Reimagining Downtown

The following is part six in a series detailing the efforts of UI students as they work alongside influential Las Vegas entrepreneurs, including Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, to help reimagine the city’s downtown area. Today’s piece follows two students as they chronicle a busy day of “reimagining downtown.”

Arriving in Las Vegas, we were greeted with a basket of goodies welcoming us to The Ogden and serving as a survival kit for the week. These goodies ranged from bananas and protein bars to ring pops and the March issue of the Zappos Employee Newsletter.

However, there was one “treat” that was left in this basket that immediately struck me: an Etch A Sketch. In a way, the Etch A Sketch can serve as a metaphorical representation for the manner in which Reimagining Downtown Fellows have worked to build a better downtown.

Numerous times over the past two days the Downtown Project workers have discussed the notion of dog years, the ideology that so much can get done in so little time. It is mind-blowing that you can collide with so many inspiring people in just twenty-four hours that you find yourself creatively exhausted, but in a great way.

Faced with a senior design project, Avery Bang and four of her civil and environmental engineering classmates proposed a radical idea to their professor: “What if we actually built something?” As Avery says now, “To see something from concept to implementation was not an experience I had ever had, and I was about to graduate as an engineer.”