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Brad Hokanson will lead Design Institute

Brad Hokanson, associate professor of graphic design, was named director of the College of Design's Design Institute (DI) effective December 1, 2009.

Hokanson said his immediate goals for the DI are to "make connections with people, programs, and ideas, and bring them together." Out of this "stone soup" approach will come a new model for the DI appropriate for the current economic climate.

Under the leadership of its previous director, Janet Abrams, the DI established a reputation internationally as a think tank for design. "We hope to build on the past accomplishments of the DI," said Dean Thomas Fisher, "and refocus it on the pressing issues that face us in a very different social, economic, and environmental context than existed a decade ago. We all need to be much smarter about how we use resources and allocate funds to achieve the greatest benefit. Design plays a pivotal role in that, and the DI is ideally positioned to lead in that effort."

Hokanson's scholarship and teaching involve design, creativity, and innovation. (See related article below.) He earned a BA in studio arts from Carleton College, BArch from the University of Minnesota, MArch in urban design from Harvard University, and PhD in instructional systems technology from the University of Minnesota. He received the outstanding teaching award from the College of Design in 2008.

Is it possible to teach creativity?

By Michael Fraase

Five-year-olds know they can draw, sing, and dance. Unfortunately, this grand confidence gets trained out of us and diminishes at an early age. Brad Hokanson (Graphic Design) believes creativity can be (re)taught and sets out to do just that with his undergraduate Creative Problem Solving course, open to all students, and a requirement for retail merchandising students.

Hokanson teaches his students to spark creativity by generating ideas and then critically evaluating them. Like others in the field, he believes that creativity can be quantified using the late E. Paul Torrance's (MA Ed Psych '44) scoring criteria for creative and divergent thinking, developed at the University in the 1960s.

Each week, Hokanson's students are required to do something they've never done before and then are scored on the creativity of their activity, using Torrance and Hokanson's own scales of surprise, novelty, and applicability.

Finally, Hokanson's students are required to ask three of their nondesign professors, "How are you creative?" The idea is to plant the seed and improve the University.

Creative critical thinking is crucial in the new economy, said Hokanson. "Creative thinking leads to innovation by sparking novel insights, unique approaches, and new perspectives."

Video of the Creative Problem-Solving Orchestra is available online.

New carbon-neutral design course offered

By Michael Fraase

The best path to carbon neutrality, or having a net zero carbon footprint (removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we emit) is to avoid emitting carbon to begin with.

Carbon-neutral design is the goal of a new course, Arch 5516 Luminous and Thermal Design, offered as a seven-week studio hybrid coordinated by architecture faculty Mary Guzowski, Loren Abraham, Ian McLellan, and a cohort of other faculty members.

Students will design a 20,000-square-foot carbon-neutral addition to Rapson Hall as a project base for applied design and are expected to employ holistic ecological thinking in their design for everything including energy, carbon, thermal, and lighting calculations, Guzowski said.

The course is required for all MArch students. "This is the only curriculum that I am aware of that fully integrates carbon-neutral design into the studio as a requirement for all students," Guzowski said. Advanced courses in carbon-neutral design will be offered in the future.

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