A&A Dean

So as a kid growing up with my brothers, we realized that anything we wanted, anything we could imagine, we could probably make. We'd use old copper pipes or molding for baseboards — any items that my dad was saving for home repairs that would allow us to make those visions or those ideas a reality. My parents really encouraged us to think, to ask critical questions, and then to make other possibilities out of what was given to us.

My undergraduate ceramics professor showed me that you could take clay and sawdust and create vessels that would render water with waterborne disease potable. Seeing what is available and making something different out of it, it can quite literally change the direction of people's lives. Here at Penn State, our faculty are encouraging students to look into the world, to recognize structures and systems and practices and question them in positive ways — through their work as designers, architects, historians, teachers, musicians, actors, writers — and transfer that knowledge out into other realms. Regardless of the medium, if they can imagine a solution, if they can imagine a response to a social issue, they can realize it.

Clay just became a natural material for me to use.If you don't like what you have, you can kind of mold it back together and form a new object. If we give ourselves a set of parameters, we're already confined. But if we allow ourselves to even question the initial notion of those parameters, other possibilities open up. That is what we do in our college. We see the world as it is and imagine it in other ways — and then use our disciplinary practices to make those other ways a reality.

I'm Steve Carpenter, and I empower people to question answers and assumptions in order to make possibilities possible.