FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK 2012
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MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
During my third semester of college over twenty years ago, I was studying the wrong major at the wrong art school. I remember having a conversation with a professor, explaining my frustrations with a particular assignment and explaining what it was I wanted to do, when she said "Hmm, sounds like you should be studying industrial design instead." I remember thinking What the hell is "industrial design?"
"Sounds great," I said, after she finished explaining what it was. "I'll change majors, I'm in."
"We don't offer that program here," she said. Shortly thereafter I left the school and never went back. Four years later I had a B.I.D. from Pratt (where I met two ne'er-do-wells who would become the founders of Core77).
When did you realize industrial design was the discipline for you? That's what the IDSA wants to know as part of a research inquiry to teach design education. Take the survey here (and while you're at it, share in the comments too).
Comments
I was actually at Pratt when I realized I wanted to study industrial design, but as a 16 year old taking a pre-college course...From then on I knew I made the right decision and I will graduate in May with my degree (not from Pratt, things didn't work out there, but I am excited to enter the "real" ID world).
While working and creating toys at Leapfrog I fell in love with Industrial Design. Having studied computer science, with a major in user interface, I knew it would round my process out as a creative person. Left the job got the ID degree and have now been able to work around the world and most of the fun was in NYC at David Weeks Studio.
I started college studying Mechanical Engineering, mostly because had never even heard of ID. Halfway through my first year, flipping through my school's course catalogue, a friend asked me "why don't you go check out this industrial design thing?"
I went and asked my engineering adviser what Industrial Design was and how I could go do that. She told me "It's just this thing that people do after we make a product to make it pretty, but it's really not worth studying". Hearing her say that just made me more confident that the world of engineering was wrong for me.
After dancing around things and experiences all my life that were ID related (me and my brother filling an exercise book full of plans to make a remote control Space Shuttle in 1981, a subject called "Design Studies" in High School that I loved but didn't follow up on, starting an Architecture degree but dropping out as it wasn't what I thought it would be, building my own furniture, attempting to make my own full suspension bicycle when I worked in a bike shop and getting to the stage of making cardboard models of the suspension linkage, life long love of Lego) I discovered a newspaper article about a local ID programme when I was 30 years old that, but my life and work at the time did not allow me to study. I few years later I bit the bullet and started studying. I've just turned 40 and hopefully I'll have my degree and a new career next year.
I was studying engineering for 2 years and felt that as much as this would help me create things but it did not help me to unleash my creativity in problem solving. I talked to my dad about it and my late uncle was an Industrial Designer and he told me of amazing stories that he has done to help the community and i remember the house he used to live in has a different personality from what i have seen when i was a kid.
Talked to my adviser about it, and enrolled myself into Queensland University of Technology where i graduated with Bachelors in Built Environment Engineering in Industrial Design. Best decision that i have ever made!
"Art" was never the issue by high school. I like many got seduced by Star Wars and such EFX films... The two kings of that media in the 80s had a strange degree called Industrial Design (Trumball, Dykstra) so thats what I searched out, In 81 i met with the Pratt day recruiters and got lucky to be seated to meet with Giles Aureli... He saw my HS "portfolio" and said.. "illustrator eh?" and I said no, i was thinking ID.. He smiled and out came the offer to go to Pratt. I was second gen "creative" brooklyn, and the first to "go to college" etc.. so all smiles from my parents who would get some financial releif out of that meeting;)--- and so it was.
"you dont want to go to Pratt do you , Jeffery"?- name the film.;)
To all yours chagrin I guess I should admit i was one of the first to "bug the crap" out of Aureli to get the first Vax computer in tehe ARC opened up to ID students and to find us an "instructor" we wont say who that was 2 years later.. .
misguided youth... oh well.
damage done. sorry/.;)
When I was 12 I had one of those alarm clocks that you hold the "Set" button and keep pressing the "Minute" button over and over again until you got the right time. I would always go one minute over. One day, I got frustrated and said, "When I grow up, I'm gonna make stuff better." Found out about ID while in High School, and have been trying to "make stuff better," ever since.
High School of Art & Design in NY, they have a great small ID program where I discovered I can make really really cool stuff.