- UIC student projects, clockwise from top left: ROKA, Cave, Hex-Catch, and Hum
Like many aspiring product designers looking for creative support and capital from the Kickstarter community, Jonathan Owens turned his bio into his sales pitch. The video he posted on the crowd-funding site to convince backers to buy his Cave Picnic Tray, a stylish walnut carrying case for serious cheese fans, references the summers he spent working at farmers’ markets for Wisconsin’s Brunkow Cheese. But for Owens, his inspiration was part real-world experience, part passion—and part graduation requirement.
“You’ll never experience pure design in your life, it’s always connected to many different things,” he says. “Connecting those dots is important, nobody is going to do it for them. The reality is there’s a lot of soft skills you need to know as well.”
“Acquiring skills and becoming proficient at using tools was everything you needed to have a place in an industrial era,” says Chou. “But as we enter a networked world, the impact a designer will have will be more of a function of her proficiency at working with and understanding networks.”
