Too Cool For School

In Consumed: Working Class Studio: A design project teaches students about the market — and gives the market what it’s looking for.

Since starting his online store Elsewares as a showcase for independent designers nearly three years ago, Ryan Deussing has had plenty of interaction with recent design-school graduates looking to find their way into the marketplace. Often they have interesting concepts but haven’t worked out practical issues of production and distribution. So Deussing was intrigued when he was approached by the founders of a program at the Savannah College of Art and Design (or SCAD) in Georgia, called Working Class Studio, that is so focused on marketplace realities that it seems more like a company than a college course. “I’d never been contacted by the product-development arm of a school,” he says. He liked some of the brightly patterned melamine plates that were part of the Working Class line, and it turned out that his customers liked them, too: they ended up being among his top sellers for 2006.

It is certainly not unheard-of for work conceived or honed in an academic context to leap straight into the retail world. One famous example: Deborah Adler’s thesis project at the School of Visual Arts in New York, a reworking of prescription bottles, was picked up by Target. And it is not unusual for design schools to have stores that stock wares created by students and alumni. But the Working Class approach is less about helping students sell whatever they have dreamed up and more about teaching them to dream in ways that will help products sell. In the nearly two years that it has been in operation as a kind of design-studio-within-a-college, it has created pillows, dinnerware and stationary sold not just in scores of design boutiques and museum shops but also in chains like Anthropologie.

The melamine plates have been the biggest hit, with more than 35,000 pieces sold, and offer a good Working Class case study. The program’s directors — Andrea Messina and Sari Gunderson, SCAD alums — knew they wanted to work with this strong, lightweight plastic that calls to mind 1950s dinnerware. ”We saw that it was coming back,” Messina says. They had also come up with a basic color palette, also based on their sense of current trends. With those parameters in place, the students — whom they refer to as ”interns” — were given the assignment of coming up with specific looks and created somewhat abstract designs inspired by wrought-iron patterns found in the historic district of Savannah (where SCAD is based). Students are also involved in producing prototypes and lots of trend research; the question of what will or won’t work in the marketplace is discussed ”constantly,” Messina adds. In fact, a follow-up set of designs riffing on statues of historic Savannah figures was scrapped when Gunderson’s retail contacts told her they thought the concept was too local. (Welcome to the marketplace, kids.)

If this all sounds a little like the way a junior-designer job at any real-world design startup would operate, that’s sort of the point: although Working Class is a not-for-profit outfit, it is meant to succeed as a brand and operates at a rhythm that is more in line with trade-show schedules and retail seasons than with the academic calendar. (When a product takes off, the proceeds go back into the program; students aren’t paid.) This seems consistent with SCAD’s own market-focused brand, which has more to do with preparing students for arts careers than with finding their muses: for instance, the school recently announced a ”collaboration” with the video-game giant Electronic Arts. (Messina notes that the school’s president, Paula Wallace, is fond of saying ”No more starving artists” as a kind of boiled-down summation of SCAD’s approach.) And the Working Class students I spoke to seemed pleased at the opportunity: ”Commerce is kind of a new thing for me,” says Jason Kofke, a graduate student in painting.

Deussing, the Elsewares founder, points out that it’s an interesting time for the Working Class approach. Lots of young designers seem less interested in licensing their ideas to bigger companies than in taking things to market themselves. And lots of consumers like to buy things they know come from young designers. While the specific contributions of individual ”interns” are subsumed by the Working Class brand, ”just knowing that this came out of a student program is really cool,” he says. Of course, the products have to seem cool too — but a nice back story can’t hurt.

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