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Class in the Spotlight
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Fee finds home in industrial design department
 Photo by Wayne C. Moore Bob Fee incorporates industry experience, a love of teaching and a sense of fun into his industrial design classes. By Monique Bos Published: Friday, February 16, 2007 When Bob Fee applied for a faculty position in the industrial design department at the Savannah College of Art and Design eight years ago, he thought he’d partially retire, teach a few classes and relax. He couldn’t have been more wrong. “That lasted about a day!” he said. He met Victor Ermoli, who had just been named chair of the college’s then-four-year-old industrial design department, and the two gelled. (Ermoli now serves as dean of the SCAD School of Design.) He and Ermoli quickly began to devise ways to build the program and prepare students to meet future as well as present design and business needs. “He really is the most intellectually generous person I’ve ever met,” said Fee. “That generosity has allowed us to build this [department].” The program has grown to include minors in marine design and interaction design, and faculty members tend to stay around, he said. “The students form deep bonds with their professors,” he explained. The setup of faculty members’ offices — in an open space in the Gulfstream Center for Furniture and Industrial Design — also contributes to a strong department, Fee said. “People love the fact that we can see each other,” he explained. “It works because we don’t just say hello when we see each other coming in or leaving the office. We have a nice community up here; we like each other.” When he came to SCAD, Fee brought a wealth of experience working in various facets of the industrial design industry. As a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, Fee spent summers working in the graphics group at Boeing’s local facility. After his graduation, he relocated to Seattle and started a full-time job at the company’s headquarters. “I worked with the first computer graphics group in existence,” he said. “It was very mechanical back then — punch cards, plodders, stuff like that.” He added, “I did a little work on the first human figure to be designed by computer. It was very interesting to be on the ground floor.” After Boeing, he started graduate studies at the ITT Institute of Design in Chicago. “I’m still on really close terms with the new people up there,” he said. “I relish that relationship.” He also worked with design consulting groups such as Design Constulants Inc. for five years, developing general products and toys. After getting married, he and his wife moved to Wichita, Kan., where he worked for nine years at Richard Ten Eyck Associates, a medium-sized industrial design firm. “It was a really good group,” he said. “I got to travel all over the country and to different parts of the world. I did a lot of heavy machinery.” He also developed products including a screwdriver and a steamer cooker that was on the market for almost 20 years, which is an unusually long shelf life, he said. After that, he relocated to Lubbock, Texas, to work in Texas Instruments’ consulting group, then moved to Dallas, where he worked at the company’s corporate design center and eventually became the group’s manager. “It was an interesting job as design goes, because my group did everything but calculators — which of course is what TI is known for,” he said. They developed products such as digital light processors, CCD cameras and night-vision products. “That was my training ground,” he explained. In addition to design skills, Fee tries to give his students a realistic idea of what they might encounter in a work environment, such as cutthroat competition. “Learning to deal with that not only toughened me up, but I try to work really hard with the students to build them up to avoid it, especially graduate students who are about to go into the industry,” he said. Another skill he developed was the ability to work with client groups made up of diverse personalities. In his classes, he emphasizes that the designer’s role is to listen and synthesize clients’ ideas into a workable concept. “How do you get along with all the people?” he said. “Tenacity and the ability to listen count. During meetings, I would be a good listener, a good sketcher of ideas. I could take the shy, quiet engineer’s voice in the corner and then the loudmouth and try to create equal opportunities through my ability to synthesize.” He teaches his students the three Cs — creation, communication, “and if you’re good, you elicit other people’s ideas and then you arrive at the highest form of creativity: collaboration,” he said. His network of contacts also proves rewarding for his students — and sometimes provides him with feedback about SCAD’s industrial design program. “My original boss from TI just walked into my studio class last week,” Fee chuckled. “He said we’re getting to be really well-known and have a good reputation. We work for those kinds of compliments; those are really good to get.” He enjoys being in the classroom, he said, and he concentrates on developing a strong rapport with his students. “I tease them mercilessly, but I always do it in such a way that they know I’m on their side. It really does establish a bond,” he said. “You kind of go really to the heart and begin to develop a level of trust. Without that, I wouldn’t be much of a teacher.” Fee said he’s seen three significant shifts in industrial design students over the past several years. First, “I have noticed that on average, they’re getting a little more intelligent and a little more solid. There are fewer peaks and valleys,” he explained. Second, he said, graduate students in particular have a keen interest in ensuring the time and money they invest in their education will pay off. “We’re getting tougher questions from some graduate students, especially the ones who have been working for a few years,” he said. “We’re learning along with them … This is part of our success. They demand more of us, too.” The third shift has to do with international students and the ways in which they want to economically help their home countries. “Students from Taiwan and China, especially grad students, are producing statements of purpose and portfolio work that are some of the best I’ve seen,” he said. “These are future leaders in that part of the world. I love to get Chinese and Taiwanese students in the same class, because they have different perspectives. The Chinese students aren’t just interested in designing one product after another, but in making life better. Taiwan has suffered a manufacturing drain for the last 10 years … so it’s trying to build a design identity, not just manufacturing. Given the size of that country, a few designers can make a difference.” He added, “They all want to make a difference for their countries and their people.” As a graduate student mentor, Fee works closely with many of these students. “My mission as their mentor and teacher is to instill in them a sense of their own potential to really make a difference in the world and the people around them,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of responsibility.” In fact, he said, one of his priorities is to create and sustain a feeling of family among industrial design students and alumni. If students contact him about advice for job interviews, or ask him about industry connections, he said he’ll respond immediately. “When they’re out there looking for a job, I will stop eating and reply, or if I can’t reply at that moment, I’ll tell them when I can,” he said. “When you call home, you need that support.” From the feedback he receives, it’s apparent Fee — and the rest of the industrial design department — is successful in preparing students for their careers and giving them a strong support system. “I don’t hear my students coming back to tell me what they didn’t learn in college,” he said. “I hear them telling me what they did learn, and they’re getting pretty successful.” And what of those intentions to relax in Savannah? Does Fee have plans to retire anytime soon? “Why would I want to?” he asks incredulously. “Precious few people are doing what they want to, and I am. This is a pretty good cake here.”  |
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