Dear Wim Wiemel,

I am a faculty member in the design department at PSU and I am writing on behalf of my students to you to invite you to our final design crit on dec 3rd at 18.30 hrs in de art annex classroom 160. As you might have read in the vanguard last week, in our intro to design class we are designing chandeliers for the presidents office as part of a design project looking at a socially conscious design practice, with a focus on the charity water campaign.

The students are working with an almost 0 budget to develop an awareness campaign and a fundraiser for the charity water foundation, who in turn builds wells for safe and clean drinking water in developing countries.

We want to see if the university can make a donation in exchange for the chandeliers. What the vanguard did not print is, I'm a Dutchy, just like you. I'm new too, maybe we can talk about making it a Dutch thing we do here at PSU, wouldn't it be a great thing to celebrate our new jobs and build a well together? We could document it, post it online in the open source network of architects for humanity, let the marketing people play with it, it could be a good thing for PSU. To support sustainability is to make it a part of your world, it starts with how we design our own office spaces, it's the "be the change you want to create attitude we need".

We fully understand if you would not be able to make it to our class, but it seems to silly not to try to invite you and see what we can do. The budget to build a well is $30.000, and i would gladly take half of that as my challenge.

sincerely,
Lukas Bertus

ps, i included the larger write-up for the vanguard article below