Kim Wiese

• M.Arch, University of Manitoba
• BID, University of Manitoba

Kim has professional degrees in both Architecture and Interior Design from the University of Manitoba, 15 years of fashion design and marketing experience, and many years of architecture and interior design projects completed to date. She has several years of work experience in Stuttgart, Germany at H4A and ASIR Architekten, where she consulted on several multifamily housing and small commercial projects as well as having worked on numerous competitions. Returning to Canada she began to teach at the University of Manitoba in the Faculty of Architecture and is currently a Senior Instructor in the Undergraduate Program. Kim has undertaken the organization of numerous foreign trips and studios including 2 Master of Architecture Design Studios in Berlin, associated with Prof. Peter Berten at the TU, Interdisciplinary Studios in Berlin with Ralph Stern, and the Undergraduate Chicago Field Trip for the Department of Environmental Design at the University of Manitoba. 

Kim co-founded and spearheaded the Faculty of Architecture FABLab and the Digital Fabrication Initiative along with Jason Hare, and has attended fabrication conferences in Texas, New York, Stuttgart, Mexico City and Copenhagen. 
Her interest is in the bridge between the digital and the physical, between the technological and the crafted. The development of innovative computational tools, a new culture of scripting and the application of these in enhancing creative and socially meaningful responses to design problems. The FABLab was established within a grounding and knowledge that we live in a society where the rate of new technologies and representational methods is continuously advancing. The honing and development of an understanding of the conventional as well as emergent technologies is the focus of the Fabrication Lab and today’s students are made aware of the implications of working within the framework of both processing and communication systems.

As educators we are guides, leading students in a direction, providing a framework to work within. Not providing solutions or answers to questions but rather creating and fostering a self-reliance and resiliency that will allow the future designer to contribute to society in a meaningful way. In broad terms, current design education must engage the values and continuities of cultural production. Education is a participatory medium rather than a passive one. Continuous reappraisal and transformation occur as societal motivations and spatial demands change over time. The education provided even 10 years ago, may no longer apply. As well, the challenges of our time require more than ever that designers focus their talents not simply on how things appear but on how things fundamentally are… and, more to the point, how they could be.
To borrow a phrase: “Every generation is presented with challenges specific to its time and place”
As stated by Joel Towers “We live in a world changing in ways that were unimaginable at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when design education first began to take shape. Technology (aided and abetted by design), advances in scientific knowledge, and shifts in social and cultural norms shaped design in the twentieth century. Our problems today involve more complex and interconnected systems - - climate, cities, resources, networks, flows—and call for a new paradigm. Design in the twenty-first century is of critical importance in both addressing these challenges and transforming them into opportunities to remake the world around us.” ¹
Design alone will not solve these challenges, but neither will they be adequately engaged without the creativity and strategic thinking of designers.
I believe that it is our job as educators in a design school to prepare students for the challenges of the time, that they not only rise to the occasion, but also solve problems and create new and great opportunities for society.
 

^{1 The Dean of Parsons: Design Education Must Change | ArchDaily. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/445647/the-dean-of-parsons-design-education-must-change (Accessed: 15 July 2019)}