In Summer 2023, three rising 3rd-year Industrial Design students enjoyed an unusual opportunity to practice their research, design, and fabrication skills by completing a real project under the guidance of Associate Professor of Teaching Deb Scott.

Answering a request from the director of Andrews House, a Delaware, Ohio-based nonprofit community center, Elise Aultman, Mark Boyd, and Kayanaat Chaudhry designed, fabricated, and installed an emergency food pantry and little free library in front of Andrews House, adjacent to a much-travelled sidewalk that leads into the heart of downtown Delaware.

The students who took on this challenge first worked with their client and Professor Scott to determine the project’s requirements. They sketched and prototyped several possibilities for the pantry structure along with potential new visual identities for the center and presented them to Andrews House representatives. With a final design idea in hand, the fun began in the SADR workshop where students built the food pantry at full scale. In the process, they experienced firsthand the many ways that preliminary design decisions impact the fabrication process (and vice versa)! As the students noted, “we learned that 1/64^th of an inch is not, in fact, ‘close enough’ to 1/128^th of an inch,” along with many other valuable lessons in design and making that they know will impact their future design endeavors favorably.

Andrews House and its clients are delighted with the outcome of the interaction with our students and our program.