Our Facilities

School of Industrial Design

Our Facilities

There has been a significant expansion and improvements made to the shop areas:

Shop Areas/Facilities: General Facts
All IDS students, in addition to studio drawing, perspective and computer drawing, and rendering classes, will take four-3D (model-making) studio classes in which they first learn and later develop their model-making skills.

The Academy of Art University's IDS workshops are where these skills are taught, and where IDS students in Product, Transportation, and Toy and Furniture Design classes will come to build samples and prototypes of the things they design.

The Workshops
The IDS 3D workshops are divided into five physically separate areas, each corresponding to a different discipline: Wood Shop, Plastics Shop, Metal Shop, Painting Shop, and the 3D Computer Lab.

The IDS department is in the process of expanding the space allotted to each of these distinct workshop disciplines, and IDS is constantly upgrading machinery and teaching new techniques as soon as they become known and tested. The workshops have recently undergone an expansion in space and facilities, allowing the department to better accommodate our ever-increasing student body.

The IDS Wood Shop
The IDS Woodshop is the largest and most often used of the four shops. It is used to fabricate items and jigs in both natural and artificial wood products. In this Workshop Area, you will find five band saws, four drill presses, jointer, planer, two miter saws, a panel saw, and four wood shapers and table routers. There are two wood lathes and two isolated sanding rooms containing spindle and disc sanders and one more lathe for working foam plastics.

The Wood Shop features four state-of-the-art SawStop table saws. These saws were recently acquired as part of the Academy's cutting-edge effort in shop safety. Each saw can electronically tell if a body part, such as a finger, contacts the saw blade, and stops the blade from spinning so rapidly that only a minor cut is incurred.

There is a highly efficient dust collection system, which is piped permanently to each machine and has floor collection outlets. This system features high-performance HEPA dust filtering to keep the air as free as possible from visible dust particles.

The Paint Shop
The Academy IDS Paint Shop is one of the best-equipped and best-managed design school painting facilities in the country, featuring a custom-built negative pressure spray booth large enough to hold a full-sized automobile. The department recently expanded to two additional booths, which comprise eighteen student workstations.

There are twin high-output air compressors to handle the air requirements of the booths and the other IDS shops, and two state-of-the-art automatic spray gun washing stations were added in September 2005. The paint shop uses the best-quality automotive paints, with 150,000 colors stored in a computer database, and a color bank allowing any of these colors to be mixed from stock on an "as needed" basis. Students refer to a color chip book, fill out an order form, and the color is mixed for their project. All students in the Industrial Design program at the Academy of Art University learn to use a spray gun to apply paint in their first semester; these skills are continually used and refined throughout a student's tenure at AAU.

The Metal Shop
The IDS Metal Shop features every tool necessary in order to make precision metal parts for a student's model project. Most of the work here is done in aluminum, and these tools are used to make things from plastic. We have four precision machine lathes (three with digital readouts), four vertical milling machines (two with digital readouts), a bead-blasting cabinet, two grinders, and large sheet metal shear and bending brakes.

The Plastics Shop
The AAU Plastics Shop will provide a setting in which students learn basics of sheet plastic fabrication (cutting, gluing, heat forming) and also learn to make molds and mold their own parts out of a variety of plastic materials. We also teach composite lay-up, sculpting in foam plastic and clay, and vacuum forming using the department's own custom-built vacuum-forming machine.

The 3D Computer Lab
The recent addition of a 3D Computer Lab space has added a custom-tailored, specially wired, and dust-free area to house our inventory of computerized model-making machines. These include a laser-sheet material cutter, a 3D duplicating machine, which works by plastic filament deposition, a small CNC 3-axis milling machine, and two 3D digitizing probes. We will soon expand and add a standard-sized 3-axis milling machine, a room-sized 5-axis milling machine, and additional laser cutting machines.

Summary
Students spend a lot of time learning to build the things that they design, and this helps them to better understand the processes that shape a mass-produced object. It also gives them an opportunity to develop their own skills and allows their confidence in their design capabilities to take firm root.