A din from students operating welders, table saws, the CNC mill and plasma cutter and various other power tools recsently reverberated in the College of Architecture’s cavernous Architecture Ranch facility, disrupting an otherwise quiet fall morning at Texas A&M’s Riverside Campus. Students in Jill Mulholland’s visualization design studio were readying their projects for midpoint review.
As the projects took shape, they were separated into loosely defined categories reflecting the wide variety of media in which the students were working. The abstract shapes, created with concrete, metal, wood and combinations of the three, reflected the nature of the class.
“I want to introduce them to as many different things as possible,” said Mulholland. “I can teach them how to become creative problem solvers by throwing a lot of challenging things at them that require work in all different kinds of media.“
The exercise was aimed at troubleshooting the pitfalls of the creative process.
“One of the problems is getting started, because you’re afraid of new things,” she said. “Another problem is ‘oh my God, what do I design,’ so we go through a bunch of design methodology exercises. I don’t say ‘make a concrete water fountain,’ so all the projects are different, and they’re open to explore as much or as little as they want. Hopefully it’s more than less.”
The object, she said, is for the students become immersed in the creative process, rather than concerning themselves with producing a finished product.
“In this culture, everything’s quantified, and everything’s rational, and we’re very interested in final products, but when you’re new at something, you have to explore the material for a little while,” she said. “So it’s not so much that their first projects will be great, although some of them were, it’s more what would they do if they return to it.”
“I teach design as a journey, as an exploration,” said Mulholland. “I want them to become creative problem solvers, not sheep that just do the same things over and over again. Because that’s not helpful to anyone.”
Click here to watch a video of this studio project.
— November 11, 2008—
