Scott Gerald Shall is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Temple University. Before joining the faculty at Temple, Professor Shall served five years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he taught classes in innovative material technologies, methods of construction, and design-build. During his time as a faculty member, Professor Shall has developed two interwoven streams of research. The first is focused upon evolving the active pedagogical models espoused by Dewey, Schon, Bruner and others so as to better engage the predispositions of the 21st century design student. Through this research, Professor Shall has developed a second line of inquiry regarding the promise of haptically motivated methods of design and design education, especially as related to the design-build paradigm. Professor Shall’s research on both of these subjects has been published widely in the US and abroad.

Through this research Professor Shall has developed several new approaches to design education, including a guerrilla-style design process which he teaches to his students through a series of design-abroad projects offered during spring and summer semester. Informed in part by Situationist-inspired acts of observation, improvisational techniques of guerrilla warfare, and the experimental, bricollage constructions described by Claude Levi-Strauss, the works produced through these programs function much like the acts of “radical reconstructions” described by writer Lebbeus Woods. It is hoped that this work, and the research that supports it, will help students and designers to more sensitively engage the unique dynamic found within the informal communities that represent the fastest growing urban condition in the world.

To provide the necessary framework for these projects, in 2006 Professor Shall founded the International Design Clinic (IDC), a registered non-profit which gives students the chance to use their unique creative talents to aid communities in need around the world. Since that time, students and volunteers from around the world have worked with the IDC to design and construct five projects, ranging from an urban tent for the homeless made of trash to a communal playspace for Romanian orphans using primarily dirt, rock and broken bits of concrete. Most recently, in the summer of 2008, Professor Shall, through the IDC and in partnership with the Study Abroad Program at Temple University, took a team of three faculty members, seven professionals and 32 students representing two countries, eight universities and six disciplines to India, where they worked with various local community members to redesign the schools run by Mumbai Mobile Crèches – an Indian non-profit that provides schooling and health programs for children living on the construction sites of Mumbai. Since its inception, the work of the IDC has been presented at numerous national and international venues, including invited lectures at Philadelphia University, Pratt University, Parsons New School and the University of Maryland. Recently, Interior Design magazine paired the work of the IDC with that offered by Kengo Kuma & Associates, OMA, Buckminister Fuller and the Arcosanti urban laboratory in an article highlighting practitioners who are challenging the edge of design practice.