Hasta La Ideas

We don’t often think of undergraduate industrial design students as being able to influence their schools’ curricula, but Jack Shepard is not your average student. First off, Shepard was a Sergeant and Anti-Terrorism Officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and after two tours—that’s eight years—he spent a few years in China, studying Chinese medicine.

“I sustained a pretty bad foot injury [in the ‘Corps],” Shepard told Core77. “Western doctors told me my foot was ‘done,'” i.e. permanently damaged; but while subsequently vacationing in China, Shepard encountered an Eastern doctor who restored his foot in three weeks. Impressed, Shepard moved to Chengdu to study the techniques, as well as the language.

After returning from China to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, Shepard started a small apparel company with some friends. Eventually he became interested in industrial design and enrolled at the Art Institute of Portland. From the Marine Corps to China to Industrial Design is not your typical educational trajectory, but “I am a think-outside-the-box type of guy,” as Shepard’s resume states.

As part of that outside-the-box thinking, Shepard took a hard look at his school’s ID program and decided it was missing something. “While the school offered multidisciplinary business courses to better prepare design students,” a local-area newspaper reports, “Shepard felt the classes were too detached from industry and real-world problems.”

Around the same time, Shepard had attended the Portland edition of Startup Weekend, a traveling entrepreneurial program that visits cities to marshal creative brainpower–developers, designers, marketers, et cetera–and has them go from open-mic pitches to workable startups over the course of a 54-hour weekend. A panel of relevant experts oversees the proceedings, providing crucial real-world expertise and advice.

Inspired by this set-up, Shepard decided his ID program would benefit from a similar process. “At first I figured I’d just start up a club [to mimic the Startup Weekend process] at school,” he says. But while discussing it with Molly Deas, the Art Institute’s then-chairperson for the ID department, she pointed out that this would be a fantastic for-credit opportunity. Soon they’d hatched plans for it to be a semester-long course, run by Justin Pyle, a designer and adjunct professor Shepard had hit it off with.

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