This book had its genesis with the receipt of an AIA Educators/Practitioners grant from the AIA Education Committee to develop a course on ethics for use by practitioners in their offices and educators in their classrooms. That original grant was awarded to Barry Wasserman, FAIA, and Patrick Sullivan, FAIA, both on the architecture faculty of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), and Thomas Payette FAIA, president of Payette Associates of Boston. The subsequent course material, “Awareness, Understanding, Choices: Ethics and the Profession in an Ever Changing World,” was completed in its basic form in 1989. Its three-tiered iterative learning approach of Awareness, Understanding, and Choices suggested the use of participatory learning processes whenever possible.
As this work was completed, its basic premises were presented in discussions of ethics at the initial AIA/ACSA Summer Practice Institutes in Sante Fe in 1992 by Barry Wasserman and Patrick Sullivan. Subsequently elements of the material were utilized in courses taught at Cal Poly Pomona by Professors Wasserman and Sullivan. Additionally the course premise, outline, and some of the Choices element with initial case studies were presented in workshops at AIA national conventions in Minneapolis (1996), New Orleans (1997), and Dallas (1999), and at the AIA California Council Monterey Design Conference (1998).
Over the ensuing years, it became apparent to Professors Wasserman and Sullivan that there was a need for a comprehen-