Emerging Professionals

UW-Madison Spring Design Trip

by Anna Gimmer, Student Member, ASID
Posted: 4/30/10

Friday, April 9th-10th—Twenty-seven UW-Madison Interior Design students traveled to Minneapolis for their annual Spring design trip. Last year, the students visited the Chicago Merchandise Mart for the day, but this year, we opted to do something different. Hopefully, the Chicago and Minneapolis trips can swap every other year so students who are involved with ASID have more options as student members.

Friday, the 9th: We arrived at RSP Architects at 11:00 am. They were the first stop and we were excited to tour with them because during Fall semester, we toured the Epic Systems campus and RSP Architects was one of the major contributors of their facility design. RSP Architects was a larger firm with over 150 people and they put on a great tour for us--having set up mini designer stations so we could learn a little bit of everything from everyone. They presented on everything from programming to rendering. The structure the firm occupied made the experience even better—a once historical brewery—the building has much character.

After RSP, we visited Perkins + Will, in which they gave us an overview presentation of their firm and walked us around their facility. It was great to see the collaborative work environments because one current interior design project at UW-Madison is the redesign of an architectural firm. The tours were very helpful for this.

To round off the day, we toured Target Commercial Interiors.

Saturday, the 10th: We got up early and went to the International Market Square. It was much like the Merchandise Mart, but perhaps slightly smaller in scale. Unfortunately, most of the large showrooms were closed on Saturday, but many of the residential kitchen and bath showrooms were open, so we were able to give the students a taste of residential and commercial on our trip. To end the day, we of course went to the Mall of America!

The entire trip went very smoothly and the students learned a lot. In fact, so much was learned and experienced it gave those students who went some advantage in studio classes. Everyone had a lot of fun and we hope to keep this a tradition at UW-Madison. It was a complete success!