Hi, I’m Amy Jones-Timoney and today I am here with Dean Mitzi Vernon from the College
of Design here at UK.
Thanks so much for being with us.
Thank you.
So we’re kind of behind the Reynolds building, which is a building that many people may not
associate yet with the College of Design.
So tell us why we’re here and what’s going to be happening in this space.
I think a lot of people see the tobacco warehouse or maybe just a warehouse.
We think it’s stunning.
I mean it’s really actually a simple body of masonry, timber and steel and to an architect
that’s a perfect level of ingredients for something that can be actually quite magical.
We like that as a shell because that means we can do a lot with it.
It’s also great capacity, it’s about a hundred and forty thousand square feet.
We currently occupy somewhere between 65 and 70 thousand on campus so it gives us space
to grow, it gives us open atmosphere which is something that as far as I can tell, all
of the programs have not had in their history here which I think is critical to design education.
So it’s going to offer us space for growth, space for experimentation in a way that we
don’t currently have.
The other thing is it allows us to walk our talk and to do service to adaptive reuse.
The greenest building is an existing building so it gives us an opportunity to talk about
sustainability in how we exist and how we educate.
So there are many things that make this ideal for us.
I think the bigger version is that we can pull art and design together.
We will be in close proximity to one another and I think there’s more than one opportunity
for collaboration because of our proximity and maybe some shared space if not immediately
in the future.
So we look at that as opportune.
We are also on the edge of the city, it’s an exciting boundary to explore and we consider
ourselves good city patrons and hope that that just continues to build that relationship.
How does this design project kind of help you meet one of the goals that you set when
you came to the University of Kentucky?
Well, one of the first things I knew very early in my tenure, so I’m in my fourth
year now, was that the college needed an opportunity for transformation.
They had pulled pieces of the campus together into the College of Design in 2002, but there
was really no way to unify them pedagogically or in any capacity to grow or expand, not
just in quantity but also to grow programmatically without a unified space.
So this allows all the programs to be together, it allow us to grow new programs.
We have two new programs, one has been approved.
A master of urban and environmental design and we also have a new pending product design
program.
So it expands our offerings but it also allows us to go from product to urban scale in the
education of that environment.
And I think that space because of the nature of the building and its bones will allow us
to have very open, shared visually open space.
And it is also really important for technology and it can be a new defining atmosphere for
us and we look to pull that into the curriculum throughout the building but the kind of home
base of being able to educate and experiment, which is really important I think with technology.
That will allow us to do it and we can envision that without much difficulty and we hope that
the architect does the same.
It’s exciting to think about the college’s future and now that we’ve kind of seen that
a little bit at the Reynolds building, let’s head across campus to kind of take a look
at some of the things that students faculty and staff are working
on currently.
Very good.
This, you are really looking at a complete resurgence of what I call the garden level
of Pence Hall.
It really was a basement before but as soon as we unearthed the windows, we were able
to see that in fact there was a lot of natural light down here and we wanted to make good
use of it.
This is kind of an assembly area for students outside of the kind of main machine areas.
We hope that we’re able to, with various forms of technology, actually teach the assembly
of technology not just the output.
One of the things that we really try to articulate to students is that just because you can 3D
print something, doesn’t mean that you should do that.
So if you have multiple options and you teach multiple options, what you want to do is teach
the student how to critically think about which option is appropriate.
This is our robotics lab and our robotics guru.
This is Pooja.
Well that’s awesome.
So we’ve kind of gone through the robotics lab, what else has been going on down here?
Well, really and truly this entire area has been transformed.
We’ve got new woodworking equipment, we have a new tool crib.
That’s a great opportunity for students to kind of learn about tools and also how
to be good stewards of them.
The biggest new baby is the CNC router.
So we actually had to kind of transform this room in order to even host the machine, but
it is not just a CNC router it really is a production tool.
So it does more than just prototyping, it does a lot of heavy lifting.
It can make things that are architectural and scale to product and scale.
So we saw how the CNC router works and now we see something that actually came from that
piece of machinery.
Tell us about this.
And it’s related to the Reynolds building which we’ve seen.
But this is really a sizable scale model, bigger than we usually work in in an academic
studio.
But it really begins to look at the detail and you’ll remember that I talked about
the bones of the building.
So this is really enabling us and you can see in this model, this is a small model done
last spring term with a group of students working on really understanding the existing
bones of the building, so now we’re able to understand it at a much larger scale so
we can begin to appreciate the changes that need to occur to create space within that
skeleton.
But the CNC router did all of this.
It is really about experiment and iteration, it is not just about output.
It’s really not just about getting to the end goal, it’s about the journey and between
that first moment of conception to assembling an idea.
You want to teach a student how to assemble an idea but also to assemble the thing they’re
trying to give you as a solution or as the idea or the manifestation of what they’ve
been working on, especially all term.
I think that education is the most important thing that we do for ourselves as human beings
and design is a way to elevate our existence.
And if we’re not rolling out of bed thinking about that every day, I don’t know what
we’re doing.
So a good liberal arts education allows you to do that.
I think design, that’s what I roll out of bed thinking about because think that it enables
us to get to that higher plane of thought and I don’t know what else we’re doing
if we’re not doing that.
Thank you so much for the time that you have taken today to show us around the College
of Design and not just the present, but the future.
Yeah comeback.
Absolutely.
If you would like more information on the UK College of Design, just visit the website
on the screen.