The Center for Innovation and Design (CID) is a place for collaboration, for creativity, and for the discovery of new capacities within students and faculty alike.
Students in Matt Martino’s Human Scale class unveiled three pieces of full-sized cardboard furniture that they created in the CID for the Beard Hall reception area. The project was the students' response to a prompt to create custom seating that brings people together.
As part of their visit to campus, the Leonieke Jazz Trio recorded a version of “Summertime” in the CID featuring senior vocalist Maya Bhide ’23. The music was recorded and mixed by MBS students in Dr. John Girvin’s Studio Recording class.
Kevin Chen '25 was hard at work over the summer planning and filming a drone fly-through of our Math & Science Center. Keep an eye out for a cameo by Kevin later in the video!
Located in the middle of campus, the CID is central to the School’s vision for what education can be: the cultivation of essential skills in critical reasoning, teamwork, and problem-solving through hands-on, authentic creative experiences.
Equipping students and faculty with cutting-edge technology and dedicated studio spaces, the CID invites all members of the community to immerse themselves in the design process: defining a problem, iterating prototypes, collaborating and critiquing, and refining a product. Whether working in digital media, audio, film, cardboard, wood, or metal, students in the CID learn what it means to follow a process, to embrace the insights gained through experimentation and failure, and to see design problems, and possibilities, wherever they go in the world.
The Computational Design Studio has been designed as an advanced collaboration and systems modeling studio that facilitates fast and seamless transitions between electronic and physical collaboration and independent and group work. In the Computational Design Studio we focus on applying computer modeling and other computational approaches to general design questions. Equipped with advanced workstations, students engage with topics as diverse as 3D animation and media programming to traditional computer science to advanced engineering mathematics, spaceflight engineering and complexity theory.
Whether creating film scores, recording their own songs, imagining soundscapes for installations, or reframing and refocusing a scene in their newest film short, students in the post-production studio have access to professional technology and professional expertise in mixing and editing audio and video media.
The Audio Studio, with a dedicated audio recording booth, changes how sound can be captured on campus. Percussion and string ensemble performances, spoken word poetry, podcasts, and even physics experiments can hear themselves, and let others hear them, better than ever before.
In the Video Studio, students can control lighting, camera angle, and work against green screen backdrops to produce a range of video media, whether a live journalism broadcast or a dramatic special effect.
Students and teachers in the makerspace prototype, sketch, slice, glue, draw in vectors, cut with lasers, and print in 3-D to work through the challenges and possibilities of design and fabrication.
Aimed at more traditional forms of fabrication, the Artisan Studio enables students to design and create in metal, stained glass, and jewelry. Joined by double doors to the makerspace, this studio encourages collaboration in mixed-media 3D design.
In addition to sustaining a unique suite of curricular electives, the CID supports faculty across disciplines who see design a vehicle for student learning. The CID was founded on the view that the central challenge of design—relating form, fit, and function—is the fundamental challenge in any classroom, in any subject matter.
MBS 7th Grade Latin students make their own Roman coins in the CID
MBS student and faculty members discuss their experience with Apple Vision Pro
Students see the potential classroom uses of the Apple Vision Pro
"Inclement Weather" sculpture now on display in the CID
Students set up new resource in the Environmental Systems Lab
Original light fixture work on display in Phoebe Stiles King '49 Gallery