My Senior Year (Fall Midterm Craziness)

My Senior Year (Fall Midterm Craziness)

October 15th, 2022

I have just completed my second to last midterm week as a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I feel both relieved and sad that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The two classes that are taking all of my time right now are my senior capstone and a SCADpro class collaborating with Trane.

For my SCADpro class, we had the opportunity to actually go down to Texas to tour the facility we would be designing for. It was an amazing experience and it was my first time in Texas! I learned so much about the HVAC industry and the trip only made me more excited to start the project!

Both classes, the SCADpro and my senior capstone, are following almost exactly the same timeline which makes staying on track easier to manage. In the last five weeks, I have been working on research in both areas. I have decided to do my senior capstone on improving the fine art museum experience, and the Trane project is to create a tour experience for one of their facilities. This is another way that the two classes are semi-connected. Learning to design for a whole experience instead of creating a product for an end user has been an incredible journey. It feels like in my senior year I have just begun unlocking an entirely new vault of information in the industrial design sector. (The pictures are some museums/experiences I have been to recently that inspired my project)

Research for these projects has been going along super fast. It feels like I just started the quarter and I am already past midterms. After I knew the direction of my classes I threw myself into interviews and secondary research. I LOVE interviews. In my past projects, I always gain the most insights when I talk to people, and interviewing people in the subject field sparks my best ideas and concepts.

I have had the privilege of talking to experts in the museum and HVAC fields. People like Matthew Solari - the creative lead and vice president of BRC, Robert River - the plant manager of the Trane facility in Tyler, Texas, and Catherine Duffy - the chief curator of the Coastal Heritage society. All these people and more have informed me of the first stages of my projects.

Even though I love interviews I needed more information to validate my findings. Spending my weeks reading articles, creating surveys, and observing people, I have achieved my research goals and painted a picture in both the HVAC and Museum experience fields. My midterm presentations were focused on recapping this research.

I can’t say much about the Trane project, but my senior capstone is progressing quickly. I have finished my research and I am now into ideation. Starting with my own ideas that popped into my head

while reading, and now I am branching out and doing group brainstorming sessions to come up with even more concepts.

Creating exhibits spaces for museums is so much fun, and I can’t wait to see where my project ends up by the end of the quarter! Stay tuned for more of my process! (here is a sneak peak of my earliest concepts)!

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