Dynamic Design Education for the 21st Century: Innovative Assignments in UC's Top-Ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

Creative challenges are hallmarks of education within the University of Cincinnati’s

top-ranked

College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP).

First-year assignments focus on helping students to individually and collectively see and think in new ways by means of unusual coursework. Later in their college careers, DAAP students are asked to put their growing creative skills to work in complex and demanding projects.

The latest example is an assignment just given to about 40 first-year fine arts students in which they were asked to design, create and wear “superhero costumes.”

The purpose of the assignment, according to Ryan Mulligan, assistant professor of art, is to translate a 2-D concept into a 3-D reality that also helps students to perhaps see themselves in a new way.

“The students are asked to relate the costume to themselves, whether it’s something they don’t like about themselves or a fear they have. Or, it can relate to an interest they have,” said Mulligan, adding that the unusual nature of the assignment provides students experience with a variety of materials and the effects that can be created with those materials.

Student Matt McDonald, 25, of Amelia, Ohio, said that he learned “how much we can do with so little.”

McDonald’s own impressive green monster costume was creatively contrived from chicken wire, inner tubes, painted garbage pages and bath mats. And though only in his first year at DAAP, he figures that seeing a green monster walking through the building must be unusual because of the look on the face of some architecture students when he walked up to them.

“The best part is also the reaction I’m getting, and art is supposed to elicit a response. When I walked up to some architecture students, they jumped up and screamed. The best part was the look on their faces,” he admitted.

Fellow student Amanda Bolton, 19, of Milford, Ohio, also liked the results of the project and “seeing what we can do” as well as “seeing the diversity of results from the same assignment.”

She created a costume related to her own fear of flying. It was a costume in which she would never be permitted to get on an airplane. She creatively used silver-painted duct tape and knives to create a threatening outfit seemingly made of metal.

It did make for some challenges, however. These included “walking with spikes on my feet” and “realizing how tight duct tape will make a costume.”

OTHER CREATIVE CHALLENGES PROVIDED TO STUDENTS

Other first-year students throughout DAAP’s programs are also provided opportunities to take on unusual challenges in order develop a creative design perspective. These include

• The construction of self-portrait robots that test students’ assumptions regarding human form.

• Making instruments out of appliance parts and then using the instruments to put on a college-wide concert.

• The construction and then crossing of student-built bridges (Bridge Break) in order to learn lessons related to construction theory, weight ratios, tension, torque and more.

• Creating “cents-ible” fashions out of thrift-store finds and then displaying the resulting apparel in a public fashion show.

• Scuba-diving architecture and interior design students constructing a framework-and-net shelter at the bottom of UC’s Olympic-sized pool in a new “Extreme Environments” course.

• Solar house: Advanced architecture and design students recently accepted the challenge to design and building a solar house (along with students from UC’s College of Engineering and College of Business). That house was exhibited in Washington, D.C., and is now back on campus where it will serve as a model for a planned project to build a new UC solar house in 2011.

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