Home, work, and play? It’s all the same to Davin Huston.
“I don’t have boundaries like that. I consider everything to just be my life,” Davin says. Whether you’re a student, a business associate, a colleague, or a friend to hang out with, Davin endeavors to interact with people the same way. “One influences the other. It’s easier that way for people to just be themselves.”
Davin’s matter-of-fact lifestyle makes him uniquely approachable. “I think academic advisors sometimes have more luck than professors. They get to speak with students informally, but sometimes the faculty don’t. In all of my lab spaces, you can come in and speak how you want to speak. If that’s you, that’s you. Everybody likes it better that way.”
For Davin’s students, he wants our learning environment’s accept-everybody-as-they-are attitude to morph into a readiness to become-anyone-you-need-to-be in the professional world. “I want them all to become chameleons,” he says. “No matter what situation they’re put in, I want them to be ready to be adaptable and functional, to trust their judgments and roll with all sorts of issues — and to do it with a sense of grace and style.”
Professional experience in architecture and theater design taught Davin the value of teamwork. “I got to work with awesome, intelligent people. It made me want to become a coach and mentor, to help more people be ready to work on a variety of real-world projects which sometimes span years. It could take three to four years for a building to become a reality — long enough that I started to forget what it looked like when it was only on paper. That was fun.”
Success isn’t always about being in the spotlight, Davin says. “With sound engineers in a theater, for example, sometimes the greatest compliment you get is none at all because you did your job so well that nobody noticed. If you mess up, everyone in the audience knows it! Sound engineers don’t strive for the compliment — they strive for the silence.”
It ties into learning how to be a chameleon in the business world, Davin says. “I want to help students do that with everything. The outcome should be so smooth that their audience, or their customers, or sometimes even their bosses don’t even realize there was a process. The best things in life are the ones we take for granted because they just work.”