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2015 Design Build Intensive

            2015 Design Build Intensive: MFA in Applied Craft + Design

The MFA in Applied Craft + Design degree program (AC+D) in Portland, OR (a joint program of Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art) begins each year with a 10 day pre-semester, collaborative Design Build Intensive project intended to help students get to know each other and learn how to work together by designing and building a project for an actual client who will benefit from the students' skills. 

This year's collaborator is Outgrowing Hunger whose mission is "to get healthy food into the mouths of Hungry People". The organization "transforms unused private, public and institutional land into Neighborhood Gardens, where healthy food, resilient community, and economic opportunity spring up together". For this Design Build Intensive the AC+D students will focus on the East Portland Neighborhood Garden (EPNG), which provides personal gardening and fresh produce work-trade opportunities.

The East Portland Neighborhood Garden has plots that range from 360 – 1550 square feet, tended primarily by 115 Bhutanese, Burmese refugee and Latino immigrant families who literally live off of the garden's harvest. Many must commute up to two miles on foot to get to the garden, after which they often work 6 – 8 hours a day tending, harvesting and preparing traditional fermented vegetables. The entire site is almost 100% garden space with little area for rest and relief, not to mention protection from the rain and sun.

There is so much AC+D can do for EPNG! 
The magic of the AC+D Design Build Intensive is the conversation and connection that happens between two communities who normally would not have come together. EPNG and ACD will meet to collaboratively discover the true needs of the community. It is clear already that there is much that can be improved. The design process will not begin until the students meet with the gardeners, but to give a sense of the potential scope the project could include: benches with shaded cover for tired gardeners and nursing mothers; raised beds with ADA accessibility for the Senior Gardens; a protective shed to secure the five wheelbarrows; a privacy shield for the portable restroom; a removable cover for the outdoor kitchen used to prepare the harvests for community and fundraising events, and the list goes on…

AC+D DESIGN BUILD: MAKING A DIFFERENCE THROUGH MAKING
Designers in education and industry fields routinely and assuredly assert that design thinking strategies can deliver the “game-changing” ideas needed to address the critical and complex problems of our times. Frequently, however, it seems we’re seduced by and fall in love with the promise(s) of these ideas, and are less committed to following through with their actual realization with the same degree of passion. The AC+D Design Build Intensive is an effort to provide a ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’ model of design education and practice of the first year MFA AC+D students working together designing and building a project for an actual client.
Emphasizing a philosophy of civic engagement, The AC+D Design Build Intensives are selected based on their potential to benefit an organization or population that generally does not have access to the services of designers, builders and makers. These projects put design thinking into action and solve local community problems.

Photos by Mario Gallucci

Taken on: August 20, 2015

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2015

AC+D

Community Garden

Design

Design Build

East Portland

Garden

MFA

Outgrowing Hunger

PNCA

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Portland

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