- The Brasfield & Gorrie Student Design Competition is an annual Interdisciplinary design competition composed of teams of students from each department in the College of Architecture, Art and Design at Mississippi State University.

- The goal of the competition is to help us start to overcome preconceived ideas of the roles traditionally assumed by the various disciplines in our college. It also gives us further exposure to sustainability, innovation, and lead construction principles.

- The 2015 competition was held during the first two weeks of the fall semester and included 28 architecture students, 13 building construction science students, 14 graphic design students, and 12 interior design students, all split evenly into teams.

- In these teams we were challenged with a hypothetical project using an existing, empty industrial building located in downtown Starkville, Mississippi.

- Each team developed proposals for the interior and exterior renovation of this space to accommodate our client, a local microbrewery, Sweet Gum Brewing.

- We produce proposals that included branding, signage, interior design, architectural design, and a construction schedule and budget based on the research and feedback from the client. The types of materials and designs also influenced our schedule a great deal, and we were trying to make it as reasonable as we could and not have it overextend throughout the project having a long schedule. And really working with the other disciplines allowed us to get a better grasp of what it was going to take and what all would go in to our schedule compared to if we were just doing it on our own. We wouldn't really have as much knowledge of what the design was going to influence throughout our instructability of the building too, really.

- As the interior designer, I was fully responsible for the interior finish, furniture and lighting selections. I also helped develop the design concept, floor plans, reflected ceiling plan, and the interior's graphic imagery.

- As an architect in the group, my role was to determine the form and layout of the building, based on the client's needs, while being sensitive to the budget. Since the project was meant to be an existing structure, our primary task was to organize the interior spaces so that the microbrewery could function efficiently while being aesthetically pleasing. The spaces in the building required close attention to allow all the equipment needed in the microbrewery, and to allow the business to be able to expand in the future.

- Design wise, I chose to also mimic the stages of brewing through color changes and constructing way finding through changes in color and simple icons. A big part of this was designing a large mural for the outside north facade of the building. As the mural progresses, the colors change to represent what stage of brewing is happening on the inside. On the inside I used the same color pallet from simple icons and signage for each step as seen on the outside for the viewer to better understand the brewing process.

- The challenges are kind of obvious to me, everybody in the different majors kind of have different personalities and different ways that they come up from their four years of college and learning how to do work and really intertwining everybody's work together is pretty much the hardest part to handle really.

- The challenges I had overcoming working with all of these other disciplines was coming in as a graphic design major, I wasn't use to any of the terminology that architecture, and interior design and building construction had. I had to quickly adapt to all the terminology and I really didn't know how a lot of their things were working and it was really nice to be able to learn all that they could contribute into a project like this. It blew my mind how much, a lot of work they put into it, and how easy it is to cooperate with each other and make something really nice.

- Some of the challenges with working with other students is you're not really familiar with their process as much, and how they approach a project and how that design develops for them and having to find a medium between all of the majors was a challenge and I know my team struggled at first to get on the same page, but once we did it was really nice to work with them.

- I think all of us tend to get kind of isolated, so we start to think-- we kind of forget what the discipline's really do. So coming into it I think we were all kind of curious to see what each other could do. And that was the really amazing part about this, was getting to understand what went in to everybody's work.

- The benefits were probably getting to know every major and what their strong points are, how they work through their ethics and things like that and their concepts, definitely learning about the interior design part, the architecture part and the building construction how they all coexist with each other. Especially the personal relationships that you can develop with those different departments was definitely beneficial for graphic design majors for the future.

- Some of the benefits that I saw from doing the project is getting to obviously meet other people that are interested in the same things as you, but also I loved working with my architects. They saw it from a whole different perspective, and how they tried to incorporate the exterior into the interior and seeing it as a whole site, rather than sometimes we get really stuck in small details and just focus on the interior, but they broadened and opened up the way we thought about it and then BCS bringing the element of reality in, was super helpful cause architects and interior designers can get really in depth with designs and not realize how much money that's costing a client.

- For interior design, you are always on some sort of team, and that team can consist of architects and engineers and all kinds of different other disciplines, so this project really prepared us for the real world and that way as a team member, and how we have to bring it together in the end and in the design process.

- It was definitely real world experience, from working in firm, you know the typical someone you may not get along with, just being adults about it, to liking everyone on the same day. Working hard, working together. It felt like a job.

- The biggest thing is go into it with a good attitude. If you go into it hating it, thinking this is dumb, it's gonna be that way, and it's gonna be a hard project. If you go into it with a good attitude, I think you can achieve anything.

- Advice I would give students going into this is probably be open minded and not come into it with these preconceived notions of what everyone can do. And you would really be impressed with what you can get out of the project when you have all of these different elements working together. And it's not so much about, you can get really caught up in arguing about little things, but it's about coming together and not letting the little things, if someone-- They're not saying something to be personally victimizing you. It's just something you have to go through, it's that process of getting to know what everyone does, and then understanding it, and then it was awesome the ideas that we came up with. I was really happy with the project, I loved it.