Collaboratory at Ringling College sees first multidisciplinary experiences

Relevant. Engaging. Challenging. These are words every college wants to hear from students when they describe their learning experience.

For the past year, The Ringling College of Art and Design, in partnership with The Patterson Foundation, has engaged in a transformative educational effort, the Collaboratory at Ringling College of Art & Design, led by dynamo AVP for Collaborative Enterprises Cynthia Gravino. The goal: create real-time, real-life art and design challenges for every student at Ringling, across the curriculum, involving students from different disciplines working together.

As the first projects came to fruition in the past few weeks, here are some of the comments from students:

“I enjoyed this so much because I got to work with students and other disciplines I want to work with but don’t usually get to in my classes!”

“Seeing what our teams could accomplish in just a weekend, I thought, ‘Wow! I can do this! I really can!’”

“This was much different from just a made-up project in class. We were working with real clients with specific needs that challenged us. It was really cool to interact with them and have to think about what a real client needs.”

The student projects have ranged from creating television and internet ads for a practical new health-care product to designing a branding and public outreach effort for the Sarasota Police Department to creating an entire graphic design and marketing program for a bar in the Bahamas. More projects are in the pipeline and new ones are coming in every day as students and faculty catch the “magic” of combining the creative gifts of Ringling students with the diverse demands of real-world clients.

When student teams present their work, the universal comment from clients reviewing the various team presentations is, “How can I pick? They’re all so good!"

To see some of the student work, you can view the introduction of the Blue + You Campaign for the Sarasota Police Department here:

If you’d like to take part in selecting the best of the best, you can visit WoundSeal's website to vote for your favorite commercial for the company.

The Collaboratory at Ringling College is a philosophy, and over time, the vision is that it will become a fundamental element of the RCAD curriculum: bringing diverse students, corporations and organizations together to support learning and innovation across disciplines and around the world.