This past weekend, the University’s Design for America chapter hosted its Midwest Meetup at the Siebel Center for Design, inviting the University of Cincinnati’s DFA branch to join them for a weekend of activities.
DFA is a national organization that uses human-centered design to solve community problems, such as poverty, education, hunger and economic growth.
The Midwest Meetup lasted from April 11-13 and consisted of different guest speakers, tours of the University campus, and social events to forge connections between students from the two schools.
DFA’s UIUC branch consists of five project teams: civic engagement, two environmental sustainability teams, a transportation team and the Champaign-Urbana community team.
“In recent years, we’ve restricted to focus more on human-centered design and the process itself rather than results,” said Evan Rafol, senior in Engineering and the organization’s president. “The changes we made were pretty significant to how we operate.”
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The group is open to students of any major as long as they have a passion for design and teamwork.
“I think it’s really cool that it’s interdisciplinary,” said Kendall Murphy, senior in FAA and director of design education. “There are so many students from different majors, different backgrounds, and can all come together to be passionate about design and impact design solutions for our community.”
The organization has many different projects in the works, including creating an app to promote circular fashion, promoting waste management strategies, and preparing students for mayoral elections in the C-U area.
“We wanted to demonstrate our facilities here, the way our studio operates and just share knowledge between us,” Rafol said.
The event’s goal was to share Illinois design facilities and knowledge as well as forge new friendships and social connections between Illinois and Cincinnati students.
“In general, the people that came to this event were very interesting and very fun individuals,” Murphy said. “We just wanted to have a fun weekend getting to know the other studios within the Midwest.”
The first day, April 11, consisted of icebreaker activities and a game night social to introduce the students to each other. This helped them form meaningful connections.
Most of the meetup’s biggest events took place the next day. It began with a tour of SCD to show the Cincinnati students the facility’s ins and outs.
Students enjoyed a lecture from David L. Hays, University professor and department head of landscape architecture
“His thoughts on humans and nature and everything design affiliated is very interesting,” Murphy said.
Another speaker session featured Savio Mukachirayil, a postgraduate researcher in industrial design.
Rafol believed this talk was impactful for DFA. It touched on the importance of people, which related to the organization’s focus on human-centered design.
After the speaker session, the event moved on to a design challenge activity and eventually transitioned into a photoshoot and other social activities.
The final day of the meetup consisted of another speaker session with Alastair Merrett, a DFA national member. The event concluded with a reflection activity on what students learned from the event.
“I can see that a lot of our studio members have had a good experience going through the entire weekend,” said Bharathi Chonachalam, sophomore in Business and co-director of membership and development. “So I think overall it’s been kind of a core memory.”
