Italy inspires the next generation of designers

It just like opened up an extra layer in my brain that like, allows me to recognize, like, almost, like, how this is going to feel. Why this trip? Because a long time ago, when I was a student myself, I was fortunate enough to go on a study abroad and it changed how I looked at everything. It changed how I designed it, changed how I was a student for the rest of the time that I was in school. I wanted to be able to share that with all of the students that we have here. I would put them in the mindset of someone that lives in the city. How would they use it compared to how they were using it as students? And then how would that change as tourists? And part of that was actually, there was this assignment that I gave them where they had to take pictures of the city as they saw it. In these hints of everyday life, it would essentially hint that someone was inhabiting the space. Handles and doors, like, how would they wear down over time. The right handle is always going to be more worn down than the left handle or stickers on walls. Right? Someone is trying to send a message. Someone is trying to say something about where they live. And I find that to be so unique. And that is the perspective that I wanted the students to have. There's so many things we overlook in daily life. It is so filled to the brim with just, like, meticulous little hidden things. That was just, like, my favorite part: just seeing the daily life and just the hints of life that people leave as they live their life, that people don't necessarily pay mind to because of all the grand architecture and museums. I mean, this sounds like cliche, but our, like, academic days were fun because it didn't feel like school. We would go places, we would tour places, we would learn about like different art and things like that. And a lot of our work was, like, sketching. And so we'd sketch what we saw. We would say, like, how, like, it pertains to, like, design and things like that. And then we would take, like, weekend trips and it would just be a group of us. We'd hop on a train; you can get across half the country in, like, two hours. So I hope that they take a playfulness out of our trip of a new perspective and user perspective into every design that they do from now on, because that is just something very magical. I mean, giving this opportunity to students to go visit Vienna is so impactful for, I mean, when they return back here, I'm totally sure that they are transformed. I hope that it transforms them by being informed. To be able to incorporate that, those design styles, those little details that you really can't capture or understand unless you're actually there and experiencing it. It's also the cultural influence and the culture that they bring back with them that then goes into their projects way beyond design, way beyond something that you can see. I took a lot of experiential knowledge from this trip, and how I'm going to incorporate that is just understanding that any base level decision that I make will have some sort of experimental factor to it. I'm now thinking about the actual real life experience of this texture, this color, this material. You'll gain so much more understanding with, like, humans in general, like, interaction. Traveling outside of school gives you such a refresh. It's just, like, a recipe for absolute magic.