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This semester’s Interior Design Furniture Design Studio course will be hosting an exhibition of their completed furniture pieces on Thursday, December 1st at 7:00pm at MAINSITE Contemporary Art Gallery in Norman. The exhibition is made possible by the generous sponsorship of Henry Home Interiors of Norman.
Throughout this semester, students in the furniture design course have taken their pieces from concept to drawings to cardboard model to full-size, completed pieces. The students have utilized the free tools and materials available to them at the Creating_Making Lab in order to construct their pieces. Most students started the course with little to no knowledge of using tools or creating full size furniture, but now understand not only the design process, but also the construction process behind their pieces.
A student in the Creating_Making Lab.
The course gave students a hands-on experience, which is something many of the seniors in the class felt they missed out on in their first years in the program due to the pandemic. Grace Pettijohn, a fourth year Interior Design student, explained that during her freshman year the program was moved online, and they were forced to do primarily digital modeling, “And, so from that point, pretty much all we did was just digital renderings. Ideation sketches were even digital. And coming in here […] right off the bat, [our professor told us to] use our hands and really dive into creating with our hands.”
She continued, “And it was very exciting for me to mold little furniture pieces out of clay and cut things out of cardboard. […] I feel like now, going into like my capstone and even finishing with school, I understand the importance of this part of the process more and it’s made me braver with just building and expressing my designs in a three-dimensional way.”
A life-size model of a chair.
Chelsea Holcomb, the instructor for the course, explained that it was important for students to learn the entire process of making something from rough sketch to completed piece in order to learn what details are important when designing, “Because as designers and architects, we usually hand off our stuff to someone else. We do all the designing, and then we’re like, ‘Hey, here, can you go build this?’. So this class forces them to understand how legible their drawings and information have to be in order to be built. And so that teaches them the importance of detailing and the process of designing.”
A scale model of a student's design.
To celebrate the students’ completed pieces, make sure to visit the exhibition on December 1st at 7:00 p.m. at MAINSITE Gallery in Norman. Appetizers and wine will be provided for attendees.
The students’ work was recently featured in KFOR News’s “Great State” series. View the KFOR article and video feature.
The Gibbs Design in Action Awards (GDAA) program, led by Dr. Wanda Liebermann, has announced its 2026–2027 funded student projects. The initiative supports design and research work that addresses social, cultural, and economic issues in the built environment through collaboration with faculty and community partners.
The OU Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) 2024 collaboration with the Historic Threatt Filling Station has been recognized in the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's newly released Byways Report: The Scenic Route to Rural Prosperity – a story-driven publication exploring how road trip culture and place-based tourism can fuel economic growth in rural communities.
The Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce that Camille Germany, Chief of Staff, has been named the 2026 recipient of the university-wide Jennifer L. Wise Good Stewardship Award.
