Design
course inspires ingenuity
By Christine G. Adamo
On-line Forty-Niner
They
are the musketeers of the Cal State Long
Beach design department.
 Cloaked
in corporate know-how, these four faculty
members have swashbuckled their way through
previously untamed territory, mastered the
art of teamwork and taught industrial, interior
and graphic design students at CSULB a valuable
lesson in collaboration.
Their efforts, and those of their students,
resulted in prototypes and packaging for
a fictitious line of Oakley, Inc., free-dive
equipment that was on display in an exhibit
titled “Industrial Fusion” from April 7
through 10 in the department gallery.
They are: Jose Rivera-Chang, assistant professor
of industrial design; Tor Hovind, interim
chairperson of the CSULB design department;
Ed Lawing, associate professor of industrial
design; and Matias Ocana, a lecturer at
CSULB.
“One of the things the university is really
trying to push is collaborative effort,”
Hovind said.
CSULB students have been collaborating on
packaging projects with Oakley, Inc., for
six years, Hovind said. This time, the department
asked for a different kind of sponsorship:
a category-specific, collaborative project
that would tap the talents of both industrial
and graphic design students.
Begun in the last seven weeks of the fall
2002 semester, students delivered the finished
product to their client in the first week
of April. They spent every Thursday for
14 weeks during fall and spring semesters
to refine their product prototypes, developing
packaging concepts and designing brand identifiers,
such as logos.
“The success of any project is basically
teamwork,” Rivera-Chang added. “That is,
I guess, [what] the inspiration for the
Oakley project [was].”
Rivera-Chang said he, Hovind, Lawing and
Ocana and have been working since last summer
to refine the department’s vision, encourage
interdisciplinary collaboration and polish
the details of what amounted to a student
infiltration of corporate design culture.
But the list of involved parties does not
stop there, Lawing said. He identified numerous
disciplines that are tapped in the professional
design process: psychology, graphic design,
industrial design, architecture, interior
design, media design, image design and brand
design.
“[The list] goes on and on,” Lawing said.
“That’s the way design happens today, so
we’re trying to create experiences that
are absolutely identical to those the students
will face when they graduate from [CSULB].”
This project, he said, will enhance student
portfolios. It will allow students to bring
evidence of collaborative experience to
the table after having worked on “real problems
for real companies.” It has also equipped
them to verbalize steps taken toward the
project’s completion.
“[Design students] need to become articulate
about their work,” he said. “One of the
reasons we combined these interdisciplinary
activities was to increase [their level
of] articulation so that they know the parameters
and the dimensions of the kinds of design
problems they’re being asked to solve.”
Though they make it sound so, Lawing and
Rivera-Chang admitted that the project was
anything but an easy victory.
“Teaching teamwork is not easy,” Lawing
said, “especially [cross] disciplines. It
takes a lot of coaching and a lot of patting
on the back … team projects are one of the
best ways to help students understand that
they’re not designing for themselves.
“You wouldn’t make a Coca Cola bottle blue,”
Lawing said of other aspects of teamwork,
such as identifying and working within the
framework of a client’s unique brand image
and design vocabulary.
“We can identify those vocabularies. They
are not constraints; they are the things
that give you the necessary foundation to
build upon as you transition that brand
into new territory.”
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