SHAPING THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Come with us to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also known as SAIC. We’re here to meet participants in Imagining Tomorrow. The yearly experiential learning opportunity brings together students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan. Their clients are local organizations who ask the students to imagine solutions to real-life challenges.

Imagining Tomorrow is a two-week international seminar in which students from schools in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States and Pakistan come together to collaboratively address questions about future design thinking. They work with clients from international public and private organizations to propose interdisciplinary solutions to real-life issues. Participating schools: HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; SAIC, Chicago, USA; Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe, Germany; Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago will host the 2020 seminar.

Student Voices
Summer, Alejandro and Faviola

Professor
Kirsten Leenaars

At Wayne State University, the curriculum is increasingly geared toward next gen art and design. Students taking the course Design for Urban Mobility work with local entrepreneurs to solve design problems. In fall 2019, juniors and seniors majoring in Industrial Design join forces with Deeply Rooted Produce.

Design for Urban Mobility is a course offered through Wayne State University’s James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History. Students taking the course consider a variety of questions of how products, spaces and experiences enable and support our mobility through urban space. Each semester—often through client-based projects—they explore four distinct but interrelated concepts of urban mobility: mobility and community, mobility and discovery, mobility and economic vitality, and mobility and social justice.

Student Voices
Mahmud, Benjamin, Nick, Julia and Marcella

Professor
Siobhan Gregory

In Toronto, we meet a group of graduate students at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, also known as OCAD University. In the first weeks of the semester, we record a conversation with students in the Intro to Curatorial Practices who are defining their roles and designing their strategy for an online exhibition about intimacy on the web.

Intro to Curatorial Practices, a graduate seminar in the Criticism and Curatorial Program at OCAD University, introduces students to the major critical texts, theories and debates in the burgeoning international field of contemporary curatorial studies. Simultaneously throughout the seminar, students attend public exhibitions, screenings, lectures, performances and events in Toronto’s visual art and design worlds. An ongoing examination of contemporary art and design practices within public culture provides students with an eclectic and critical mapping of the layers and intersections of the visual arts, media and design in relation to their varied publics, audiences, markets, the mass media and the scholarly community. 

Student Voices
Alex, Cassandra, Delilah, Jacquie, Jenna, Marilyn, Pricilla, Rebecca and Sam

Professor
Andrea Fatona