Cultivation, Care, and Gardening in Design & Education

Session Description

How might “cultivation” help us rethink design education and practice? Our opening keynote asks us to consider the conference theme as a provocation for our time together and beyond. “Cultivate” carries a botanical inheritance in tension with modern design and education. Cultivation’s connotative opposite could be “bootcamp”: intensive, bounded, output-driven. Design loves a good bootcamp, charette, workshop; higher education slices life into terms, credit hours, class years. Both traditions run on what Allison Gopnik might call “carpentry logic”—define objectives, arrange the parts, move on. Our goal will not be to resolve the tension between cultivating and boot camping, but to leave with a sharper sense–and tangible ideas–for how we might cultivate more in our work.

About Rafe Steinhauer

Rafe is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College who studies, teaches, and practices the design of education. He founded an Education Design Clinic in which teams of K-12 educators and administrators learn and apply methods of co-design to school improvement projects. In higher ed, he leads faculty development workshops on everything from Metacognition & AI to Applying Philosophy of Education to Practice. Rafe was the 2025 winner of the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. He holds a BSE in from Princeton University and dual MBA/MEd degrees in Innovation in Education from the University of Virginia.