Second-year students in Conestoga’s Visual Merchandising Arts program have designed and built a Nutcracker-themed display at The Museum in Kitchener for the public to enjoy over the holiday season.
The immersive Nutcracker display will be at The Museum until mid-January.
Funded through a $20,000 grant from the Downtown Kitchener Business Improvement Association (BIA), the project is part of a partnership that began when the college’s Kitchener - Downtown campus opened in 2020. Over the years, students have created window displays for local businesses as well as a life-sized Candyland display.
“Our students have been doing a really great job for the last two years. But this year, we knew that we wanted it to bring it to the next level,” said Andrea Hein, program coordinator, Creative Industries.
To elevate this year’s work, Hein’s students partnered with professors and students from Trier University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program -- an international network of virtual student exchanges, joint coursework and knowledge sharing. The German team travelled to Waterloo Region to help with the installation of the display.
“I learned about COIL through faculty meetings and found it really intriguing. What I thought was really missing from our project was the tech side, but also the European influence for a holiday project. Europeans do Christmas just as big as we do, but on different levels,” added Hein.
Each Conestoga student group brought a Nutcracker scene to life, and worked with a Trier student to add interactive technology or a fashion element. The whole display consists of four Nutcracker scenes.
“My display is the snowy forest with activation stones. When people step on a stone, it will activate a projection for an immersive experience in the snowy forest,” said Visual Merchandising Arts student Ronnie Chan, who also described how her group worked with the German students to create the overall display.
“We basically built everything physically, and then they brought in the technology. When we request that we want to make this magical moment where people step onto the stone and it lights up, they make it happen.”
Chan also spoke of the cultural benefits of working with students.
“Some of the suggestions they made were things that we never thought about. I think it's really great to have someone from another country bring in their traditions.”
Trier University of Applied Sciences professor Christopher Ledwig described how being physically present to help build the displays has been very helpful for himself and his students in addition to the COIL sessions.
“It was actually was very theoretical beforehand. We didn't really know what the context was, what the room was like, the space and everything. It's interesting to make it happen in a physical space,” said Ledwig.
“It's always good to give students the opportunity to go to foreign countries with different cultures and work with different people on a project.”
The display is open to the public starting December 7 and will run until mid-January.
“This has been a massive undertaking, but immersive displays are truly where our industry is heading, so it's a great opportunity to promote our program and what our students are capable of, as well as educate the community on how things are changing,” said Hein.
The Trier University team will accompany Hein and her students to New York City during the week of December 9 to visit the prop production houses behind the city’s famous holiday window displays. Students will see where they are created from the very first concept sketches, and then visit Manhattan to see the completed displays.
Students in Conestoga’s Visual Merchandising Arts program combine the art of window displays, prop making, graphic design, event planning, photo styling, and e-commerce with the science of floor planning, planogramming, branding and marketing, and entrepreneurship.
The program is available through the School of Creative Industries, which offers a broad range of dynamic programs that span all aspects of media, communication and design in fields ranging from journalism and broadcasting to interior decorating and graphic design.