It is summer, and the classrooms and halls of the Cleveland Institute of Art's Gund Building in University Circle resemble a ghost town. A guard is sniffling with allergies at the front desk, and the downstairs maze of design labs, classrooms, offices and studios is eerily quiet with most remnants of creativity and academia tidily stowed away until next term. Then there's Daniel Cuffaro, working in his unmistakably scholastic office environs, with no summer vacation.
Redesigning the Program
Cuffaro is a native Clevelander who graduated from CIA in 1991, though he spent nearly his entire career in Boston, working as a product development consultant for Arthur D. Little and Altitude, Inc., among others. He is an award-winning designer, who, perhaps guided by his own relentless pursuit of design perfection, found himself increasingly frustrated with recent design graduates. He struggled to find capable, fresh designers. It was disheartening – especially in a city home to the likes of MIT.
Before moving to Boston, he had worked as an adjunct professor at CIA, putting him firmly on the school's administrative radar. He's been in and out of the school's classrooms for nearly two decades.
When an opening to lead the industrial design department emerged, Cuffaro's phone started ringing. By 2003, he was living in Cleveland's West Side, embarking on a substantial design project: redesigning the ID program at CIA.
"I felt like Boston was figured out – a financial city, a city founded on academia – but Cleveland lacked identity and direction," says the slender, soft-spoken Cuffaro, clad in jeans and a white button-down shirt. "I saw coming back and taking this position as an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, in terms of training good designers, and my belief that design could make a difference in Northeast Ohio." His goal was to bring industry best practices into the classroom.
"The design model was broken; it didn't meet the demands of top firms," says Cuffaro, sitting upright in his small office, surrounded by relics of design. "The old model placed all the emphasis on technical skills: if you could draw, you were a good designer. That's like saying neat handwriting makes for good writing."
Outside the classroom, as a design professional, Cuffaro and his peers spent more time researching than drawing. Hours were devoted to meaningful examination that brought about ideas to solve a real problem, address a need or fulfill a want. He was at CIA to fulfill a need.
Playing it Loose
"Today, it's not about sitting and waiting for good ideas to come to you," says Cuffaro (pictured), whose titles are Design Environment Chair, Department Head of Industrial Design and Anne Fluckey Lindseth Professor of Industrial Design. "It's about creating constructs that yield good ideas." Cuffaro revised the book at CIA, using existing resources and packaging the ID program into a three-year experience. He made it cumulative, each course building on the prior, rather than disparate individual courses.
His model for generating ideas is sound: look at problems from somebody else's point of view; look at a problem through the lens of a brand; begin with simple manufacturing, then advance to more complex manufacturing; recognize that complex manufacturing requires complex communication to convey it outside your sphere. Easier said than done.
CIA students spend four years earning a BFA, with one year of foundation and three years in a major. Within the design department, there is interior design, industrial design and communication design. The industrial design course of study includes product design, where students create everything from consumer products to medical products to toys to furniture to sports equipment to industrial machines. The other industrial design avenue is transportation design. "We try to be loose enough in the curriculum, where we can tailor to a student's interests."
