Summer lab opens the door to new design majors

Summer transfer studios for students who are changing majors within the university or sometimes entering from another school. It's for students in architecture, industrial design, landscape architecture, and interior design. The summer program is a very intensive first year experience where the students are in lab every day. After the summer, they're then qualified to go into their second year. Right now, we're making cubes, and it's like, how does making a cube relate to designing a building? And I think I can bridge that gap for them as someone who's gone through the program, practiced and is teaching the curriculum. We're experimenting. It's not just a studio. We're experimenting with things. and we're trying stuff out. A lot of what this is, is just learning how to look at things from a design lens and learning how to start doing these sort of, like, physical, like modeling things and, like, drawing techniques. It's basically just anything that you would do to express your ideas or how to even think of those ideas in the first place we're doing here this summer. Something more creative like this, it gives people the tools and teaches them the same things so that they can go out and do different things and kind of express their own creativity. Which really excites me, and I like that self expression that you can get through this kind of a class. We're not really sort of pushing them from behind, you know, It's a matter more of Once the studio really gets going, of trying to keep ahead of them with a kind of challenge that they can go towards. And again, that's the best teaching experience you can have. Often I think there's intimidation to question why we're doing things, and that's actually one of the goals in design lab is to get these students to question everything. I've never been in a class that, like, allows you to talk to your classmates so easily and fluidly and, like, be with all these other people who are learning different things, yet, kind of in the same realm of we're all designers, so we all have the same kind of goals and principles. This is my favorite thing that I've done ever. I love this so much. This is truly my passion. I love to design, and I'm so happy to be in just like a design focus space. I get so many little projects. I get to explore so many different things. I'm truly just full of whimsy and joy at the concept of being in this building every day.