Students engage in international
social media design experiment

As part of a grand international design experiment in social media, students in a fourth-year Texas A&M design studio joined architecture students from around the globe for a ten-day collaboration with four top Italian designers that culminated in an April 15 exhibit at the world renowned Milan Design Fair in Milan, Italy.

The digital happening, “Design Royale,” was dubbed by organizers as an “online workshop” and “party in progress,” that used social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Skype, to involve more than 100 young designers on different continents in a series of design exercises aimed at testing a number of assumptions and ideas through rapid prototyping.

For the experiment, Texas A&M architecture students in associate professor Peter Lang’s design studio were randomly paired with international peers into different project teams, each led by an internationally acclaimed Italian designer.

The projects, somewhat mysterious and esoteric by design, included:

• origami dinnerware design, led by Hagit Pincovici, a product designer from Rome;
• a mobile aquaponic system (involving the farming of fish and crops in a symbiotic environment), led by architect Antonio Scarponi from Venice;
• hanging pods based on tensile structures, led by Luca Poncellini, a research architect from Torino; and
• Sumo wrestler costumes, led by Elio Caccavale, director of the graduate product design program at Dundee University.

Each project was launched on Facebook with a briefing from the project leader. The students’ progress (which can be viewed via the Facebook links above) unfolded in real time as participants used the social media site to post their work, critique the work of their peers and receive input from the lead designer.

Near the end of the competition, event organizers selected the best designs to be prototyped and built for the Design Royale exhibit at the Milan Design Fair.

Texas A&M students who participated in the project were: Christopher Dilworth, Karine Bashoyan, Elizabeth Tschirhart, Miranda Katherine Rogers, Valerie Marie Stevens, Trey Donovan Rice, David Rose, Katie Ogden, Allison Gay, Lori Kneese, Heriberto Rodriguez Valenzuela, Daniel A. Senning, Thomas V. Bett, Danielle N. Davis, and Joshua M. Wilson.

Learn more about Design Royale at the event website.

Review the projects as the evolved on the Design Royale Facebook-based event webpage.

- Posted: Apr. 27, 2011 -

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.