Students in the College of Design are working with communities in Iowa to get hands-on design experience before graduation.

The PLaCE — Project for Partnering Landscape and Community Enhancement — project in the College of Design partners students with community members to help the students use the skills they will need for their future careers.

M. Susan Erickson, landscape architecture lecturer and coordinator of the PLaCE program, said the program has been very beneficial to both the students in the College of Design and the community where the students have worked on projects.

“This is a pretty meaningful experience for students, because they can work with real clients on a real world project,” Erickson said.

The program started in Aug. 2000. The goal of the PLaCE program is to “make the best use of our resources within the college, as well as [meet] Iowa’s needs when we are contacted for help,” Erickson said.

Erickson said she is currently getting so many requests for projects that the students do not have time to work on them all.

“We have to make sure we can match the requests with studio class needs or areas of expertise,” she said.

The landscape architecture department and the community and regional planning department are working together on a master plan for the Ioway Trail in McCallsburg, Erickson said. There are many project requests on file she hopes the students will be able to take on later.

“There is a hospice center that wants our help in designing a therapeutic garden,” Erickson said. “We also have a high school that wants help planning a cross country trailway around their campus. I think both of these would be interesting projects for us to take on.”

Erickson said the projects must meet certain criteria, and must be complex enough to meet the needs of studio classes.

“We only take non-profit community organizations, and we try not to take business away from private practices,” she said. “The projects have to fit the needs of our students first and foremost.”

The clients who the students work with also have to defray the expenses of the projects, and the project has to have an evident impact on the community, Erickson said.

“Our interior design majors work with small businesses to help them with layout and colors, and our graphic design majors work on the signage on the outside of the stores and help give them a unified appearance,” she said. “The PLaCE projects can be very beneficial to all our students.”

Erickson said there are currently five studio classes working on projects, including one of her own, Landscape Architecture 401.

Students in the class said working on their PLaCE project has been a good experience. Jon Russell, senior in landscape architecture, said he has learned a lot from the project.

“I think it is a good experience, because we’ve actually interacted with people from the community,” Russell said. “It’s good to get other people’s perspectives when you are designing, and from this project I’ve gotten an idea of what goes into designing a project of this magnitude.”

Peter Brock, senior in community and regional planning, is a member of a community and regional planning class that collaborated with the landscape architecture students. His part of the project has focused on community economics.

“We are looking at how the project will benefit the communities,” Brock said. “We are considering factors such as tourism and population growth. We have also studied some other towns that have benefited from these types of projects.”

The students are planning to present their work to their clients Nov. 12, and will eventually develop a final project.