10 Questions for NJIT's New Dean of Architecture and Design

As interim dean of NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, Gabrielle Esperdy found ways to apply design thinking to the challenges of leading an academic college of more than 1,000 students.

Now, as she starts her first month as dean, she realizes that her background prepared her well for administration. Also, the support of President Teik C. Lim and Provost John Pelesko spurred her to be an active interim dean and ultimately apply for the job.

“Administration is a creative practice because you’re relying on the same set of skills. It’s why people outside of design have embraced designed thinking: they understand that that iterative process is part of how you can achieve success,” said Esperdy, an architectural historian.

“Whether you write books or design buildings or objects, you are always playing the long game because it takes time to bring things to reality. And to bring the notion of creative practice to administration, you have to play the long game,” she said. “You have to be willing to test things that are going to fail. And then you're going to say, ‘Okay, what did we learn from that?’”

That hands-on, can-do, collaborative approach should serve her well as she seeks to redefine architectural and design education in the years ahead.

Colleagues find you knowledgeable, engaging, approachable. How will those qualities help you as a dean?
What’s really critical is to make sure that faculty, staff and students — and even family members of students — feel that they're a part of the community. And one of the ways you demonstrate that is through a willingness to sit down and talk to them. They feel valued when you're willing to listen to them. I also think it's useful to have been a teacher for so long. Because if you're a good teacher, you know how to communicate.

How else do you stay connected to students?
In the two years that I was interim dean — and I plan to continue this — I taught an intro architecture class, doing the lectures every week and guest-lecturing in other classes. That way, folks know that you aren’t some distant administrator. This is actually someone who's in the college, involved in the mission of the college, which is to educate. The other really critical thing is to be externally facing and promoting the incredible work that our faculty are doing, promoting the incredible work that our students are doing, cultivating partnerships with communities and industry and getting our alums involved. You can only do that successfully if you know what's going on. And the only way you know what's going on is because folks are sharing their work and achievements with you.

How would you describe your relationship with the faculty?
One of the reasons that I said yes to the interim job was because we, as a group of colleagues and collaborators, had work that we needed to do here. As someone who has been on the faculty for 23 years, I know it’s important to give the faculty a share in the governance of the college. That's critical. It can't just be lip service. It has to be the real thing. And because folks know that I'm serious about shared governance, they are pitching in and making change happen. At the end of the day, most change has to be generated by the faculty because that's how shared governance works. It can't be top down. That doesn't mean that the dean and the administrative suite don't need to make decisions, some of which will be unpopular. But the dean and faculty need to be strategic partners to advance the mission of the college of giving our students the best possible architecture and design curriculum.

What are the threats to education and getting students into the workforce?
There are always threats. When I left Pratt in 2001, folks were wringing their hands about how the computer was going to be the death of architecture. But then I came here and discovered a school that had completely embraced computers and was clearly thriving. So, threats are contextual. Now here we are again at another one of those inflection points with the rise of AI. Historically, our students were always hired because of their technical skills in what we used to call computer aided design. This is no different: they need technical expertise in AI and an informed critical approach to using it.

How do you cultivate that?
We offer studios and specialized courses that focus on how to harness artificial intelligence as part of the design process. The thing that was most remarkable to me when I sat in on some recent final reviews was hearing students say that the real challenge is how to design the prompt for the AI. This means we need to cultivate those skills that are connected to critical thinking and making. Design, as a form of representation, always requires communication, but sometimes students think that happens at the end of the process, when you are explaining a project. With AI, it must happen at the beginning. With AI, writing and speaking are now explicitly part of the design process.

Power skills are critical, right?
Yes. Because as AI continues to improve, humans are going to need to stay a couple of steps ahead and bring expertise — not just skills, expertise. That to me is a real opportunity in that it allows us to go back to fundamentals and return to what we're teaching students in this college. We're teaching them how to communicate.

How long have you had the AI course?
For several years. We're also starting to incorporate AI exercises across the curricula of architecture and art and design. AI can't be this dirty word, this thing out there that the faculty are ignoring. I'm sure that in five years, we’ll be in a different place. If we don't embrace it, the students are going to be ten steps ahead of us anyway. It's simply another thing in our toolbox and we’ve got to use it. The implications of AI architecture and design are enormous. We can't be Luddites.

What’s the role of HCAD in a polytechnic?
Most people don’t realize that polytechnics have always included design and architecture. Some think polytechnic is an old-fashioned, 19th century word, but I like it. Poly implies many techniques. I think it's cool. So is STEM-plus, which allows for infinite expansion. STEM is ubiquitous. Technology is the foundation of the world that we live in right now. That’s no longer enough. So, the project of the polytechnic in the 21st century must be STEM-plus. That's going to include the critical thinking skills that come out of the design disciplines and the humanities. The beauty of architecture and design is that we combine it all. Our disciplines are part humanities, part technology, part art. In this sense, we are already situated at the very nexus of innovation that NJIT is advancing.

What’s your fundamental goal for HCAD?
Thirty years ago what was then the New Jersey School of Architecture was at the forefront of what became a complete transformation of architecture and design education. I would like us to be in that place again. It's about fundamentally rethinking the nature of architecture and design education and rethinking — not displacing — how we go about studio, which is the heart of architecture and design education.

How do you achieve that?
We have an initiative that I call space time studio. It's a riff on a book that was foundational in architecture or education in the middle of the 20th century called Space, Time and Architecture. As the heart of our architecture and design curricula, studio is a dilemma of space and time. Studio is a physical space where students spend many hours every week — but not necessarily the way they used to. How do we take those things that are absolutely positive about studio, things that we all believe in, while recognizing that our students don't necessarily want to work in studio? Once they're out in the professional world, they're going to work in all different kinds of situations, at home and in the office. We need to understand those professional models and transform our pedagogy as needed. None of us knows exactly what that will look like, but across HCAD we have the talent and expertise to transform studio education. Hopefully, we also have the will.