Ordinarily, students in the McCormick School of Engineering’s Design Thinking and Communication course build functional projects for an external client with real-world applicability – a treadmill for wheelchair athletes, for example. But students in a Winter 2024 offering of the course built something a little less ordinary: small-scale printing presses inspired by the mechanics of household objects and designed for variability.  

“Every class has a client who has a real-world problem, challenge, or opportunity for them,” explains Alice Boone, Manager of Art + Engineering Initiatives for McCormick. “Many of those people are external to the university.” 

This quarter Boone served as the student’s “client” for the printing press project, and her inspiration came, in part, from The Block’s Fall 2023 exhibition For One and All: Prints from The Block’s Collection. Curated for the museum’s 40th anniversary and then re-presented in 2023, For One and All celebrates The Block’s longstanding reputation for presenting groundbreaking exhibitions on printmaking.

Featured in the exhibition were John Cage’s EninKa No. 45, in which the artist incorporated fire as part of his process, and Maya Lin’s Geography Lesson 8, Ghost, printed with shards of broken glass. McCormick School of Engineering students visited The Block to view thee complex work. The museum visit opened a discussion amongst Boone’s students about the relationship between process and variation, and about the printmaker as engineer.  

“What I told the students in the engineering class was that master printers are as much like engineers as they are like artists,” Boone said. “They’re true artist engineers, and they’re working really intimately with machines and making adaptations to them, knowing how to push their limits but also how to make things as perfect as possible for the artists.”  

Boone knew she wanted to challenge students to make a functional printing press, but was cognizant of the constraints of just 10 weeks to ideate, prototype, and finalize a design. She decided instead to lean into the machine’s potential for variability and have the students design with that outcome in mind.  

She cited words from the prolific composer, ambient musician, and visual artist Brian Eno: “It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.”  

“Fundamentally, what I’m interested in as an educator is the idea of generative error,” she said. “The idea that mistakes that we make while we’re learning and experimenting, and fundamentally treating art as a form of inquiry, actually show us the most interesting possibilities, ones that we hadn’t considered, perhaps, when we were trying to control every outcome.” 

Much as seeking perfection can be a learning experience, so too can aiming for imperfection. In leading her students to produce something imperfect, Boone hoped to get them comfortable with the idea of mistakes being avenues for exploration, rather than dead ends. To her, that was an especially important experience to emphasize for students early in their college careers. 

“I wanted to be able to sort of share that possibility with the class, which also gives them a certain amount of freedom in experimentation and in treating this process as a form of art as inquiry,” she said. 

Grouped in teams of four, the sixteen students for whom Boone was a client produced unconventional printing presses. Among the submissions were presses based on a mousetrap’s spring, a car jack’s lifting force, a potato smasher affixed to a lazy Susan, and a pin screen’s array of moving rods. The students presented their finished projects March 9 at McCormick’s DTC Expo, a showcase of the work produced by students in the Design Thinking and Communication course.  

“I was simply blown away by the student’s creativity, innovation, collaboration and problem-solving,” said Block Museum Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director, Campus and Community Education and Engagement Erin Northington, who attended the event. “It was a joy to witness, and a true testament to Alice’s interdisciplinary thinking and excellent teaching skills.”