An interview with Thomas Fisher, a Professor of Architecture and the Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. 

Enoch: When we were talking before on last week's show, you talked a little bit about the disruption that you're seeing. I think that's such a great word for what's happening both in architecture and in academia. Could you tell me a little bit about what you're seeing?

Tom: Well, The digital revolution and the fact that we're moving in to a new industrial revolution is really having a disruptive effect in virtually every industry. We've seen what it's done to the music business and to journalism. I think we're going to see similar kinds of disruption across every industry including the construction industry and including higher education. In fact, there's evidence of how that's already starting to happen.

Maybe just a step back: The economist Jeremy Rifkin has been writing about the rise of a third industrial revolution in which we are moving out of a mass production, mass consumption economy of the 20th century in to what he calls a mass customization economy of the 21st century. What that's doing is, sort of, forcing systems, be it the construction industry as a system or higher Ed as a system, to be much more responsive to individual needs.

For example, in higher Ed, we basically have had a mass production mentality toward education. You come in as a freshman, you leave as a senior. You go through a standard curriculum, and it's a little bit like a an assembly line which is the characteristic metaphor of the second industrial revolution that Henry Ford started about a hundred years ago....Continue Reading

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