When Mitch Goldstein (episode 62) published his book, How To Be A Design Student (And How To Teach Them), he was, indeed, both a design student and design teacher. After getting tenure at Rochester Institute of Technology, he decided to pursue a second MFA, this time in Furniture Design, also at RIT, while he continued teaching. That time as a student again was transformative to his own creative process. In the years since, he’s exhibited a range of work — including collages, three-dimensional sculptural work, and more — in multiple exhibitions and just launched a new YouTube channel, expanding on the ideas from his book.

We recently caught up with Mitch to talk about how becoming a student again changed his practice, the value of developing a studio practice for designers, and how discovering what his work was about shapes his recent work.

In 2023, you completed your second MFA, this one in furniture design from RIT, where you also teach. What were you hoping to get from that program — and time of study — and what did it give you that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? 

Quite a few things, first I have always wanted to work dimensionally, but never really had done so before. I studied architecture at my first go-around at college when I was 18 (and then failed out), so I’ve always been interested in 3D work, but I’d never really done any of it beyond a little in architecture school. Like a lot of people my age, I grew up watching This Old House, and later, watching Norm Abraham in The New Yankee Workshop. So, furniture and woodworking were always things I found really interesting – specifically in architecture circles there is a really tight parallel between buildings and furniture, especially chairs. I felt like there was a direct dialogue between these two things, and furniture was a really natural thing for me to gravitate toward.

The overall experience gave me quite a bit that I was not getting elesewhere or on my own. Obviously, I learned quite a bit about designing and fabricating furniture, and especially working with wood — it is a masters degree in furniture design, but it is just as much a masters degree in woodworking. Within the MFA program, I finally got to explore ideas that I had done in flat work such as collage, photography, and graphic design, but this time in dimensional objects. This was a lot more difficult than I anticipated, but it was really interesting to translate these ideas into 3D. I also learned a lot about craft, tenacity, patience, and ritual. I’ve always tended to make things kind of quick and dirty, but this prooved to be really diffcult to find a place within furniture design that let me work the same way. Woodworking pretty much has to be done very deliberately and relatively slowly. Working fast is a great way to both make bad work and to get injured. But I learned a ton about slowing down, being calm, thinking first, then doing, and I really started to enjoy the physical rituals of woodworking: sharpening things, making jigs, laying out drawings, etc… the things that seem sort of mundane and repetitive, but are actually very meditative and calming.