2012 Imagine RIT Exhibit

The Vignelli Center for Design Studies is the permanent and comprehensive home for Massimo and Lella Vignelli’s expansive archive of professional career accomplishments. The Center is an educational resource with the primary goals of advocating design excellence at RIT and beyond through innovative programming, supported by extensive archival holdings of design exemplars.
The Vignelli Center for Design Studies is a place for design education, research and critical examination. The key concept in all areas of the Center’s work is the rigorous reflection of Modernism–the discourse of Modernism, which forms a bridge between the history of design and the Vignelli design tradition. The Center’s aims therefore are to conserve, research and extend this cultural heritage and, at the same time, investigate current design issues.

This course is a special project developed in conjunction with The Vignelli Center for Design Studies and the graduate Industrial Design program.
Students were each assigned a Vignelli-designed artifact and evidence of its developmental process from the Vignelli Archive. Each student was afforded the opportunity to study the items first-hand in the Center. Each student researched their designated context in which their item was generated, developing a clear metric for assessing the item’s success in its original context. Students were then responsible for using the same metric for developing a new object, adjusted in order to accommodate today’s landscape of conditions and habits.

Photography: Elizabeth Lamark

Chunxiao Zhu, Danwei Ye, David Strauss, Flora Qiangwei Zhu, Igor Sobolevsky, Jason Liu, Jong Soo Gang, Miguel A. Cardona Jr., Randall Yarborough, Siyang Amanda Gong, Xiaoxiao Pu, Xiaoyu Wu, Josh Owen