There is an old saying…"In college we educate people for jobs that have been gone for a hundred years." This presentation traces the creation of a new curriculum in jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The curriculum fully integrates classic hand skills (rendering, modelmaking and gemology) with CAD literacy from the first semester onward. The presentation will outline how the education works and illustrate the before and after results including employment data from our new graduates. In the past, our old curriculum created designers who could render designs in gouache (water color paint) and jewelers who could make single works of art. No one learned how to engineer their work for production. In our new curriculum, every student learns design engineering and is CAD literate. Every student is also a jeweler who can use hand craftsmanship and digital modelmaking with equal, interchangeable skill and confidence.

Author: Wendy Yothers