High School Design Day

Workshop Title: Ideal Garden

Explore the idea of landscape by creating a small-scale model of your ideal garden. You’ll use simple materials—cardboard, steel, wood and fabric—to shape a space that balances form and feeling. This hands-on experience introduces a core practice of landscape architecture: designing places that hold meaning, offer a quiet personal experience of place and encourage interaction with nature.

Capacity: 10 students (but more is more!)
Location: AA 101

Workshop Title: Conceptual Connection

Human beings spend nearly 90% of their lives indoors. So, what can this “indoor generation” learn from the natural world? This workshop introduces biophilic design patterns and shows how they can inspire interior architecture and design concepts that invite connection and enhance human health and well-being. You’ll create a conceptual mood board to express your vision for an interior experience inspired by nature.

Workshop Title: Design Through Collage

Use collage-making as a launchpad for architectural ideas and design exploration. Since the early 20th century, architects have turned to collage as a tool for both analysis and creativity. In this session, you’ll select, cut, rearrange and remix architectural references to form new relationships and compositions. The resulting images are more narrative than explanatory—hypothetical visions that help you imagine and communicate architectural possibilities.

Location: AAN Studio Room 208
Capacity: Open

Workshop Title: Mixed Media Accordion Books

Use a mix of physical and digital approaches to create expressive compositions in an accordion book format. This workshop introduces you to layered visual storytelling, combining creative tools and media to build a tactile fold-out artwork that moves as it unfolds.

Workshop Title: Character Animation Workshop

Design a character animation in the style of your choice: anime, hand drawn, stylized, “spider-verse” style, realistic or another form that excites you. You’ll explore artist-friendly digital tools that make content creation more intuitive and less technically demanding. With guidance from a virtual technology and design faculty member, you’ll model your character in 3D, paint it and animate it using motion capture—all in less than an hour. Your final creation will be rendered as an illustration or animation that you can take with you and share with friends.