Connecting Academia with Industry: Pedagogical Experiences from a Collaborative Design Project

This article discusses an academic and industry collaboration where interior design students designed and built light fixtures that exemplified a company's product line via social media. The design challenge was to conceptualize and build a fixture that uses reclaimed materials and exemplifies Groovy stuff's product line and complement art work by Dick Idol. Groovy stuff provided the class with a bill of materials kit and feedback via Facebook. Students final fixture prototypes were informed by research, collaboration with Groovy stuff via social media, parametric modeling, and digital fabrication techniques.