A note from Dean Tepper

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A note from Dean Tepper:

Welcome to DISRUPT 2022, a look back at 2021-22 that is also a look forward. 

When I began as dean nine years ago, the Herberger Institute was the largest comprehensive design and arts college in the country. Since that time, we have doubled in size, from 4,000 students to 8,000, and are now working at a whole different scale. 

In growing, we have embraced the future. We are building a fashion program that is fully connected to the growing trends in digital design and fabrication, robotics and artificial intelligence.  We are connecting animation and film and gaming to the meta verse and XR technologies—including building the best enhanced immersion studio ever conceived in the new MIX Center in Mesa.

With the growth of XR in fields like healthcare, education, entertainment and retail, there will be millions of designed worlds that require animators, storytellers, experience designers, composers, audio engineers and beyond. This is the future of work, which is why we are creating degrees and experiences for our students to lead in these  emerging fields and to understand how technology impacts all fields of creative study. And, of course, to be successful now and in the future, we continue to teach our students to master their craft – understanding materials and structures, instruments, techniques of performance and movement, the fundamentals of storytelling, and the ancient craft of organizing perception to create powerful human connections and experiences.  

In everything we do, we remain committed to the concept of Creativity at Social Scale and to ensuring that creativity’s tools and practices are shared as widely and as equitably as possible. We will not accept an educational system that rejects students who have talent, voice, passion and imagination just because they do not fit the narrow criteria for selection used by most other design and arts colleges. Nor will we accept a design and arts landscape that does not reflect and represent all of us. 

If you look beyond the exciting bells and whistles of our technologically empowered programs and spaces and inside the impressive size and scale of the Institute, you will find 8,000 personal stories—remarkable students doing extraordinary things with the support of our faculty and staff. 

In this issue of DISRUPT you’ll find examples of those stories. I hope you’re as inspired by them as I am.

Steven J. Tepper

Dean and Director, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

DISRUPT is organized around the following themes:

Centering student thriving: Focus on the academic, social and community well-being of our students.

Art at the intersections: Champion the power of art and design to transform ideas and practices in other sectors including science, health, sustainability and development.

Projecting all voices: Center and advance those artists and designers whose lived experience and professional work are historically underrepresented or underinvested.

Creativity and place: Support arts and design integration into comprehensive, equitable community design and planning.

 

To explore the magazine, flip through the pages using the arrows on the bottom right corner, or click the three lines in the top left corner of any article to see the table of contents.