The Design Cultures and Creativity (DCC) program is proud and pleased to celebrate this extraordinary cohort of students at the end of their Honors College journey. While we host a live Capstone Fair on Tuesday, May 10, 2022, we also invite you to explore some of their digital and multimodal projects in this virtual environment.
The Capstone Project is the culmination of two years of learning and living in the Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) program in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. From their very first day in the program, students begin learning fundamental principles of design, culture, and creativity. During their first semester, they begin to envision a sophisticated, largely-autonomous Capstone Project that not only engages this curriculum, but also resonates with their own personal, academic, and/or professional interests. At the start of their second year, they further work with DCC staff and faculty to craft a compelling proposal—similar to any proposal that they would write for a professional research grant or other funding opportunity—for their Capstone. Finally, students spend their fourth and final semester in the DCC program executing their vision, undertaking the intentional process of implementing, testing, and revising their ideas under the guidance of DCC faculty. In building their own unique Capstone project from start to finish, DCC students learn to think both within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, take creative risks, and approach questions and problems from multiple, ever-shifting perspectives.
Capstone Fair 2022 showcases primarily the work of DCC's eleventh cohort, affectionately referred to as the Lambda class, as well as some members of DCC's tenth cohort, the Kappa class. Like each cohort, these students faced their own set of unique and complex circumstances while enrolled in the program. Lambda students entered DCC in Fall 2021 in a fully remote, virtual environment. Without in-person classes and events, they imagined new and creative ways of forming bonds, building their own workflows, motivating themselves toward creative pursuits, and developing their identities as individuals, as well as members of a community. Their two years in the DCC program have been marked by the ever-present expectation to be adaptable and resilient. In many ways, the Capstone projects you find here reflect these challenges; as students endured the rigors of academic, personal, and social life, they have sought ways to nourish their minds, bodies, and creativity through novel and comforting forms of imagination and making.
