Laura L Prieto-Velasco

Skateboarding is a cultural phenomenon, now an Olympic sport and a global design language, that shapes how people interact with their surroundings. Through risk, creative thinking, and community support, skaters turn curbs, handrails, and empty pools into places for play and reinvention. In Designing Distant, an online studio seminar, you'll explore skateboarding's history, culture, and design through research, design development, and community outreach. You might develop some steeze along the way.
The course welcomes anyone curious about skateboarding and design. No skating experience is required. You'll contribute observations from your surroundings, considering how geography, public space, and local communities shape skateboarding.
Through online lectures, visiting speakers, and virtual field trips, you'll trace a history from wheels and objects of play to skateboarding's emergence and global spread, from Rodney Mullen, the Z-Boys of Dogtown, and Andy Anderson to Alexis Sablone and Elissa Steamer. Course material spans skateboarding's key contributors, turning points, and the geographic spread that carried its culture worldwide.
Your research into its contributors, turning points, and culture will become a written paper.
Next, you'll develop a design concept for a deck, streetwear, or another aspect of skateboarding culture. Working primarily in digital formats, you'll present a formal proposal connecting your design to your research. Finally, you'll identify a potential collaborator, partner, or sponsor and develop an outreach letter, contact plan, and pitch, as a practice exercise or a step toward connections beyond school.
You'll leave able to investigate a subculture, translate research into a design proposal, and present your ideas to people within a creative community.