UIC majors merge to solve real-life problems
In some classes in the UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, design students work directly with corporations that partner with the university to solve design problems.
Although so much of design impacts how we live, UIC anthropology students didn’t always have a chance to work with these design and manufacturing companies.
Then last fall, the UIC Innovation Center brought together professors from both disciplines to create a course that matched design majors with anthropology majors to learn how people living in the U.S. actually use their kitchens. The class was one part client relations, a dash of anthropological interviews and a sprinkle of group participation. The result: a well-cooked helping of student success.
“A class where you’re collaborating with other majors is ideal,” said Natalia Sandoval, a 2025 graduate of industrial design from the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts.
In the interdisciplinary course and alongside the UIC Innovation Center, students helped designers from a South Korean electronics company understand how to create better kitchen appliances for the American market. The mixing of majors was so successful, the two departments — design and anthropology — are collaborating again in fall 2025 for another class that will give students tangible work to build their resumes.
“The concept of having a course that mixed our majors interested a lot of us,” Sandoval said. “Then, the exposure to a company like this was really interesting, especially the idea of being able to put that into a portfolio.”
Explaining U.S. consumers to an international audience
The challenge from the corporate partner was to understand the overall American market in their effort to enter the kitchen appliances space. By working with both the Innovation Center and the students from the course, UIC could give the company a nuanced view of how people in the U.S. actually use their kitchens.
Sung Jang, a design instructor, said the question wasn’t just how to design the right kind of kitchen. First, the students had to explain how U.S. consumers use their kitchens and how that might differ from other families around the world.
For example, Jang said many foreign visitors might be surprised to learn that a typical American family leaves their kitchen appliances, like refrigerators and ovens, in a home after it is sold.
Sandoval added her group of classmates presented findings about how people in the U.S. market create safety nets for the future. The students used examples like canned goods, plastic food containers and pantries with added space to store all the extra food are not as common in some countries.
“Our group talked about how we value counter space and pantry space, where in other countries, you get away with so much less,” Sandoval said.
Why interdisciplinary classrooms work
Students studied how people actually use their kitchens through interviews and human-centered research, which prioritized practical needs and uses over strict design components.
Human-centered research is a major component of anthropology studies, but not always for design classes. It was also a new approach for the corporate partners. Before starting the class, Jang said, he and Michelangelo Giampaoli, adjunct faculty teaching anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, helped rewrite the corporation’s presumptions of the competitive market and the importance of a human-centered approach.
“The company was OK with the open-ended idea of the concept of design as well as anthropology, which was very important to the project,” Jang said. “We didn’t know exactly where it was going to end up, and that’s where we had to fall back on both of our disciplines. I learned a ton about the anthropological approaches to the interview process, which aligns pretty well with the pure sense of what design is.”
Jang and Giampaoli created the curriculum and co-taught the class. Incorporating students from both majors was key to the success of the project, the professors said.
“We learned a lot from design, that was the most important thing,” Giampaoli said. “And I saw anthropology students discovering the opportunities design gave us to better shape our reasoning. At the same time, I hope we were able to give design students the idea that creation is not everything. It’s important to create the shape to design things, but it’s also important to listen.”
Defining student success in 2025
The UIC instruction team is reuniting with a new question: What does successful education at UIC look like? The “client” for this research is Provost Karen Colley and the UIC administration, and students will use similar human-centered research to ask how success and expectations vary.
The fall 2025 version of the course, “ANTH 494 Our Voices, Our Campus: (Re-)Framing Student Success at UIC,” will bring together anthropology and other College of Liberal Arts and Sciences students with design and art students to learn if the definition of student success is consistent across the university.
“If you compare the university to the company, you can see that they came to us with a very specific ask, but once the students dove into it and the faculty dove into it, the brief changed,” said Donald Bergh, associate director of the Innovation Center. “I think the same will be true here. The university has an idea of what student success is, but we’re going to ask the class to really go to that base level again and ask them, ‘What does it mean for you and your family?’”
Like the 2024 course, class groups will be expected to interview people. This time the interviews will be with students, families, alums, administrators, faculty and other campus stakeholders to learn how each group defines success.
“The interdisciplinarity of different kinds of students working together is a critical part of the class,” Bergh said. “We’re opening this session to a broader range of areas of study with multiple years working together. There’s no reason that can’t work, as long as these students are all curious and have an interest in the anthropological approach.”
