Boundarylessness



Boundary: (boun-da-re) noun, plural: boundaries: Something that indicates bounds or limits, sometimes called a frontier; the politics of division; an edge in the topology of manifolds; a limiting location mapped by the most advanced or newest activities in a limited area of knowledge or practice; to form the limit of.

Boundarylessness: noun: IWB Post-Grad Program at George Brown College’s School of Design



The Institute Without Boundaries, a post-graduate program in the School of Design, George Brown College, is where the interdisciplinary world of creative design and design management comes to party, intellectually speaking, with a mandate that personifies the core notions of integrated education and lateral thinking. Edward de Bono might have been quite at home here. So would Buckminster Fuller or Niels Diffrient.
Contrary to that most commonplace of metaphors, to push the envelope or to stretch the boundaries, the IWB chooses instead to ignore those inhibitions altogether, not just reinterpret or move them around so they’re less noticeable. Here, they’re more concerned with that special in-between zone that emerges between overlapping design disciplines, and in that counter-intuitive gap between design assumption and design application.
This zone is a unique creative location where seemingly different professional paths of design expertise first intersect and then superimpose in order to operate cooperatively. Formed in a kind of visionary partnership that resulted after a very popular collaborative project between the Design School of George Brown College and designer Bruce Mau, what began as an exploration of the utopian design notions contained in both the Massive Change exhibition and book quickly evolved into a discreet educational program which has grown exponentially over the past six years.
Maya Lin, the acclaimed Yale Design architectural graduate and public art/monument specialist, perhaps best known for her highly successful Vietnam Veterans and Martin Luther King memorials, has expressed it quite succinctly in her own remarkable book, Boundaries. “I feel I exist at and on the boundaries, somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet, existing not on either side but on the line that divides, and that line takes on a dimensionality, it takes on a sense of place.”
At the Institute Without Boundaries, their methodology explores that place in a way that encourages students of each and every design discipline to pay attention to the edges of our awareness, to notice what is going on at the periphery of possibility. Their mandate is as direct as it is elegant: find the next generation of young design innovators and then give them the practical training they’ll need to design a workable future for the rest of us.
What makes this design school program distinctive is that they provide the ideal context for prepared strategies when that future presents itself. Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson once remarked that the future has arrived, but it’s just not evenly distributed. And a recent guest lecturer at the IWB, urban planner Robert Ouellette, has observed astutely that design itself is the distribution vehicle for the future. This inspiring insight is somewhat reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s own definition of design as a distribution system for ideas and services on a worldwide basis.
In a way, the product being created at the IWB is design insight into what the future might bring and the proper preparation for it with adequate design strategies to meet its challenges. In other words: the even distribution of the future amongst everyone equally.
At the IWB, it is precisely this kind of incisive and thought provoking domain, a unified field of free research, that is put into practice every day. Beyond just the built environment, from it’s smallest to its largest scales, the world of everyday design issues and objects is also explored rigorously in a manner emphasizing the key elements of creative collaboration, intellectual cooperation and professional mentoring at the highest levels.
This also makes for a remarkably vital and creatively challenging collision of cultures, languages, contexts, perspectives, angles and avenues of shared study, since their students are drawn from the international and multi-cultural communities. Indeed, this is the very kind of collision that so often results in a new hybrid form, something that did not exist before the academic players encountered each other, but one which will inform their future professional lives in a subtle yet deep-seated way.
Like Maya Lin’s personal practice, the IWB’s process-driven context also strives to create a professional institution, a place in which to think, but without trying to dictate what to think, apart from encouraging excellence through cooperative synergy. The IWB was literally born in the context of collaboration and cooperation and it continues to focus
on these vital principles as it undergoes the kind of organic growth that always rewards ongoing innovation.
After its inception in 2003 by George Brown College with its inaugural project, Massive Change, the collaboration resulted in a remarkable book and exhibition which traveled from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Six IWB students worked in the Bruce Mau Design studio researching, writing, and designing a public showcase, a website, a radio show and a seminal book that explored multi-faceted discourse on the future of global design.
In 2004, eight new students carried the exhibition project to fruition and the student-designed Massive Change product line was launched by the well known Umbra company, with the exhibition subsequently moving on to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006.
From 2006-09 the World House Project was undertaken at the Institute Without Boundaries to explore the conceptual evolution of Home, and ultimately to re-imagine and recreate the ways in which we all live together.. The project aimed to produce a knowledge base for housing design that can be applied to both local and international contexts with the goal of generating a housing system that achieves a balance between the extremes of urban sprawl and urban slums and also enables people to build sustaining, accessible, and healthy human dwellings and communities. To do so, the Institute engaged students, teachers, and industry and community experts, locally and worldwide, to work on this challenge collaboratively. This project has lead to the development of various housing prototypes, design tools and systems frameworks which will be presented as an exhibition at the opening of The Brickworks in Toronto, in 2011.
The third and current activity at IWB researches and redefines the complex subject of
City Systems, at a time in our history when conscious urban renewal is both a challenge and a necessity. Luigi Ferrara, Director of the Institute Without Boundaries, encapsulates the current mission statement very well:

"With a commitment to leadership through design and social innovation, the Institute Without Boundaries has been amassing knowledge, wisdom and capacity through design education, research and practice. In undertaking this work, the students, faculty and industry partners at the Institute have built upon four key pillars: Inter-disciplinary collaboration to solve complex problems and issues that face humanity; engaging stakeholders, users, communities and members of the public in the design process; developing holistic design practices that create robust, long-term solutions; and finally, taking on the challenge and risk of applied research projects for clients and documenting and exhibiting the results of our learning experience. Our work has taught us that it is not the world of design that matters but rather the design of the world. Building on this knowledge, the Institute moves from the design of the home with the World House Project to addressing the designs of the interconnected built environment with the City Systems Project.”
What’s up next for the Institute Without Boundaries? One could easily speculate that the next program focus might be on global systems: a much needed template for eliminating barriers to true shared growth and the full realization of our mutual human potential. Perhaps. But it is probably currently gestating, taking shape in that special place reserved for creative thinking that cannot be rushed or pushed. But wherever it takes us thematically, and whatever it explores academically, it will continue to take a big picture approach which vigorously reminds us that we’re all in this together, and that design indeed does touch everyone.

Donald Brackett :
The author is a culture critic specializing in the history, theory and practice of art, design, and architecture. He teaches a Design Issues course for the IWB called Urban Syntax.