Advisory Committee Member, University of Petra

The Advisory Committee for Engineers and Designers brings practitioners back into the institution that shaped them. The remit is straightforward: review the curriculum, mentor the students at the edge of graduation, and feed the realities of the working studio back into the academic programme.

Returning to the University of Petra means walking the same corridors I walked as a student. The campus has grown; the materials lab is better equipped; and the questions students are wrestling with are sharper than they were fifteen years ago. They want to know how a small studio competes, how to price a project, how to refuse the work that isn't right — questions that come from a generation that takes the discipline seriously.

The hope is that the committee's work — in small, steady doses — keeps the gap between what is taught in a design school and what is needed in a working studio narrower year after year.