Major: Industrial Design
Minor: English
In Industrial Design, we spend most of our time sketching, building models, and generally solving real-life problems in two and three dimensions. We don't just make products that look cool (though that inevitably happens as well), but we create objects that can make life better. In my studio classes, I've designed everything from a more efficient corkscrew, to a sleek container for a bushel of oysters, to a gaming system that links into the blood glucose meter of a child with diabetes.
Being a student of Industrial Design, or any of the CAUS majors, doesn't involve remembering dates and formulas, but rather constant, hands-on innovation. As designers, we first brainstorm wildly, reaching for any solution, no matter how fantastic or impractical. Then we comb through these solutions, testing, tweaking, and redesigning until we find the best combination of form and function. In a combination of "big picture, anything's possible" creativity and down-to-earth practicality, we can design anything, and, in turn, create the world as it should be. At Virginia Tech, the studios in Cowgill Hall and under the glass pyramids in Burchard Hall are centers of this creative and impassioned energy, and I can't imagine spending my days anywhere else.
