Building on the award-winning tradition set by our 2009 poster, which received an AIGA Best of New England Design award, the poster for this year’s Summer Design Fellowship was designed by world-renowned graphic design firm Experimental Jetset out of Amsterdam. The poster, which is mailed out to accredited architecture schools across North America, is often posted in common areas within the architecture or design department. I’d like to share some insights about the design process, strategy, and design thinking behind the poster itself.

- Dan Vlahos

An ...[more]

One in an occasional series

Shepley Bulfinch’s technology department manages tools and culture, with a goal of trying to create the intimate connection between ideas and how we communicate them as much as possible and have these very complex systems run in the background without the designer needing to worry or know about them. We want to be like electricity. Or rather, we want to be like paper and pencil.

The space in design between ideas and communicating them, filled with the casual and formal interplay of tools and culture, is the most interesting to me. ...[more]

In early November I attended the Educause 2009 conference in Denver and a series of discussions about technology and higher education. I left with three takeaways that warrant further reflection and discussion:

- What’s the relationship between the current higher education budgetary crisis and shifts in IT/ Library organizational structures and service philosophies?

- Seventy percent of scholarly research in the humanities is now being published digitally. In the transition from print to digital library collections, are academic libraries at a tipping point?

- What does the word “library” mean today? As library facilities expand to include programs for student life, student success, teaching excellence, and technology support, does the building type need ...[more]

Building projects are becoming increasingly complex and fast paced and funding is becoming more and more limited. In this climate collaboration among project teams is being increasingly expected. Integrated Project Delivery is one example of attempting true collaboration among team members such as engineers, contractors and architects. While this term describes a specific project organization, it could also be viewed as a general description of an improved collaborative process. However, collaboration does not always come naturally. Builders, engineers, architects and owners are trained very differently and with diverging priorities. Our training occurs within a vacuum of our own discipline and insulates us from other disciplines.

How can we change this? In ...[more]

Welcome to the redesign of our primary website (www.shepleybulfinch.com) and its new interactive partner site (http://inside.shepleybulfinch.com). Links at the top right of both sites allow you to toggle back and forth between the two.

We’ve come a long way since our last major redesign in late 2006. Our online portfolio now includes more than 70 select projects and communicates the depth and breadth of our work. The site is now a primary research tool for current and potential employees, clients, consultants, and journalists.

Now it’s time to turn a good monologue ...[more]

As a participant in Herman Miller’s Spring 2009 Higher Education Leadership Roundtable, I found the opportunity to sit and talk with thought leaders across the spectrum of higher education to be highly stimulating.

We spent two days discussing scenarios for learning that had been developed in 2005 and summarized in Herman Miller’s Outlook for Learning white paper – which ones were still valid, which ones had not come to pass, which ones were we still waiting for? In spite of the overarching theme of today’s economic realities, we still believed that every challenge presents an opportunity – and that higher education leaders are the ones who need to capitalize on these ...[more]

I was surprised when someone recently asked in passing if there was really anything behind the term “integrated design.” or if it was just the latest buzzword in architecture. I couldn’t imagine anything more off base, but it did get me thinking.

If you were tasked with solving an enormously complex problem utilizing a team of highly trained professionals, each representing different, but related, disciplines, wouldn’t you want to create a situation in which all the various expertise on the team could be leveraged to its maximum potential?

If a successful solution to the problem ...[more]

Yale Daily News video on Smilow’s design

Amir Sharif from the Yale Daily News, Yale’s student newspaper, created this video recap of the design of Smilow. Did you work on the building? Know the building? What do you think?