The New School’s Tim Marshall walks the talk

Tim Marshall, the Australian-born provost of The New School in New York, is an evangelist for contemporary design.

Tim Marshall, provost of The New School. Picture: Hollie Adams.

Tim Marshall is an evangelist for contemporary design. But the Australian-born provost of The New School in New York, which includes the famous Parsons School of Design, is under no illusions about the reality of integrating design principles into long-established organisations in a rapidly changing world.

“Like many people in business, my job is trying to change a legacy institution that is faced with all the evidence saying ‘change and change fast’, in the face of deeply entrenched incentives, structures, norms and fears,” says Marshall, a graduate of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.

“At The New School, we live and die by our ability to meet the needs and ambitions of our clients – in our case, students. We have to use the same design processes we are teaching; we have to walk the talk.”

The New School, which opened with its forward-looking name in 1919, has an impressive history, including as a centre for Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe in World War II. In 1970 it merged with the Parsons School of Design, which was founded even earlier, in 1895.

Next month, for the first time in Australia, the Parsons School of Design will run a course on Design Thinking at Melbourne’s Commons Campus. Taught by associate professor John Bruce, the three-day course will focus on a systematic approach to using logic, creativity and intuition to produce human-centred innovation.

Commons Campus is the educational arm of The Commons, a shared workspace provider that has recently expanded from Melbourne, where it has been since 2016, to Sydney’s Chippendale. The Design Thinking course is open to the public, and future courses will examine such topics as creative technology, venture finance and product management.

“It is all about getting attendees out of their habituated context and into a setting where they can receive a short, sharp blast and view their organisation’s challenges through this design lens,” Marshall says. “Many older companies trying to find ways out of their entrenched culture find it valuable to set up ‘skunk works’ to get multidisciplinary teams to rethink their challenges.”

Marshall says Greenwich Village, where The New School is based, has been a fascinating vantage point from which to witness the fast-evolving understanding of what design means to business.

“We’ve come from where people appreciated the design behind a product like the iPhone and how it transformed Apple, to where most people now appreciate that design is not an optional add-on ... but an intrinsic step, and one critical to their business’ future,” he says.

“In the US, major businesses from banks to healthcare have been acquiring independent design studios ... because they recognise its strategic importance and don’t want to outsource design to the same place as their competition. You can expect to see more of that in Australia.”