Where do Innovation and Insight meet and lead to startling new ideas?

Where do Creativity and Deep Play team up to form an inspiring and transformational partnership?

Where do Art and Design join Science and Technology to field ingenuity and rich crossfertilization?

Where do Entrepreneurship and Expression find common ground?

A new intersection, a new and exciting collaboration, has formed, between the college on the river and the extraordinary resource on the lake.

In December, Milwaukee's two leading creative incubators, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and Discovery World, joined forces in a unique commitment to exploration and excitement. The result, we think, will be a unique opportunity not only for MIAD students and Discovery World visitors, but also for the greater community, and the world.

The commitment has started with a splash. Beginning immediately, all MIAD students are members of Discovery World, and as such have access to this extraordinary laboratory / educational resource / think tank. The relationship has excited our faculty and students. We are being flooded with fantastic ideas for research, new classes and assignments, new experiences, new audiences. We want to create moments that will invite the public into a deeper understanding of the world.

A number of initiatives are already under way:

• MIAD Communication Designers who participated in the Aspen Design Challenge as a part of Professor Anne Ghory-Goodman's senior design course will present their final solutions to the City of Milwaukee at the city's birthday party. One team of seniors traveled to Mexico to research how a village struggles every day to get drinking water. Their design solution reveals how precious water really is and how design can be a powerful tool for changing people's lives.
• Industrial Design sophomores will be conducting a Biomimicry project in which their research begins at Discovery World. How is our understanding of built form improved by looking at the genius of natural form?
• Printmaking students and artist's bookmaking students are anxious to begin creating digital prints in Discovery World's state-of-the-art digital print facilities. What happens when traditional art-making technologies merge with contemporary digital technology?
• Industrial Design juniors and seniors are looking forward to the potential of designing with Discovery World's prototyping machines and 3-D printers. Traditional design depends on a designer's hands and eyes and the ability to refine models over time. What happens when three-dimensional technologies speed up the model-making process?

These are but the initial steps of our commitment to Milwaukee and each other. The next leap will be to find opportunities to reach out to the community.