This year’s Hobo Day Parade, as of Sept. 29, has 75 floats in the parade with 44 of them being student entries. The Design 2D class for the past few years have been contributing to the Hobo Parade with various creative ideas. This year the class is making wearable sculptures for the parade. 

Students of the Design 2D class have been working in groups of four to five students each to design and create a large wearable sculpture form. There are two sections of this class that consists of about 65 to 70 students per section. 

The class instructors are Kristy Weaver, instructor in Studio Art, Elizabeth Tofte, assistant professor in landscape architecture, Shannon Frewaldt, lecturer in Studio Art, and Mark Stemwedel, senior lecturer in Studio Art. 

“Every year, the concept of the project evolves a little,” Stemwedel said. This year’s project is inspired by Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits.” 

Each project the class does this semester emphasizes elements and principles of design. For this project, students are focused on developing elements of texture, form, and color, along with the principles of movement, repetition, and unity in their forms. 

The objectives that are going to be achieved during this project are working collaboratively to create a wearable design, developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills, filter ideas through the creation of sketches and maquettes, which is an unfinished sculpture, and maintain a high level of craft and project engagement. 

“This class is teaching me about the many different aspects and principles of design,” Kendal Kinsley, student of the Design 2D class, said. “Applying these principles through studio projects is critical for your creative growth as a designer 

in all areas within the school of design.” Students have been working on this project for about a month. They have been working through many different workshops to help them create their final sculpture. For their first workshop, each student had to make small models of their ideas. Then they share those maquettes with other groups through in-progress critiques to get feedback on their designs. 

“I think that the workshops we did for the project were very helpful,” Kinsley said. “Making small versions of our design really helped us to see what we like and where we may have been lacking in different areas. This gave us a chance to see what we wanted before starting on a much larger scale.”  

These students also underwent many challenges which consisted of structure support and possible bad weather conditions that they had to think about. They were also required to have each form have some element that extends at least 4 feet off the body, which strained the structure support. Groups will need to consider the design of the overall form, structure, materials and textures they want to apply. 

This class’s designs have a strong impact on the parade. “I think they bring a different aspect to the parade that helps break up the flow of floats within the parade,” Marissa Vogt, 2023 Hobo Day Grand Pooba, said. “The students that participate in the Design 2D class project their creativity and display their hard work and dedication they have to art, and I think that is very unique.” 

Thursday, Sept. 28, was the first day that all the groups started on their life size model that they will wear for the parade. They have until the Thursday before the Hobo Parade to be finished with their wearable design. There should be about 36 different sculptures walking in the parade. 

“I think people should come see the sculptures in the parade because the designs being created are super unique and interesting,” Kinsley said.