Katie Marinaro, architecture major:  Before I came to Ball State I was really just looking at the classes that were available and just expecting another normal kind of school experience to get through classes.

Kevin Klinger, architecture professor:  Streams was part of a Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry project where we invited students to participate in a fully immersive learning opportunity. Well, the students were looking at the river --  the White River that courses through East Central Indiana -- as a kind of a muse for their creative projects. As well they were looking at digital fabrication as a way of engaging the river.

Marinaro:  The Mounds Park project started with a design phase where everyone was working on it trying to figure out some sort of interactive piece that we could place in the park to get the people who visit there and walk around the trails to really focus more on the river. From the start we had many different ideas and we eventually had to just distill it down to one design that we would all work together on. So, from the design we went into the production phase, which included making files.

Klinger; The students work with a whole raft of different software packages. For the limestone, we worked with the Indiana Limestone Fabricators. They received the file in a particular format and translated it into their machine software. They'd never received a file like that before and based on the success of what we did with them, they're now asking all of their architects to submit their files in this kind of format.

Marinaro: This was so much better than normal classes. I think I've learned more in that semester than the first year and a half I was in the Architecture Building because it really gets you out onto specific sites where you're going to be building something.  So, you're more engaged with the project. It's something that people are going to see and interact with. So, you want to make sure it's the best project that you can make. 

Marinaro: Since being in the seminar, I've really been trying to get more people to learn about this. It's actually fun. It's immersive. You're working hands-on. You really get a lot more out of this experience than you would taking your regular classes.