Two student designers share advice from a summer touring factories and studios as part of the Be Original Americas fellowship For many college students, especially freshman stepping onto campus for the first time, formal design education has just begun. Schedules filled with lectures, studio classes, and competitions will begin to turn aspiring creatives into designers, makers, and small business owners. But like most industries, design is best learned through hands on experience.
That?s the impetus behind the Be Original Americas Student Design Fellowship, an outgrowth of an industry-led collaboration and non-profit dedicated to promoting the ?economic, ethical, and environmental value of authentic design? in North America and beyond. This new educational opportunity gives a pair of college students the chance to learn about the realities of design as a business through a seven-week tour of studios and factories. Earlier this summer, Tom Groom, an industrial and graphic design major at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Irene Lee, a design and environmental analysis major at Cornell University, hopscotched across the U.S. and Europe for seven weeks, visiting factories, headquarters, and showrooms and meeting designers, marketers, and executives from companies such as Fritz Hansen, Herman Miller, Vitra, Emeco, and Rich Brilliant Willing. The pair kept a diary of their tour, chronicling what they learned about marketing, manufacturing, and the economic realities...