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[ 14 ] climbing the glass cube ate on a Thursday afternoon, March 11, Meghann Harris enters the glass Brown Center, making her way up two flights to her Typography II course, already with a few favorite styles in mind. She is climbing the glass cube. Outside, Chris McCampbell parks his car. He’ll be on the campus late tonight, so best not to ride a bicycle home, despite the superb weather. As Chris makes his way up to the top of the glass cube, his mind is focused on how to build a scale-model exhibit of the history of neon signs. For everyone in the Graphic Design department today, moods are bright. Spring break begins in twenty-four hours. Just before six o’clock, the calm is broken. The stairways of the glass cube fill. Excited conversations echo off the glass walls as, it seems, the entire Graphic Design department (with 260 majors) streams down to the lobby, then down into Falvey Hall. Tonight’s theme is “the design revolution .” After a panel “debate” on design and social justice in Falvey, there will be a book party, an outdoor display, and a reception (with food). Today at least, the spirit of “design thinking” has completely taken over the Brown Center. Design thinking is not exactly new in American art. Back in 1825, a year before the Maryland Institute was founded, the National Academy of Design opened in New York City as the premier art school, and before the Civil War, mica ran its Night School of Design. So what is the design “revolution?” For a start, much is not in revolt. Design continues to mean communicating ideas (as in advertising and publishing), producing efficient kinds of products and environments, and following the rules of typeface and punctuation. “I mean, who cares about quotation marks?” says Ellen Lupton, head of mica’s Graphic Design graduate department. “That’s what we do.”1 So the revolution is elsewhere, mainly on two other tracks: keeping up with the avant-garde for one, and for the other, making design for a “sustainable” world. This is design that is wise in its use of space and L [ 224 ] a r t a n d s o u l resources and aims to relieve the particular mental stresses of today’s environments . It is design that helps the poor and needy, as is evident in the panel discussion taking place in Falvey Hall. There, activists with Project H Design—an on-the-road group that is visiting mica—are showing products that can “empower people and improve life.” No mere “stuff making” here: Project H has designed wheelbarrows from disposable water jugs, a waterless washing machine, prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille Lego-style building blocks, and wheelchairs for rugged conditions. These kinds of designers are entrepreneurs. Outside, they’ve parked a 1972 Airstream trailer, which is traveling the country selling their book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People. While Chris opted to stay in his class upstairs, Signs, Exhibits, and Spaces, to hear its guest speaker, Meghann Harris attends the panel, and finds the examples of helping the needy with design an inspiration. “The things they did are really admirable,” she says, and she would like to do this in needy schools as an art teacher. She is intrigued also by how Web sites can join the design revolution. “Any kind of design can be beneficial,” she says. “You don’t have to actually be making objects. You can be making posters for fundraising. You can make a Web site. It doesn’t have to be building houses.”2 Now it’s time to celebrate design books, and the book party tonight is for a mica publication, Exploring Materials: A Hands-On Guide to Product Design. This book is produced by Lupton’s students in cooperation with the Environmental Design Department at mica. Unlike other art departments , graphic design can press books into service for the design revolution . Publishing and marketing are changing. Books must change too, becoming part of the diy, or do-it-yourself, arts and crafts movement. That at least is the impression in the glass cube. Based on her successful 2006 book, D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, Lupton launched the Center for Design Thinking at mica in 2007. It’s mission is “to create opportunities for mica students and faculty to author, design, produce, and contribute to publications, exhibitions, conferences, and other projects that participate in public discourse on design...

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