Masters of Industrial Design

It all began with the buggy.  Several years ago, I watched a 60 Minutes segment on the design firm IDEO.  During the episode, the team re-designed the shopping cart, called a “buggy” where I’m from in Alabama.  Ever since that day, I wanted to be part of the industrial design world. 

Art history is my passion.  It was my major at Elon University, but I most enjoyed asking tough questions of my art history professors. “What is a new way of looking at the problem?  Why are we doing this?  Does art history exist?  Can I paint the wall outside the classroom creamsicle orange, like the Cookout milkshake?”  After tiring of the never-ending flow of questions, I took some time off to go to culinary school for pastry arts.

I now have forearm strength to envy, but I feared the monotony of baking day in and day out.  I wanted to ask questions again, but re-direct them toward a goal like IDEO does.  I needed to find my own “buggy,” a way to push the boundaries of a once solely product-oriented industry and to encourage a re-framing of our understanding of how we work.  Now a graduate student at The University of the Arts, I plan to use my art historical skills, and even baking ones, to point out problems and question all aspects of the mundane or routine to discover new avenues of change.