One of the goals of the Arts Initiative has been to create both new and improved spaces for the arts to thrive on the Stanford Campus. In May of this year, we celebrated two major milestones along this path. First, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, more commonly known as the d.School, opened its own newly designed space in Building 550. This project exemplifies creative reuse of an existing campus building for a new purpose and incorporates successful elements that were prototyped in other temporary campus settings over the past few years. The d.School's new facility is itself a design laboratory filled with spaces and tools to foster collaborative and innovative design thinking. Second, the groundbreaking festivities for the Bing Concert Hall featured performances by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford Taiko, student instrumentalists and jazz musicians, and the newly formed Mobile Phone Orchestra, and signaled the start of construction of the acoustically superb 844-seat hall that is now being built at the intersection of Museum Way and Lasuen Drive, directly facing the Cantor Art Center. You can watch the construction as it happens via a webcam on the Bing Concert Hall website. This long-awaited premier music listening venue is scheduled for completion in Summer 2012, and will be "tuned" and activated in subsequent months, with opening events planned for January 2013.