Nicole wrote an amazing post over on the FoGD blog about the evolution of the student group here at PSU. Also, Nicole just graduated! I know that I am not alone when I say this: WE WILL MISS YOUR FACE BIG TIME!
Okay, Let's sit back and read the recap, shall we?
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Nice work, everyone! You worked hard this year, and it paid off.
I wanted to wrap up my time with FoGD with a post to remind us all of how far we've come as a department and as a community.
(Note: All of these photos were shamelessly stolen from Kate
Bingaman-Burt, Alex Boyd, Aaron Rayburn and maybe you.)
In Spring of 2008, our student group had five regular members. The Green Rooms were piles of broken furniture and paper scraps. There was little student work in the hallways and I was a bummed out sophomore SO excited to get over the review and onto the good stuff.
Lis Charman helped me, Belin Liu and Amanda Benson get funding from Bill LePore, the chair of the Art Department, to transform those rooms into something useful. Something good. Something to facilitate interaction. Engagement. Community.
Kate Bingaman-Burt and Matt Livengood arrived on the scene, and for three days we worked our butts off to transform the Green Room into the headquarters for community that it is today.
Starting Fall term 2008 our student group EXPLODED. We went from less than ten regular members to more than 100 participating students. HECK YEAH! We petitioned the SFC for a budget and succeeded! Bam!
We grew our leadership. Alex Boyd, Sarah Baugh and Hans van de Bruggen were elected by their peers to lead the way! (I just sort of stuck around and slapped on an official title.)
Show & Tell, our weekly Skype series, began with loads of hard work from Kate. She beamed her friends and acquaintances in from across the country to give us a taste of the "real" design world. Lots of us developed some serious design crushes.
We visited countless Portland studios and developed even more intense design crushes. The Portland creative scene really opened their arms to us, welcoming us into their spaces and stopping into PSU to lecture as part of Show & Tell. We were hosted by Lark Press, Pinball Publishing, Em Space, Office PDX, Kamp Grizzley, Nemo Design, Amy Ruppel, and lots more kind, creative people.
The rad dudes from the Grass Hut came by in February 2009 for an Official Lecture about commercial and fine art, feast and famine employment, collaboration, handmade and digital design and a dumptruckload more.
In July of 2009 HOW Magazine declared PSU a HOT Design Department to keep your eyes on. WHAT? Amazing.
We tabled at the Portland Zine Symposium, sharing student publications with the independent publishing scene here in Portland and raising money to support more exciting programming.
We held a competition to send three students to the 2009 AIGA MAKE+THINK Conference in Memphis, Tennessee. Jasmine Silver, Alex Boyd and I tagged along with Kate as she gave a showstopping speech to a roomful of wide-eyed design students. The conference opened our eyes and broadened our horizons. (To get clich