During the COVID-era, design educators, design students, and design practitioners alike have been forced to adapt their creative practices to online learning and working modalities. We, an industrial design program that has come to rely on frequent engagement with local industry within our project-based curriculum, realized that we not only had to rethink the ways in which we engage our students, but also the ways in which we engage professional practitioners due to the needed response for public health concerns. This situation led us to organize and implement a novel, online adaptation of a “design charrette.” Our main goal was to reignite industry partnerships in our program during the COVID era, with an eye toward improving future industry collaboration. The project involved IC3D, a local company that specializes in large scale 3D-printing, as well as several individual design practitioners from our local design community. This paper details a case study of a design charrette spread across half a dozen online collaboration tools, out of which student teams proposed fifteen “parklet” design concepts. The experience resulted in a successful education-industry collaboration, blazing new trails for fruitful hybrid collaboration in the post-COVID era.
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No Distance Too Far
Year: 2021
- Paper Type: Case Study
- Education Symposium Theme: Breaking Down Barriers