Email sent out by Kevin Henry, Coordinator of Product Design

Hello everyone:

I just wanted to alert you all to an exciting project that the product design studio V is undertaking. The students will spend the semester working with the city and their 2015 bike plan (http://www.bike2015plan.org) to research, document, and develop new bike related opportunities. We have two faculty teaching this studio- Carl Boyd has a lot of experience in sustainable design (http://www.normalstuff.net) and the other one, Kent Solberg, who was formerly a design manager with the Chicago-based manufacturer SRAM (a bike components OEM) now runs his bike zero cooperative (http://bikezero.org) while also consulting. The idea of the project is to get our students out into the real world (in this case aligned with city goals) to explore the issues that Ben Gomberg, Bicycle Program Coordinator, Chicago Department of Transportation and others in the city have framed so well. My hope is that this project can be an on-going one which would build every fall until 2015 with the possibility that outside funding from organizations like the NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance) and others could fund the development of actual products. We will be developing a Flickr site or some other virtual place to park images and other collateral materials as they are gathered, we will be working with the bike organization already at Columbia College Chicago (Dave Dolak is the faculty advisor there), partnering with a variety of outside vendors, community organizations (like Working Bikes) and pushing bike culture to the next level in Chicago. I would love to discuss ways that this initiative could get some publicity or to see what other initiatives are already under way.

We would be especially interested (Alicia and Joe) to see if there is any momentum to develop better bike storage on the campus as well as a place where minor bike repair could be done to further foster bikeculture at CCC. This would of course help increase greater bike usage on the part of our student body. We would love to discuss this project in greater detail with anyone interested. We look forward to hearing back from all of you. Thanks.

Kevin Henry, IDSA

Coordinator, Product Design

Columbia College Chicago

600 S. Michigan Ave.

Chicago, Ill. 60605

312 344 7381

312 344 8009

khenry@colum.edu