Get Schooled

At Utah State University, students in the country’s first program for gear designers aren’t just learning how to sew a bestselling jacket. They’re being groomed to lead the industry’s next big political and environmental fights.

- Axie Navas

THREE STUDENTS CLUSTER around a laser cutter as the brilliant red light, guided by a robotic arm, bites into a chunk of green plastic. After a few minutes, the arm jerks abruptly aside and junior Bailey Purser, 22, raises the glass lid to extract two palm-size, kidney-shaped discs. It’s only a mock-up, the ghost of a belay device that’s not yet ready for the crag but could one day be as ubiquitous as the GriGri brake. Which is precisely the point of this exercise: to learn how companies like Petzl and Black Diamond turn a whisper of an idea into the bombproof gear we trust our lives with in the field.

“You have to think about dimensions, measurements, proportions,” says Andrew Deceuster, an assistant professor at Utah State University who tasked the 40 students in his junior design-studio class with creating three prototypes—the belay device, a hammock, and the outsole of an ultrarunning shoe—over the course of the fall 2017 semester. “It’s not enough to just draw something in CAD and hope it turns out OK.”

These juniors could very well end up designing climbing gear for a living. They’ll have the right degree for it. In 2015, Logan-based Utah State, tucked in the foothills of the Wasatch Range north of Salt Lake City, launched the Outdoor Product Design and Development program, the country’s first undergraduate major created expressly for outdoor-gear designers. (A few other North American universities have similar initiatives. Next year, Oregon State–Cascades, in Bend, plans to launch a product-design major a lot like USU’s. And Kwantlen Polytechnic in Vancouver, British Columbia, has a strong program in performance apparel.)