Your NameDavid Foley
Email Addressdfoley@pratt.edu
Cohort AssignmentAmericas Online, Winter-Spring 2024/2025
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

I am the Chair of Interior Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York.
The program is a challenging, spatially driven program that prepares students for professional work while providing the tools and skills to redefine what the Interior can be.
Since stepping into the role I have been working with faculty and students to refocus the curriculum to address design as an agent of change, to support the design for social justice, sustainability, and interdisciplinarity.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

I support faculty and students in their research providing a healthy environment for their personal and professional growth. I help to provide a direction for the program and the curriculum.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

My goal is to see the Pratt INT program at the forefront of an evolving/emerging design curricula which break down disciplinary silos and engage in the pursuit and activation of design as an agent of change.*

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

I am pursuing a permaculture design certification - which has been a long term goal of mine. I see my engagement with Regenesis Institute as an opportunity to learn more and practice a more wholistic approach to design/design eduction and my ability to facilitate regenerative opportunities.

5. And for professional growth?

Permaculture certification.
After leaving the chair's position I hold now, I would like to take what I learn here in TRP to the upper levels of academia - OR - become more instrumental in my local community and share what I can, and help support and facilitate what I can.

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

Ummm - there is not enough space to fully answer this question.
I don't mean to be flippant - but in a way - it's a lifetime of investment in questioning, seeking, risking.

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

I am educated, trained, and practice as an architect.
I worked in the luxury fashion industry for 15 years - innumerable lessons learned, usually dismissed by our kind of people.
Art/Architecture/History/Theory/Practice
Ed Mazria, Ian McHarg, DH Meinig, JB Jackson, Colin Rowe, Christopher Alexander, Nato Thompson, Teddy Cruz, Miuccia Prada/Patrizio Bertelli.
Poets, Writers, Film makers
...

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

Hmmmm - that's a curious question to ask in an online survey.
In a very macro view, the earth is an infinitesimally small part of an enormously larger system, and as such the role of humans - as we know us ... is pretty negligible.
Even at a more local (!) and tangible scale, the best we can do is act as the best custodians of the context in which we live.

Date CreatedNovember 17, 2024