The AUBURN project is a year long academic design course at Washington State University in Pullman, WA.  The course, titled the Integrated Design Experience (IDeX), is an interdisciplinary design studio that addresses funded, real-world projects at local and global scales with strong tenets of sustainability.  This year’s studio partners with the City of Auburn to develop innovative stormwater strategies at multiple scales in the built environment.  The Spring 2011 semester is a continuation of the year-long collaboration with Auburn.  In Fall 2010, allied engineering and architecture courses proposed multiple conceptual urban and sustainable design strategies.  The spring section brings the disciplines directly together in a design studio format to work in integrated teams to create one large vision for the Auburn and to develop relevant strategies to a 20% construction document level.  This level is defined as a proof of concect milestone where external professional firms could theoretically pick up the design ideas and further develop for actual bidding and construction.       

Goals for this studio are to have every student exit with strong collaborative research, questioning, and design methods to utilize in their academic and professional work.  The focus will be on developing open-source design thinking processes that foster innovation across multiple disciplines of research and practice.