short for Social, Economic, Environmental Design–a term coined by architect Kimberly Dowdell and adopted by a network of like-minded professionals.

We should do all we can to encourage students to imagine science that enables us not only to understand nature, but also to steward it; to innovate technology that helps us improve the quality of life not only of the wealthy, but also of the world’s poor; to engage in engineering that allows us to do things not only more efficiently, but also in more culturally and climatically appropriate ways; and to devise mathematics that facilitates our ability to work not only smarter, but also more sensibly and sustainably.

Click here to read Thomas Fisher’s “SEEDing a New Kind of STEM” in at HuffingtonPost.com.