Designing with a sense of place, with particular interest in color and materials that are regarded as waste or by-product.

Melanie McClintock is a multi-disciplinary designer, artist and educator. Before becoming the Chair of the Color and Materials Design (CMD) department at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit, she spent two decades working in the fashion industry and academia in New York, San Francisco, Qatar, and Indonesia. Within the Color and Materials Design program, she integrates sustainability into all courses, where students work on solving design problems with a lens on waste streams, circularity, and social responsibility.   Her most current material study, The Ruderal Material Project, observes ruderal flora – commonly known as weeds – found in the wet mesic flatwoods of Belle Isle as signals of adaptation to human intervention and climate change.  Her most recent exhibition, Color Lab, focused on the materiality of color to create interactive landscapes through point-of-origin pigments. Melanie’s research interests include objects and experiences with a Sense of Place, the Materiality of Color, the Found Object as Art (Seeing), Creative Archiving, Making as Research, Re-imagining Waste Materials through Biodesign, Adaptive Design for Climate Change, and Trend Futures.