Event

Real World Real Risk

November, 2014
CCAD (Map)

In this joint presentation at the 2014 AICAD Symposium, Elaine Grogan Luttrull and Kelly DeVore, both faculty members at CCAD in the business and interior design departments, respectively, will tell a story of successful collaboration.

Collaborative client-based projects can expose art and design students to tangible, immediate, and meaningful work, yet the planning (and outcome) of these projects comes with significant risk to the instructor and institute.  How do we foster these experiences for our students while working under the constraints of curricular planning and institutional goals?  This presentation will explore how we, as educators, embraced this fear that comes with unknown project outcomes through the very real-world example of the CCAD Airstream project, completed during Spring 2014.  We essentially designed a semester-long experiment, asking, “What would happen if we could redesign an existing iconic American product?  And what would happen,” we continued, “If we involved students and faculty from all nine majors, plus supporting departments like science, creative writing, and business?”

Kelly led the successful collaboration between CCAD and Airstream during the spring of 2014 — a true example in project-based learning for our students with commercial clients.  That collaboration included input from Elaine’s students who “made it real” so to speak (even as the industrial and interior designers actually made the trailer real).  Elaine’s students made the project real from a financial standpoint, conducting extensive budgetary analysis, break-even analysis, and commercial feasibility for the newly-designed product.

Through collaboration at all levels of the school, our students answered the question, “Is it feasible?” with a resounding “Yes.”  It wasn’t only feasible.  It was riveting.

Hear more about their experience at 11:00 on Saturday, November 8, 2014 at CCAD.