SCAD StartUp inspires future entrepreneurs
Written by Colleen Miller and Jordan Petteys
Photos by Jordan Petteys
Last week, FLUX, SCAD’s User Experience club, partnered with SCAD+ to host SCAD’s fourth annual StartUp event. The week-long design sprint challenged 47 teams of students from 26 different majors to create and present solutions for the question, “What Makes a Home?” to their peers and a team of judges. “StartUp is an amazing opportunity to create a solution and portfolio piece with your friends that could immediately become a product the next day,” Dane Galbraith, a junior in user experience design and the Director of StartUp, said.
Designed to make the sprint as fun and low stress as possible for students, StartUp hosted a variety of workshops and panels the week following midterms to guide team’s project development. On Thursday, Feb. 14, SCAD StartUp hosted an Alumni Founders Panel featuring four accomplished SCAD alumni who founded their own businesses and companies. In their question-and-answer style presentation, common themes for future entrepreneurs included money, investors, acquisitions and success as well as failure.
Each alumnus discovered successes in the business world, but they were not quick to dismiss their failures. Rather, each spoke about the importance of learning from their mistakes. “You will probably fail, and that failure will teach you what you should be doing,” Leslie Chicoine, SCAD alumna, said.
In a similar way, other members of the panel spoke about moving forward with a renewed drive after a perceived failure. “The first company you want to start will probably fail,” Taylor Pemberton, SCAD graphic design graduate, said. “99.9 percent is just going to fail, chalk it up to that. And then try to take the heart and soul of what that is, hold onto it, if it deserves it, but just iterate as fast as possible on that. And the people who can iterate, pivot and persevere are usually the people who end up making it out of the weeds with it.”
The alumni panel included both inspiring stories and constructive advice for rising entrepreneurs. Graphic design M.F.A. alumna, Angela Benton, described how she rose from the trials of teen motherhood and often found herself as the only black woman at the negotiating table. In addition to this stigma, she battled cancer while creating her accelerator, NewMe.
Through uncertain times, Benton found ways to keep moving forward. “I’ve had a lot of situations in my life where there is a sense of fear, personally and professionally, and I think part of what makes you a good designer is also the level of empathy that you have,” Benton said. “You need to pay attention to your intuition when making decisions, because a lot of the decisions that I made, if you look at it on black and white on paper, may not [have been] the best decision, but I still made that decision because I was paying attention to my intuition, and it ended up being good at the end of it.”
As a word of advice to young artists and entrepreneurs alike, SCAD graduate, Tingbin Tang, left the audience with a final note, “Always challenge your limitations.”
On Saturday, Feb 16., StartUp held their final event where teams pitched their ideas and celebrated their successes. After one week to develop and five minutes to pitch, winning team, “ComFORTable,” received $4,000 to launch their product, while second place, “hyggehome,” received $2,000, and third place “TRIBE,” received $1,000.
“Many projects had their core idea down and grounded,” Harsh Singa, User Experience senior and contributor from the winning team, said, “but I think we won because we implemented all the advice we got from the mentors and we developed our idea and graphics a lot.”
To participate in the event, teams were required to include two to five different majors. “Because we’re [and Fiona Wu, graduate student in Furniture Design] furniture design majors, I was thinking of creating physical pieces, but after teaming up [with Helena Cheng, Senior in Animation] and defining our theme, we wanted to tackle the problem at its source,” said Katy Chung, Senior in furniture design. “That’s why we delved into something we’ve never tried before: solving a problem through user experience.” Having begun planning in May 2018, FLUX intended to make StartUp as inclusive and collaborative as possible.
StartUp gave students an opportunity to network with industry professionals and develop their solutions even further. FLUX hopes students will apply skills and experiences from this event to their academic and professional careers. “What I’m serious about is this connection,” said Tucker Hemphill, a user experience design sophomore. “The amount you can network with SCAD pro is legit. We’re serious about pursuing this and so are they.”
Regardless of major, interests, or background, each participant used their unique insight for ideation. “We rooted our idea in science and that’s what helped us make it a tangible concept,” said Vanessa Jaber, a user experience design senior and contributor for the runner-up team. “Working really hard, regardless of whether or not we won is what helped us to expand our skill set. Nonetheless, it was still a lovely surprise because everybody is wildly impressive.” Most teams varied not only in major, but grade and skillset as well.
Especially thankful for the entire StartUp team, Galbraith aimed to execute an engaging, creative and fun event for students. “As an underclassman, it’s the best opportunity to meet new people, find your place, and create a major portfolio piece that can get you a job as a sophomore,” Galbraith said. “A freshman won second place, and now she has an amazing portfolio piece and she even hasn’t taken any UX classes yet. For upperclassmen, it’s the last time to get together with friends you love and spent the past four years with and just create one more project for fun, no grades attached.”
