Phelps, "Administration as a Design Art," keynote speech from WPA 2003 Summer Conference

Summary: Phelps tackles the concept of design in this piece, examining the breakdowns of some of our traditional understandings--such as that design occurs before construction and is realized with construction--and discussing how design functions in writing program administration. Phelps explores "the performative question of designability," or how we actively and continually design and re-design, how we are constrained by the structure of the institution (drawing analogies to architecture), and who is empowered to do such design. When we step into writing programs, Phelps writes, they are more often than not already extant, and we need to decide how and why to redesign them. Part of this task is rhetorical, part intellectual, part spacial and financial, etc. Phelps "locate[s] administration at the juncture of the practical and productive arts"--it's an art that is situated in a particular space with practical considerations, and it is one that produces something. Phelps explores the themes of complexity, contradiction, and improvisation and time. Writing programs are complex--they have a large number of factors to consider, such as people, curricula, physical spaces. They are contradictory--they "serve" several purposes, are located in several spaces (English, independent, cross-disciplinary, etc.). They require improvisation--rather than planning everything, they sometimes need WPAs to act and respond without fully knowing the results. Closely tied to this last point is Phelps's contention that we look at design as ongoing, as a process of continual redesigning.

Response: I remember that one of my interview questions was to lay out how I would design a "writing lab" (computer-equipped writing classroom), which didn't exist yet at my college, and support that design with theory. After I was hired (but before my contract officially started), I had to meet with an architect and work with the financial and maintenance arms of the college to actually design the room, order furniture, decide on software, etc. It was a tall order and a pretty stressful first task. I thought of this as Phelps described being asked to (quickly) design some physical spaces at Syracuse. What has saved me over the years is the concept of redesign. My lab has changed in a number of ways since its initial design (although we still have the desks and general classroom set-up I came up with), and when it was time to design another classroom, I and other writing faculty could talk about what we liked and didn't like about the first room and use it to design the second, which has also had several redesigns. I find this idea--that we work in a given context to continually revise and redesign and communicate to others the goals of the program and how these designs will further them--really helpful and productive.

Uses: Theory of design and a writing program.