Industrial Design Students Invited to Participate in International Design Workshop

For the second consecutive year, industrial design students and faculty from Auburn’s School of Industrial + Graphic Design were invited to participate an international innovation workshop at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Saint-Etienne, France, on March 24th‒27th. Working under the direction of associate professor Shea Tillman, students travelled to Saint-Etienne and took part in the L*unchbox, “a multidisciplinary, multinational, design-led, experiential-based, four-day creative event.” Their design challenge was to “Imagine the Future of Retail Environments and Experiences.” Seth Maddox, Vanessa Lee, Jonathan Dunn, Marcus Crawford, Will King, and Elené Weaver were tasked with generating, developing, and presenting concepts that addressed this challenge.

The Auburn students worked on teams with students from Brunel University (London England), Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) Ecole des Mines (Saint-Etienne, France) and Université Jean Monnet (Saint-Etienne, France). In addition, faculty/program director Shea Tillman led and facilitated two teams that included students from France, Italy, Korea, Malaysia and Tunisia. As Tillman explains, “L*unchBox creates a unique platform for students to engage in design thinking with others from diverse cultures and disciplines, in order to illustrate collective visions for the future.”

Through a series of progressive design thinking activities, the each team produced future vision scenarios of their concept after generating more than one hundred original ideas. Student teams presented these concepts at the Citi of Design, and exhibition campus in Saint-Etienne.