SEE: A New Paradigm for Education

You have worked throughout your career, at SEE and other organizations, to bring a knowledge of design and design skills to a broader audience. What do you think design can do for young people that isn’t offered by a more traditional art education – let alone a more traditional academic curriculum?

Originally, the only people who learned design education were those who had already chosen it as a career. But more and more, people are realizing that younger students can benefit incredibly from going through the process of a professional designer – and that those benefits are transferable to all areas of their life, regardless of what career they go into.

Design is problem solving, and that process is applicable to a lot of things. One of the biggest challenges for kids, especially underserved kids, is relevance – [making sure that] they are motivated and engaged and interested in what they’re learning, and that they’re learning from their daily lives. Everything’s design. You can connect it to anything they’re wearing or using, anything they’ve seen in the built environment. Design education connects the dots between what students are learning and what they care about.

How was the organization founded?

Marc Ecko and I founded SEE together. He wanted to be more impactful in his giving, in terms of education. And he was really interested in helping underserved kids have the chance to do creative, culturally relevant work. You know, Marc Ecko is somebody who started out as a graffiti artist, and didn’t graduate from college, so he’s taken sort of an alternative path.

We believe that young people and professionals have a lot to learn from each other in this mutual way."

And the more we researched, the more we realized there was a gap, a real void, in terms of an organization that treats kids not as problems, but addresses their creative potential. A lot of our kids are dealing with major major life challenges: they’re dealing with abuse, they’re dealing with neglect, and really serious issues related to poverty. But we don’t focus on their problems and their challenges, we focus on their talent, and they rise to it. We believe in teenagers, that they have this incredible talent and power and insight in the market. We believe that young people and professionals have a lot to learn from each other in this mutual way. We wanted to build an organization around that.

How closely involved are your students with someone like Marc Ecko, or the specific client at hand? What are the benefits for each?

The clients always go back and forth with our kids, giving critical feedback until they get a quality result. And we have a lot of professional designers who take part in critiques, as well. That interaction between students and urban professionals is really good for our kids, especially socially. We’ve actually have an outside evaluator measure what the kids are learning, and they gain in three ways: academic skills, personal skills or socio-emotional skills, and also professional skills.

Every company is different, and we tailor our partnerships around the needs and interests of that company. Sometimes, they’re really interested in market research, sometimes innovation and design, and sometimes corporate social responsibility and PR. Usually it’s a combination. And what we keep hearing again and again from the companies is that they don’t really know what they don’t know until they work with our kids. RadioShack and Nissan and the watch company Callanen will say, “We had no idea what we were missing, or the questions we weren’t asking.” Because when you hear from young people who have training in market research, and in marketing, and design, you’re hearing from this group of people in a very sophisticated way.

And also, they’re very very honest (laughs). We see jaws just drop to the floor sometimes.