2019 Summer Interns Kick-Off Collaborative Project

Each year, the Cuningham Group summer intern cohort steps away from their day-to-day learning and client-driven work to team up on a collaborative project. Yesterday, our 2019 cohort — our largest one yet! — kicked off their project with a site visit to the American Indian Cultural Corridor (AICC).

The parameters of the collaborative project are different each year, developed in response to the students' goals for their internship experience. This year, Cuningham Group Principal Sam Olbekson's continued work with the Native American community in Minnesota presented an opportunity for the cohort to explore the AICC and develop proposals based on the feelings the site evokes — investigating how one attracts, how one approaches, and how one enters a space.

Under the guidance of Cuningham Group designer Aarón Regla Beton and team of mentors, the 17 interns across six offices will work together in groups to nurture their intuition while testing it against what they perceive, and translate it into culturally-sensitive design solutions. They will frame the contents of their work so that its composition and content represents an idea or observation they have made from the three key feelings/senses initially described (attracting, approaching, and entering a space).

Stay tuned for more as these ideas begin to take shape and the teams have an opportunity to present their process and final design solution to the firm next week!