UC Student Takes a Top Prize More than $28,000 in National Design Contest

University of Cincinnati student Holly Smith, a senior in UC’s

nationally ranked

interior design program within the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), recently earned one of the most prestigious prizes available in the interior design field – a Angelo Donghia 2013 Senior Scholarship.

The award will provide her $28,500 to cover tuition, living expenses, books and materials costs as well as her travel costs as she is spending the current fall term on a travel semester that will take her throughout the western United States and then to stops in France and the United Kingdom. The scholarship was one of only 12 awarded in 2013.

Smith

, 22, of the Cincinnati neighborhood of Wyoming, won the prize due to the excellence of her design work. Her winning entry for the Angelo Donghia Foundation scholarship competition consisted of taking an online men’s apparel brand, Bonobos, and reinterpreting it into a brick-and-mortar pop-up store in one of the most-fashionable districts in Manhattan. She created that winning design in a fall 2012 retail design studio course led by Ann Black, associate professor in UC’s School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID), and Brian Davies, SAID associate professor.

According to Smith, she based her design concept on the vintage warmth of a Manhattan tailor shop of the late 1800s coupled with an easy, fast shopping experience enabled by technology.

The pop-up store would physically carry pants, and a “personal ninja tailor would assist each customer to find the right pants based on his lifestyle and needs,” she explains, adding, “From there, customers could then select and complete other apparel purchases online via store kiosks. The whole outfit, based on the initial pants selection, could then be shipped to the customer’s doorstep, eliminating the need to carry shopping bags.”

Also, as part of her concept, Smith envisioned a designer’s worktable right in the store where Bonobos designers would be actively designing upcoming lines, answering questions and taking suggestions from customers.

The Angelo Donghia Senior Scholarship contest is highly respected because each accredited interior design program in the United States and Canada is only permitted to nominate two students to enter the annual competition. Smith and fellow interior design student Carli Werthmann of Beavercreek, Ohio, were nominated by UC’s interior design faculty to submit work to the contest.

Smith states, “My education at UC and co-ops have helped me greatly in winning this scholarship.”

For instance, her rendering techniques have “grown exponentially from my co-op experiences, especially my work at MKG Productions in New York City.”

Cooperative education

, or co-op as it’s called, is the practice of alternating semesters in the classroom with semesters of paid, professional work related directly to a student’s major. UC is the global founder of co-op, having established the world’s first co-op program in 1906. Today, that co-op is ranked in the nation’s Top Ten, and UC co-op students earn a

collective $43 million

annually by co-opping.)

Co-op is required of UC’s interior design students, and Smith has co-opped not only at MKG Productions but at Eckenhoff Saunders Architects in Chicago.

• See the national rankings earned by UC’s interior design program.

• Apply to UC’s undergraduate interior design program.