Designing and Disseminating
Better Health and Nutrition
Practices
Artful Outdoor Furnishings for Midtown
Enhancing
Well-Being
Interior Architecture and Product Design
Advanced Manufacturing Institute
Building and
Protecting Global
Food Systems
Enabling Impactful
Technologies
DECODING NATURE
Kansas State University Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities and Discovery Strengths
Overview
K-State students are learning to accelerate innovation through impactful new digital fabrication technologies and integrative
collaboration processes. A residential developer and design firm engaged K-State to design and produce artful outdoor furnishings
to bring flair and enhanced well-being to Midtown, an emerging residential neighborhood in downtown
Denver, Colorado. This design/build project brought together creative students in Interior Architecture
and Product Design from the College of Architecture, Planning and Design with the prototype and
fabrication capabilities of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI) of the College of Engineering.
Students engaged in a digital fabrication class conducted a client-focused design charrette, an intensive
collaborative planning session that provides a forum for ideas and feedback. Using the same tools they
will use in industry to translate ideas from the creative realm to physical reality, students digitally
modeled and 3D-printed their designs with prototyping expertise provided by staff at AMI. Clientapproved designs were fabricated and shipped to the installation location in the fall of 2014.
Impact
Students with hands-on experience are better prepared for the workplace and are able to use research, scholarly, and creative
activities and discovery to solve real problems. Starting with a real-world client project and working through a process that
begins with a creative vision and ends with a finished product helps students understand how clients
see and relate to their ideas, how engineers evaluate materials, and how to work within or modify
ideas according to constraints such as time, client comments, material characteristics, cost, and shop
capabilities.
Midtown neighborhood residents find the furniture engaging and useful. It fits the contemporary
environment of the neighborhood, draws people into public spaces, and brings artful design to
everyday objects.
This unique collaboration between design students and engineering expertise has continued, with a
second round of furniture commissioned in 2015.
About Kansas State University
Kansas State University was established in 1863 as the nation’s first operational land-grant university. We’ve held firmly to the landgrant philosophy of serving our world through discovery and innovation. Today, the university is on its way to becoming a Top 50
public research university by 2025 through supporting, encouraging, and growing our research efforts.
1887 Agricultural Experiment Station
Important
points in time
for K-State
Research
1967 Alf Landon Lecture
built to analyze horticultural and
entomological subjects
1863 Kansas State University
1944 First U.S. patent application
founded
filed for a plastic container for
frozen foods
2015 National Bio and
Series on Public Issues
established
Agro-Defense Facility
groundbreaking
1997 Hale Library expansion
completed
$184.9 million in FY2014 research expenditures 4 USAID
RECENT SUCCESSES:
14 patents granted in 2014
$473.9 million
in FY2014 endowment
Office of the
Vice President for Research
Feed the Future Innovation Labs
1,000 research grants in FY2014
more than
4,300 graduate students
k-state.edu/research
@KState_RSCAD