Re:making Architecture

Eleanor Ruth Duckworth, PhD., is a cognitive psychologist, educational theorist and constructivist educator. A former student, colleague, leading translator and interpreter of Jean Piaget as well as renowned Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she is one of the leading progressive educators today. Duckworth earned her Ph.D. (Docteur en sciences de l’éducation) at the Université de Genève in 1977. A former student and translator of Jean Piaget, she grounds her work in Piaget and Inhelder’s insights into the nature and development of understanding and in their research method, which she has developed as a teaching/research approach, Critical Exploration in the Classroom. Her interest is in the experiences of teaching and learning of people of all ages, both in and out of schools. Duckworth is a former elementary school teacher and has worked in curriculum development, teacher education, and program evaluation in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and her native Canada. She is a coordinator for Cambridge United for Justice with Peace, and is a performing modern dancer. Eleanor Duckworth is the author of several books including The Having of Wonderful Ideas: And Other Essays on Teaching and Learning and “Tell Me More”: Listening to Learners Explain.

Thomas Ewens, PhD., is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at RISD, former Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts and practicing psychoanalyst. He served as Executive Director of the Syracuse Consortium for the Cultural Foundations of Medicine and the Director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies. Dedicated to community progress, he has served on the Boards of Director for the Providence Haitian Project and Humanities Forum of Rhode Island and organized Project Esperanza, a program in which high school students work alongside impoverished Dominicans building clinics, etc. As General Editor for the Theories of Contemporary Culture series published by Coda Press, he applies his insight into arts education, psychology and philosophy in his publications and lectures. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis, the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Philosophy and International Development Ethics Association.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news, the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, Internet culture and artificial life. In the late 80s, Kelly conceived and oversaw the publication of four versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs the award-winning compendiums evaluating all the best "tools" available for self-education including hardware, power tools, books, and software -- anything that leverages power to individuals. In 1988 Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a Whole Earth Catalog of personal communication tools, which evaluated the technologies of faxes, satellite TV, cellular, digital retouching, online systems and the whole emerging world of digital technology. Kelly was also co-founder of the annual Hackers' Conference, a weekend rendezvous which in 1984 brought together three generations of legendary computer programmers for the first time. Kevin was involved with the launch of the WELL, a Sausalito-based teleconferencing system started in 1985. It currently has 10,000 members. Kelly is the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems, published by Addison Wesley (1994). This wide-ranging book is about how machines, the economy, and all large human-made inventions are becoming biological. His second book, New Rules for the New Economy, was published in 1998 by Viking/Penguin in the US and by 4th Estate in the UK. His most recent book is What Technology Wants, published in 2010 by Viking/Penguin. He has no college or university degree.

Sung Ho Kim, Architect/Educator and RISD Alumnus is Principal of Axi:Ome LLC of St. Louis, working on various commissioned projects. Two monographs about Axi:Ome—Spatial Practice (Oro Editions) and Specular: Between Practice and Education (Damdi Architecture Publishing Co.)—were published in 2009. Sung Ho Kim has taught at Rhode Island School of Design and was Assistant Professor of Architecture at Northeastern University. He has worked as a designer for Nasrine Seraji in Paris, France, and Wellington Reiter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a principal researcher for Krzysztof Wodiczko's Interrogative Design Group at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. He is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and coordinates the Digital Media Curriculum.

Elliot Washor, Ed.D. is the co-founder and co-director of Big Picture Learning. He is also the co-founder of The Met Center in Providence, RI. Elliot has been involved in school reform for more than 30 years as a teacher, principal, administrator, video producer, and writer. He has taught and is interested in all levels of school from kindergarten through college, in urban and rural settings, across all disciplines. His work has spanned across school design, pedagogy, learning environments, and education reform and is supporting others doing similar work throughout the world. Elliot’s interests lie in the field of how schools can connect with communities to understand tacit and disciplinary learning both in and outside of school. Elliot is deeply committed to imagining Big Picture Learning as a ‘do-think-do’ organization, and persistently pushes the boundaries of its design in order to continually innovate practice and influence in the world of education.

Frank R. Wilson, M.D., is a neurologist/writer who has been an internationally respected authority on the neurological basis of skilled hand use for over two decades. Now retired from active clinical practice, he was a founder of the Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California San Francisco, and its medical director from 1996-2000. He was Visiting Professor of Neurology at the University of Dusseldorf in 1989-1990, Associate Clinical Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco until 2000, and Clinical Professor of Neurology at Stanford University Medical Center until 2004. He has long been interested in the neurology of skilled hand movement, and is a widely respected authority on the neurology of acquired hand disorders. He is the author of two monographs on the hand: Tone Deaf and All Thumbs: an invitation to music-making for late bloomers and non-prodigies (Viking-Penguin, 1986) and The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture, published in 1998 by Pantheon books. In this landmark book, Frank R. Wilson makes the claim that it is because of the unique structure of the hand and its evolution in cooperation with the brain that Homo sapiens became the most intelligent, preeminent animal on the earth.

Richard Saul Wurman is an architect, graphic designer and cartographer who is a pioneer in the practice of making information easily understandable. Wurman has written and designed over 80 books, and created the TED, TEDMED and eg conferences. Wurman coined the phrase "information architect" in response to the large amount of information generated in contemporary society, which is often presented with little care or order. Wurman created the ACCESS travel guide books, which were innovative in their use of mapping content by neighborhood. With this series of books, Wurman firmly established the purpose of information architecture. Wurman has been awarded several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Graham fellowships, two Chandler fellowships, the Chrysler Design Award as well as several honorary doctorates. He was made an AIA Fellow in 1976 and entered the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003. He was a 2004 Medalist of the AIGA and is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. Wurman is in the process of creating a new gathering, the WWW Conference, which will be based upon improvised conversation and music, or what he calls "intellectual jazz".

Sebastian Ruth is the Founder and Artistic Director of Community MusicWorks, a nationally-recognized organization that connects professional musicians with urban youth and families in Providence. As a member of the Providence String Quartet, the organization’s resident ensemble, Sebastian has performed in recent seasons in Providence, Boston, Los Angeles, Banff, and New York, and with members of the Borromeo, Muir, Miro, Orion, and Turtle Island String Quartets, with pianist Jonathan Biss, and violist Kim Kashkashian. Sebastian is a graduate from Brown University where he worked closely with education scholars Theodore Sizer, Mary Ann Clark, and Reginald Archambault on a exploring the relationship between moral education and music. In 2010, Sebastian visited the White House to receive the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from First Lady Michele Obama on behalf of Community MusicWorks. Also in 2010, Sebastian was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “creating rewarding musical experiences for often- forgotten populations and forging a new, multifaceted role beyond the concert hall for the twenty-first-century musician."