What is the Design Students Organization, or DSO?

Our goal is to get design students from all years working together on common projects as well as connecting to the design industry in Edmonton.

Who can join the club?

Right now our executive team is design students only, just to try and keep it in the program at an executive level, but we’re definitely going to open it up to everybody, so anybody is welcome to come to our monthly meetings.

What events are going to BE on campus this year?

This year we’re hoping to do some smaller events. Last year we did a couple of pizza parties, where (we’ll) supply all of the food and just allow everyone to network. For some of them we create a little bit more of a crafty feel, like you can make pins and stickers and stuff like that. I would like to see more design skills be utilized. We have a contact that taught us bookbinding at our last workshop and I would love to bring that back this year.

Every year you host a design conference called Orange. What will it look like this year?

We’re still aiming for a multi-day conference; I think it’s really cool to do a whole weekend. We bring speakers as well as people to run workshops, so it’s a lot of hands-on. We also bring in alumni from the design studies program here, as well as the U of A, to come and speak about what they’ve been doing in the industry and how they see it at an entry level. The biggest change that we’re going to be implementing this year is (we’ll have no) vendor sales. It’s a lot more work and it took away from the learning aspect, which we really want to focus on this year.

How do you see the club changing now that it will be on City Centre Campus?

We really want to start seeing design students integrate into the community at MacEwan. I think there’s going to be a lot more integration with other clubs and other programs. We’ve already solidified contact with Enactus, Oikos, and the Marketing club, so we would love to see those grow a lot more and see who else we can connect with. I think there are lots of opportunities for design students to try out different clubs, and not just do design stuff but learn more about business and other aspects of the industry.

Photos supplied. Edited for length and clarity.