Inés Valderrama, Industrial Design

Why Porter

“Valmora is on the ocean. It is 24 degrees in January — Celsius. My family has a small furniture workshop, so I grew up around sawdust, but the design schools near home taught design on screens. I wanted a place where I would make the thing, not only render it. A Porter professor answered my questions on a video call from inside the shop, with a band saw running behind her. That was the decision.”

Inés is a senior in Industrial Design, one of Porter's international students. The international student office helped her with the visa interview, and she arrived in August 2023 for inbound orientation. “They gave us a list titled ‘Things you will need by November.’ I thought it was a joke. It was not a joke.”

The hands-on part

Her studio is on the second floor of the Applied Arts Building, but her prototypes come out of Founders Hall. Industrial design students have badge access to the Forge Prototyping Lab and the digital fabrication lab, and Inés says the best part of the program is “how close the sketch is to the saw.”

• ID 340, Prototyping & Fabrication: a folding step stool in ash and aluminum, made in five versions. “Version three collapsed under my professor. She laughed. I did not.”
• Senior project: a jar opener and grip set for people with arthritis, tested with residents of a Porter Falls senior apartment building. Twelve testers, forty-one pages of notes.
• Internship: last summer, on curricular practical training, a product design internship at Bluff City Design Co. in Cedar Bluff, working on handles for garden tools.

She also spends time in the Furlong Gallery. “The faculty show, Load Bearing, opens October 29. I am curious to see what my professors make when nobody grades them.”

A hard semester

“My first winter. Not the cold, exactly — I bought the right coat, I followed the list. It was the dark. At four-thirty it is night, and my family is asleep when I finish class. I stopped going to studio after dinner and my work got worse, and I didn't understand why.

“A friend from the International Student Organization took me to the Winter Carnival and made me go broomballing. Then the Counseling Services office lent me a light box for my desk. Small things. By February I was back in studio until ten. Now I am the one who tells the new students, buy the coat, but also make plans for January.”

She has read the winter in Porter Falls guide “more times than any textbook.”

A studio night

Senior studio in Industrial Design runs on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but most of the real work happens at night, when the studio on the second floor of the Applied Arts Building fills up with seniors, foam dust and a speaker everyone pretends not to own.

• 6 p.m.: dinner at The Forge, usually soup. “I have opinions about American soup now.”
• 7 p.m.: sketching grip variations, twenty at a time, on newsprint.
• 8 p.m.: printing the three best on the 3D printers in the fabrication lab, which take about ninety minutes each.
• 10 p.m.: sanding, testing in her own hand, and writing down what hurts.

Every two weeks she takes a new round of prototypes to her testers at the senior apartments. “They are my best critics. One woman, she is 84, told me my handle was ‘very pretty and completely useless.’ That sentence improved my project more than any review.”

Inés also helps plan the spring International Night, where she has cooked her grandmother's fish stew for three years running, “with Wesconsin fish, which is a compromise.”

What’s next

Inés will show her arthritis grip set at the senior design show in May 2027 and plans to apply for optional practical training to work in the United States for a year, ideally in consumer products or medical devices. Longer term she wants to go home and help her family's workshop design a line of furniture for small apartments.

“If you are international and you are afraid of the winter, be afraid, a little. Then come. The shop is worth it, and so are the people who will lend you a light box.”