Hasta La Ideas

If you went to ID school in, say, the ’70s or ’80s, it would have been adequate to teach you how to draw, carve hair dryers out of foam or sculpt car fenders out of clay. And you probably would not have interacted much with students from other majors.

These days you’d expect a lot more from your program. With mere consumerism moving into industrial design education’s rearview mirror and interdisciplinarianism (how’s that for a word) coming into its own, design schools have an opportunity to address far bigger issues.

An encouraging example of this is the Healthy Food Project, a collaboration between RISD, Brown University and Design for America, an organization that uses human-centered design and multidisciplinary teams to solve problems. The Healthy Food Project seeks to tackle a very American problem—we eat like crap—and incorporated students from industrial design, graphic design, architecture, international relations, and urban studies.

While the project appears to be ongoing, there does not appear to be any website, beyond this video, where we can follow their progress. If you HFP guys are reading this, please let us know how we can keep abreast.

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