In 2007 RISD graduate students pursued design research from an inspiring new angle, thanks to a partnership between RISD and Target Corporation. In a year-long studio course — the first all-graduate, strictly interdisciplinary offering at RISD — six students from different departments worked closely together and with TargetŐs Innovation Team, defining and addressing consumer-oriented design challenges. Though the development components of the research are confidential, it is clear that the true value of the work for the student designers lay in their discoveries along the way — about working collaboratively, the value of professional trust and achieving a balance between structure and autonomy.

As Provost Jessie Shefrin explains, the format of the studio was an experiment in itself. “How do you create the conditions necessary for truly interdisciplinary, self-directed, team-based work in art and design?” she asks. Furniture Professor Rosanne Somerson ’76 ID, who helped guide the project from the initial discussions with Target, notes that “for RISD as an institution, these research opportunities allow us to investigate new models for student learning opportunities” while they also “widen the educational experience beyond discipline confines.” Studio instructor Lane Myer ’80 GD and project coordinator Enrique Martinez MID ’98 took advantage of the project’s innovative structure by assembling a team of graduate students based on diversity of interests and professional backgrounds. After being nominated by a faculty member and then selected through an interview process, Chris McCray MID ’08 remembers thinking, “The idea of working for Target was a dream. I’d been following developments in design at Target for years, and the prospect of maybe one day seeing something on the shelves that we had a hand in — it was an incredible opportunity.”

McCray and five other students from the departments of Graphic Design, Furniture Design, Industrial Design and Digital + Media first met as a group at the beginning of 2007. Traveling to Target Corporation headquarters in Minneapolis several times during the course of the year, they met designers from all strata of the company and worked in a focused way with the interdepartmental Innovation Team. From the very beginning, McCray says, he was impressed by the “very intellectual, even-playing-field conversations” that took place between Target’s team of “heavy hitters” and RISD’s emerging designers. Emily Rothschild MID ’08 concurs, noting that it was “validating to realize how much Target appreciated our work.” Lane Myer credits the Innovation Team with providing “the resources and open parameters we needed to investigate the challenges put forth by Target” — a degree of self-direction that had a profound effect on the investigation.

Back in Providence, the RISD team spent its first semester engaged in research and brainstorming, developing a “database of ideas” for an initial proposal to Target, explains Huy Vu MFA ’09 GD. Underlying the demands of the design assignment, though, was a more fundamental challenge: figuring out how to work together in a team that determined its own roles and methodologies. It was a demonstration of Target’s confidence in their abilities that they “could, and did, leave us alone to work” without micromanaging the process, notes Melissa Lankhaar MFA ’08 GD. The flip side of that trust was that we “had to figure out new ways of working together,” explains Zeke Leonard MFA ’08 FD. As a furniture designer, he likens that process to “making your own tools. What you can make is determined by the tools you have. As a new group working together, our tools were our working methodologies — the ways we communicated and collaborated.”

By all accounts, the team forged a solid set of tools. Throughout a multi-phase process of concept development and design, punctuated by presentations to the Innovation Team, the designers “had to regroup and readjust at every step of the way,” says Yana Sakellion MFA ’08 DM. As Enrique Martinez explains, “The lesson was to understand collaboration as something that needs to be redefined constantly, depending on both internal and external circumstances.” The future of their specific design proposal is uncertain — their ideas may or may not ever take form on Target’s shelves — but to the designers, that’s almost beside the point. In partnership with Target’s Innovation Team, the students succeeded in “clearing a space for reciprocal thinking and joint exploration,” says Jessie Shefrin. “This is the space of design thinking.”