USG recently launched an online portal for their continuing education programs, e-university.usg.com.

Looking at the site, I reflected on the role of education in the company's history. They built their drywall business, in large part, through education. Gypsum board was a paradigm shifting concept and it took lots of education to convince contractors, code officials, insurance companies, designers, and engineers to embrace each step of the product's evolution.

I was a consultant to USG in the early 1980s and worked for Vince Waropay, director of architect services, and other individuals that were approaching the end of their long careers. They shared stories about the many challenges they faced, such as inventing metal framing, drywall screws, and tools for installing the screws. Then the challenge was to convince plasterers to use screw guns, since there-to-for the hallmark of their craft was the skillful trowel use. Hence, the need for education in their promotional efforts.

The site offers a course called, Evolution of Lightweight Building Materials. It makes the case for the company's new, lighter weight gypsum board products. To do so, they inserted their pitch into the larger context of the evolution of architecture, tracing construction techniques from the earliest stone-on-stone methods through the development of modern ultra-highrise buildings. They then extrapolate into the future by speculating on the impact of bio-mimicry, pointing out that nature has produced elegant and lightweight structures through 4 billion years of evolution.

This approach, making a new product seem like an inevitable step in the evolution of the industry, works well with many architects, especially "designers" as their work draws upon the "idea" of architecture as well as the "tectonics".