October 4-20, 2019
Public Opening Reception:
Friday, October 4, 6:00 – 9:00 PM

Meta project Reunion + Thought at Work Networking Event:
Saturday, October 19, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

RIT Brick City Homecoming Weekend
October 18-20, 2019 

About Meta project:
Meta project is an annual collaboration between RIT Industrial Design students and industry partners. Each year, seniors in the program are challenged to engage design thinking in a project prompted by the nature of the industry partner’s mission, products, or services. Drawing from the ‘Design is One’ philosophy embedded in the archives of RIT’s Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Meta project aims to encourage students to produce design that is “semantically correct, syntactically correct, and pragmatically understandable, but also visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and timeless.”

Working with companies like Umbra, Areaware, Kikkerland, and Poppin, the annual sponsors drive the project and then jury and honor outstanding student-developed designs. Each year, at least one project is collected by the RIT Archive Collections. A selection of projects has been moved into commercial production — in particular, James Paulius’s Blockitecture (image above) produced by Areaware and available in the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Blockitecture encourages imaginative play while enhancing understanding of architectural and structural concepts through assembly of custom-painted wooden blocks in various configurations.

Other projects include collaborations with the Corning Museum of Glass, Herman Miller, and Wilsonart. In 2017-18, students took on a unique version of Metaproject with Good Luck, a restaurant owned by an alumnus of the Industrial Design BFA program, where students designed a dining experience for invited guests. Most recently, students worked with Sesame Workshop’s Vice President of Creative Services Theresa Fitzgerald, a 1984 graduate of RIT’s Graphic Design BFA program, to develop objects that respond to the urgency of play in contemporary life. The project was presented at New York City’s Design Week in May 2019.

Josh Owen, Distinguished Professor, Industrial Design Undergraduate Program Director and author of the Meta project initiative, has been leading this course for the past decade. “This series has brought real-world challenges to the classroom,” Owen said. “Unique to RIT is our ability to share exemplars from our archival holdings to demonstrate the value of good design through world-renowned artifacts of process. Students are tasked to use their research and design thinking to create solutions that are essential for their education and maximize experiential learning. In many cases, these projects help jump start their careers.”
 

About the Exhibition:
To celebrate the upcoming 10th anniversary of Meta project, RIT City Art Space will host an exhibition that highlights projects from the previous nine years, with materials loaned from the RIT Archive Collections along with a selection of unique installations based on projects that have gone into commercial and experiential production. In-progress elements of Meta project’s 10th iteration will also be on display, which will culminate at New York City Design Week in May of 2020.

The exhibition will open to the public Friday, October 4, 2019, with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m., and continue through RIT’s Brick City Homecoming and Family Weekend (October 18-20, 2019) —  an ideal time to reflect on the growing impact of Meta project, engage with RIT’s creative community, and celebrate the College of Art and Design’s reconnection to downtown Rochester through the new RIT City Art Space.