PNCA Collaborative Design
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Illahee News: Peter Schoonmaker to chair Pacific Northwest's College of Art's Collaborative Design program.
As Illahee's twelfth year closes and we finalize plans for our thirteenth season, changes are in the making that signal a new and exciting phase for our organization. Peter Schoonmaker is consolidating his academic life (until recently split between Portland State University and Linfield College) into a one dynamic program in Collaborative Design at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Collaborative Design is an interdisciplinary program that uses systems and visual thinking, design ecologies, and other methodologies to tackle "wicked problems" through collaborative process. (Wicked problems are those whose ongoing impacts are seriously debilitating to the ecological and social viability of the planet and whose proposed solutions regularly worsen the problems or create new ones in their place.) Because of the ground-breaking nature of this new program, its graduates will be highly sought after by organizations in both the private and non-profit sectors.
Peter will chair the program, which has been created to design solutions for just the kind of problems that Illahee has addressed for the past decade. The result will be real world projects, which many of you have been asking for. As a result, we anticipate a dynamic and creative dialogue between Illahee and Collaborative Design.
In many ways, this is a natural and logical evolution. Peter has held academic positions continuously for the past twenty years, and Illahee has collaborated with dozens of organizations over the years. In the last twelve months, our partners have included Mercy Corps, The Natural Step, Ecotrust, The Earth Leadership Institute, Open Spaces, University of Portland, and Portland State University's Institute for Sustainable Solutions.
We are excited about helping PNCA and its Collaborative Design program with our network of partners, as we believe policy and science need the insights brought from art and design to successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. Peter will maintain an active strategic role at Illahee that will strengthen the relationship between the two organizations, as well as Illahee's ongoing collaborators. Illahee will continue, as it has since 1998, to provide a forum for environmental innovators through evidence-based, policy-relevant inquiry, but now with an additional partner that we expect will translate our inquiry into action.
