Report on the 3 April 2008 FuturePresent Symposium at GSD [FuturePresent Organizing Committee] May 23, 2008 The following report discusses the FuturePresent symposium held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 3, 2008. FuturePresent was organized by Social Change and Activism (SoCA), a GSD student group. I. Overview Consensus among student organizers—that minority underrepresentation in the design fields is a problem shared across minority groups—led to changing the original name of the symposium, Black Community: FuturePresent, to Our Communities: FuturePresent. The urgent need to re-situate the dialog of architecture and of design involves not only Black communities, but also Hispanic and Native American communities (etc), and a polyvalent discourse between minority communities and an historically Eurocentric design community. From the symposium program: The FuturePresent symposium and initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design serves to amplify discussion of the interrelationship between marginalized cultural environments, (schools of) architecture, and renewed leadership of minority architects. FuturePresent seeks to energize a network of students, professionals and academics to think critically across the design disciplines and to proactively and in collaboration work to increase diversity within landscape/architecture, urban planning and design.
In terms of this overall goal—specifically that of empowering and activating a new, younger generation of minority leaders within the design fields—the conference was a notable success. Perhaps most exciting to GSD students was the attendance of a diverse set of minority student leaders from across the country. Students individually interpreted the symposium literature that we sent to every design school in the United States, and ultimately joined the discussion regardless of their being Indian, Asian-American, African, African-American, Hispanic or Caucasian. This dynamic response was the most powerful dimension of the conference: Consistent with what the GSD itself is experiencing now, students nation-wide are not only questioning outmoded attitudes and cultural biases within design pedagogy, but are eager to collectively work to advance multicultural perspectives and a higher degree of social engagement within the disciplines. Funding from the Provost Office was instrumental in covering the cost of speakers and symposium overhead as well as making possible the attendance of student leaders (e.g. presidents of school chapters of NOMAS, the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students) from a host of schools outside the Boston area, including UVA, Cornell, CCA, Hampton, SCI-Arc, Tuskegee, Woodbury, FAMU, Howard, Morehouse and the University of Cincinnati. Historically black architecture schools such as FAMU, Howard, Hampton and Tuskegee sent full delegations of up to four students plus a faculty advisor. The conference statement deliberately framed FuturePresent as “symposium and initiative”...and the symposium itself was organized as three panels and two presentations in the morning, with the afternoon dedicated to workshops—small groups developing action items under the overall theme. Notes from the workshop are appended to this report, as is the symposium program. II. Outcomes Minority Recruiting The April 2008 FuturePresent event was a singular example of the positive correlation between diversity, within the cultural terrain of the academic project, and minority recruiting, within student