VCU news

By Brian McNeill

During a recent class session, Virginia Commonwealth University engineering students Clayton Miller and Maricarl Hidalgo arranged dozens of yellow and black cloth triangles as they tried to design and create a small quilt that would evoke VCU's Rams logo.

"We're using our engineering skills for something that you'd probably never think an engineer would do," Miller said. "We're not doing something high-tech, we're not doing thermodynamics, we're not doing any complex math. What we're doing is basically just making a quilt – but asking how we can innovate the simple and holistic process of quilt making."

Miller and Hidalgo are two of 22 engineering students in a new experimental course on innovation – and quilting – at VCU.

The course, taught by Russell D. Jamison, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Engineering, asks its students to explore the quilt-making industry and to try to design a kit that would allow a beginner  to create a quilt in less than eight hours without any sewing experience or access to a sewing machine.

"Quilting is kind of an old-fashioned craft. So our hypothesis is that there could be a market for working women who are too busy to [quilt] the traditional way. Is there a way to turn out a quality product without the training and even the sewing technology of traditional quilt making?" Jamison said. "We want to see if we can take the quilting business, innovate it, and possibly open up a new, untapped market."

As part of the course, Jamison wanted his students to first understand the quilting business so he sent them to a number of Richmond-area quilting shops to conduct interviews about how the businesses work.

"We realized that we don't think like [quilters] do," said Zarwan Waqar, a senior mechanical engineering student. "They think differently when it comes to executing design. The way that we would do it, if there's one little error, we would get upset, quit and start over. When they make a mistake, they embrace it and they make something of it. We're perfectionists because that's the way we were taught to think."

"In engineering," he added, "if you make a mistake, somebody could die as a result of it. For them, it's just a quilt."

One quilt shop owner, Terri Helfrich of Sew Refreshing in Mechanicsville, visited the class at Jamison's request.

"She came to class, brought her own sewing machine, brought instructions and just said here's how you design a quilt and here's how you make a quilt," he said. "And it turns out those are two very different things actually."

In order for the students to understand the process of quilting, Jamison broke the class into 12 teams of two students and assigned each team the task of designing and creating a quilt.

Now, each Tuesday night in the School of Engineering East Hall, the students huddle around several sewing machines and work on designing and manufacturing their quilts.

"In developing the course, I knew I wanted to include the idea of 'making things.' I think the importance of making things has been lost in education," Jamison said. "I thought, could we use the idea of making things as a vehicle to understand the business? For a quilt project, it was obvious. Let's see if we can make a quilt. Do we have the skills and the patience to make a quilt? Well, I think the answer is going to be yes."

Quilting, he said, is proving to be a vehicle for the engineering students to connect with the fundamental purpose of engineering.

"It's about making things that hold up, that serve their purpose, that have good design and good construction," he said. "That's what engineers want to do. We teach them a lot of theory, but for many of these students it's the first time they've made something."

The students' final grade in the course will hinge in large measure on the quality of their quilts' design and construction.

"He gives us the freedom to do whatever style you want, but we just need to follow the general guidelines [of the quilting assignment]," Waqar said. "There's very little restrictions – it's left to us on how we want to design it. The way [Jamison] said he'd grade us is how well the design fits with the colors and the pattern scheme and everything."

After the class is finished, the students' quilts will be featured as part of a fundraising event for a pediatric cancer patient at Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU. The quilts – which will be 30 inches by 42 inches, or big enough to cover a child's car seat – will then be donated to the hospital.

"[Jamison] doesn't want us to just put a bunch of quilt pieces together and call it a quilt. He wants us to make something that is meaningful. It should be something that you'd give to someone that you love because it's something we've made with our own hands," Waqar said.

"We're not just doing this because we're required to make a quilt in order to get an A," he added. "We're putting our own love and care and time and effort into these quilts because we want these kids to appreciate it."

While quilt making is a major part of the course, it also focuses on how to launch a startup company.

The course is using a 2010 book, "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers," as a framework.

"We’ve adopted a way of thinking about building new companies called Lean Startup," Jamison said. "It says you really have to talk to customers about their problems, not about your product."

Hidalgo, a senior chemical engineering major, said the course's emphasis on innovation will prove useful in their future careers.

"We really learn more about product innovation or even innovating an entirely new company," she said. "Somebody like me, an engineer, who doesn't know anything about creating a company can learn how to go about doing it. What do you need to know about the customer segments? Who is the customer? What are you proposing to them?  And what is the value of your product?"

Jamison has also brought in guest speakers from the Richmond area to discuss their experiences with launching companies.

Earlier this semester, Jamison invited Larkin Garbee, founder of Richmond coworking space 804RVA, who brought along Abbie Zwicke, who works in 804RVA and is a hobbyist quilter. Since then, Zwicke has attended every class, helping the students with their quilt making.

"I just offered to come in and watch, and as things progressed, I think we all realized that there are more technical pieces to it than you might initially think," Zwicke said. "I've just been helping them sort out what the quilting rules are [that'd you'd hear if] you were to take a quilting class and then help try to be innovative and do things in a new way."

Zwicke said Jamison's quilting class has made Tuesday her favorite night of the week.

"They're doing a really good job and they've been really good sports about doing something that's out of their comfort zone," she said.

Once the class is over, Jamison will send the team that creates the best quilt to visit Missouri Star Quilt Co., a Hamiton, Mo.,-based company that the class learned about in a case study. The company provides pre-cut fabric patches and other quilting supplies that allow customers to quickly make quilts rather than the traditional method, which can take weeks or months.

"They've invited us to send two students after this course is over to bring their finished quilt and talk about how they would innovate in this different market," Jamison said.

 

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