Ep. 74 THE COMPLEX AND EVOLVING WORLD OF DESIGN EDUCATION with Trevor Bullen, Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology

ABOUT TREVOR BULLEN:

LINKEDIN PROFILE:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-bullen-6b55b615/

DUNWOODY COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY: https://www.linkedin.com/school/dunwoody-college-of-technology/

TREVOR'S BIO:

Trevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience. He has significant international experience; working on a wide range of architecture, landscape architecture and planning projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. In addition to his role as Dean, Trevor has taught architectural design at the Boston Architectural College, the City College of New York as well as the University of Minnesota and is a frequent guest critic at schools of architecture nationwide.

Prior to joining Dunwoody, he was a Senior Associate and Director of Operations at Snow Kreilich Architects, the recipient of the 2018 AIA Architecture Firm Award. From 2000 to 2016, he co-founded and led an architecture and planning studio on the island of Grenada, completing more than 30 built projects. The work of his firm has been published extensively in journals and books as well as being exhibited at the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. 

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 74… and my conversation with Trevor Bullen. 

On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

Trevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience who believes that design and teaching architecture is synonymous with discernment.

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

                 *                                  *                                  *

When I think back to my architecture education, it seems like another universe to today’s practice. And then again, in some ways it is much the same.

Architecture school was 4 long years of hard work and all-nighters that, at the time, we wore as a badge of honor. It seemed that there was never enough time to do what we were being asked to accomplish. Or maybe I was trying to do more than was necessary to fulfill the learning objectives. 

I certainly felt I had a lot to prove since it had taken me a couple of years to finally get accepted into the program after not doing particularly well at calculus and linear algebra in junior college. I also took extra math in fifth grade. 

Yeah… math wasn’t my thing.

Or at least it wasn’t my thing until I had a good tutor in second year who helped me understand that I was visual spatial learner and if I could draw or make models of the problems they would all make sense. 

Seeing algorithms… my eyes would roll back in my head.

Anyway…I stuck with it, took every drawing class I could, loved design studio and managed the engineering. 

I was proud to graduate from the McGill School of Architecture school, go on to study for my licensing exams - another series of all-nighters – pass and be able to enter the profession of reserved title and call myself an “Architect.”

I was proud to wear the traditional pinky-finger white gold ring with 7 notches in it representing the 7 Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin. Ruskin was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. The Seven Lamps were seven principles which Ruskin viewed should be reflected in a building: Sacrifice, Truth, Pow