Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to the initial source for 'Screened' Out: Display Screens as Functional or Aesthetic Design Elements.

Sometime back in the 1990s, I made a case for screens—video monitors, computer displays—as the architectural ornament of our time. As Notre Dame has gargoyles, we have our screen-size talking heads. For this, I apologize. I’ve now decided that it’s time for the age of the ubiquitous screen to be over. 

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My evidence for this is thin; screens big and small are still proliferating. But I’ve had a series of conversations with interior designers about what the future might look like, and most of them downplayed technology’s role in their aesthetic. Words like authentic and homelike have replaced wired or smart. And I take it as a good sign that in New York, the gathering places for a new generation of digital entrepreneurs are self-consciously creaky: the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, the old NoHo hangout Tom & Jerry’s, “a place so low tech you can’t even run up a credit card tab,” as Susan Dominus writes in the New York Times. 

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Oddly, it was a recent visit to MIT that suggested that this might be more than wishful thinking on my part, that perhaps the technological project we embarked on in 1990s, the relocation of all our transactions and interactions to screens, is pretty much over.