The carts are overall pretty ugly and they do not fit the Nasher aesthetic.
Liam Byrne, Duke Class of 2026
Engineering Students Selected the Nasher as their "Client"
Visitors to our galleries often sit on folding chairs while they listen to an artist or curator’s talk. The carts that transport those folding chairs are wobbly and tend to pinch fingers.
That’s where a team of first-year Duke engineering students came in.
Ellen Raimond, PhD., Associate Curator of Academic Initiatives at the Nasher Museum, tasked the students with making a more stable and effective storage system for the chairs. They call themselves Team “Chairing is Caring.” They are all enrolled in the EGR 101: Engineering Design and Communication.
Last week, the students brought over their first prototype.
This semester, the museum has also welcomed class visits from Duke’s Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering departments.
For some tasks, everyone works together and puts in input. But for others, you create subtasks and allow a certain person to do a certain task and come back and combine all those ideas.
Ahnaf Hossain, Duke Class of 2026
It’s using a wooden base and PVC pipes but hopefully we’ll be able to make it out of metal and make it more aesthetic and more stable so it can be properly used in this museum.
Rania Challita, Duke Class of 2026