Industrial design to me means that you're considering every step of a
product from how people interact with it to how it's made and how it gets
disposed that in the end. I've always been very passionate about foot wear and
I was trying for a long time to figure out what would allow me to design and
create different shoes and the only thing that kind of allowed me the
creative freedom to do that was industrial design. So I knew before
coming to MassArt that I wanted to pursue industrial design. So MassArt has
a group of faculty member that is very connected to the industry. So we have
full-time tenured faculty members and two of those are both steeped in their
own personal business as well we bring the industry knowledge into the
classroom. A lot of the teachers have kind of followed our class - I guess
Judith particular - Judith Anderson was the department head now - she's kind of
like been our teacher in at least one class every semester from the get-go. So
she knows this all really well and like as a class we know all each other.
Retrospectively I think my favorite assignment was the vessel project. The
vessel project entailed going to the MFA and choosing a vessel something that
holds something else and mimicking it in a volumetric form, a surface form, and
several different material types as one of the first ones we did and it was a
great introduction to how to think about craft and form at the same time. Senior
year is way more self-guided you end up doing a lot of things that are kind of
your choice it's a lot more research-based and it's also a lot more
actual problems in the actual world. The other years are just kind of giving you
the tools to be able to execute and then this year it's actually applying all
your design knowledge and design thinking to actual problems. And you get
a year to work on your thesis so you get to pick whatever problem or issue you
want to tackle and the first semester all you do is research - second semester
is actually trying to like like develop it. Students will leave here and they can
go into the corporate environment. We have Bose, and, Gillette, and Staples. Some
of the larger corporate environments even Reebok and Stride Rate - um so
there's quite a bit of opportunity and that's just locally. So then we've had
people going on - you know West Coast - there's other firms even from the
Midwest. We have a wide variety of locations where students graduate who
participate in the industrial design field. I actually did one last summer it
was for a startup at MIT. It's a POS system so a point of cell registered
place and it was cool and I got to design their packaging which is kind of
it's on a shelf right now which is really amazing to me. And I got that kind
of dope connection through the school. The major thing is really strong
curiosity about the world - the life - people in general - our program is very
user centered so we think and design around the needs of particular consumers.
It takes a really good curiosity from the students point of view to understand
that connection. That translation is a really key important aspect of being a
Industrial Designer.