Mark Randall: Embracing Exploration
“Design is a way that you view and interact with the world,” says Mark Randall, associate dean of and assistant professor in Parsons’ School of Design Strategies. “As a designer, you’re a lifelong learner.” It’s a belief reflected in his wide-ranging design practice.
Randall came to Parsons as a consultant to the BBA Strategic Design and Management program, a position in which he helped develop external partnerships for the senior capstone class and taught its first cohort. The course connects students with businesses and helps prepare them for their professional lives. “Students love working with external partners because it enables them to see how the abstract concepts they’re learning in the classroom can be applied in the real world,” says Randall. Later, in his role as associate director of the BBA program, he cultivated a diverse group of program partners ranging from start-ups and nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies.
In Randall’s own career, he has embraced exploration and bridged disciplines. One of his many interests is honeybees. He has kept bees for more than 20 years and in 2017 started B-Line Ice Cream, a small business in upstate New York that produces ice cream using wildflower honey from his own hives. For Randall, the business is about much more than selling ice cream. “My ice cream company is a platform for raising people’s awareness of issues related to sustainability, climate change, and the importance of pollinators,” he explains.
Randall has brought his passion for bees to the classroom in the form of Honeybee Colonies: Art, Design, Science, and Culture, an interdisciplinary course he created and teaches. A perennially popular class, it attracts students from across Parsons and the rest of The New School, who learn lessons from the world of honeybees and apply them in exploring their own interests and fields of study.
Earlier in his career, Randall co-founded Worldstudio, a design and communications firm that employs creativity to advance social change, along with the nonprofit Worldstudio Foundation and its college scholarship program, which promote diversity in the creative professions. The foundation has awarded nearly $1.5 million in scholarships, and two recipients have gone on to become Parsons faculty members.
Randall champions the use of an interdisciplinary approach to design as a way to explore ideas and solve problems: “I want my students to come away with an understanding that a design education is not about learning a specific skill; it is a process, a way to engage with the world to have a positive impact.”