Our stop at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia was short but very sweet. We were welcomed by Industrial Design professor Ed Dorsa (who we have known for a while now and actually collaborated with a few semesters back on a social design studio), who guided us into the courtyard between the Design and Architecture buildings.
We met with the director and dean of the college before giving our lecture at 2pm. Our audience was about 90% industrial designers, 10% architecture students. In attendance were Roger Cobb and Emily Owsley, who we “met” via email about a year ago, and who helped orchestrate the aforementioned social design studio. Akshay Sharma was also there, who ran the studio and who I coincidentally met for the first time at a conference in Singapore.
After the lecture, we answered a few questions including one about the role of aesthetics in humanitarian design. The HomeHero fire extinguisher was a great example of how aesthetics can be used with a purpose to achieve a more important goal (in the case of HomeHero, the beauty of the object inspires people to put the extinguisher somewhere visible where it will be within arms reach in a fire). We believe in aesthetics “with purpose” as a means to engage users and make useful products more ubiquitous and accessible.
After the lecture, students came out to the trailer to check out the products first-hand. Before leaving, we did a few laps through the amazing studio space in the basement. We hope to stay in touch with the folks we met today and potentially invite some students down to our North Carolina projects later this summer. Thanks to Ed Dorsa for helping to organize!
