Monthly Archives: September 2010

Made Up Events Explore Design Fiction

Art Center’s Graduate Media Design program (MDP) announces two events that explore a resurgent interest in utopias and an emerging genre called “design fiction.” The first Made Up event—a panel discussion, AS IF: alternate realities—will be held today from 3 to 5 pm in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus.

The panel, hosted by MDP faculty member Tim Durfee, will feature researchers-in-residence Sascha Pohflepp, an artist and writer whose design fiction video installation, SUPERCALIFORNIA! was produced during his Made Up residency; Norman Klein, a cultural historian, critic, novelist and author of the database novel, The Imaginary Twentieth Century; and Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist and researcher at the Design Strategic Projects studio at Nokia Design, as well as co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. Works from the 2010 MDP’s summer research fellows and current students will be on display to complement and inspire the discussion.

Next Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7 pm, the MDP and Broadcast Cinema will screen Utopia in Four Movements, a live documentary performed by Sam Green with music by David Cerf.  Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker whose feature, The Weather Underground, was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound artist and user interface designer at Apple who composed music for The Weather Underground. The screening, to be held at Hillside Campus in the Los Angeles Times Media Center, expands the Made Up project’s interest in utopias, dystopias and the fantastic.

Previous coverage of Made Up.

Meet Gabriel Wartofsky

Transportation Design student Gabriel Wartofsky first learned of Art Center from an automobile magazine when he was a child.

He says that his goal as a transportation designer is to “improve the way we move around our neighborhoods, our cities and our planet with desirable, responsible design solutions.”

Read more about Gabriel and his Art Center experience in this great interview.

Analog Technology in the Digital Landscape: Archetype Press at 21

A Q&A with Professor Gloria Kondrup, Archetype Press Director


Gloria Kondrup

How did Art Center’s Archetype Press come about?
Archetype Press was founded in 1989 with more than 2,500 drawers of rare American and European foundry type, wood type and ornaments from the collection of Los Angeles typographer and printer Vernon Simpson.

The support from Art Center’s then-president David Brown, the financial backing of five patrons, and the hard work of the founding Archetype Press Director Vance Studley was crucial to its creation. Before coming to its current home at South Campus, Archetype was located on Mills Place in Pasadena. This was before the retail revival of Old Pasadena—most of Colorado Boulevard was boarded up, and finding parking was never a concern.

What role have you played in relation to Archetype?
I discovered Archetype Press and letterpress printing in 1992 as a graduate student at Art Center. Although my design background was in branding and packaging, I found the letterpress experience authentic and tactile. After graduation, I purchased my own presses and established a design studio that straddled both 15th and 21st century technologies.

In 2003, I was given the opportunity to become director of Archetype. In one sense, I view my responsibility as stewardship for the preservation of language and of a cultural artifact while enhancing students’ ability to understand the relationship of language and imagery.

People are often surprised that Art Center teaches students to use this “outdated technology.” What is your response to that?
Archetype continues the tradition of an older—but not outdated—technology. While letterpress is steeped in tradition, Archetype is not nostalgic.

As an experimental typographic workshop, students don’t just study the prototypes of digital letterforms, but are exposed to a sensual graphic experience that is both felt and seen as type is inked and pressed into a piece of paper. They are getting ink underneath their fingernails, not merely replacing ink cartridges in color printers. They are being challenged to expand beyond the margins of the computer screen, engaging in a design discourse that can question the uses of newer technologies.

Without question, digital technologies are the preferred way for the efficient exchange and dissemination of information. But digital technology has also allowed letterpress printing to change and explore new ways of combining image and text.

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Reflecting Back at 80: Alumni Relations

Annual meeting of Society of Art Center Alumni at the Sportsmen's Lodge in North Hollywood (1963)

Guest post by Art Center Archivist Robert Dirig

Art Center’s alumni have always been an important part of the College, but the Office of Alumni Relations wasn’t formed until the ’60s—and it looked much different than it does today.


Ninth Annual Meeting of the Society of Art Center Alumni, known as the "Fall Roundup" because of the Western theme (1969)

The Society of Art Center Alumni was formed and incorporated in 1960. While support for the Society was provided by the College, it was a separate organization with a budget based in annual dues.

The aim of the Society was to form a network of alumni by creating alumni directories, distributing newsletters, organizing regional chapters and planning exhibitions.

One particular goal was for alumni to be more active with Art Center and help support and strengthen the curriculum and policies.

During the ’70s, the Society’s most important activity was a juried exhibit of alumni work for which they produced a catalog. During this era, the annual meeting was an opportunity to showcase the alumni work created during the previous year.

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Save the Date: Art Center’s 80th Anniversary Weekend

We’re celebrating 80 years of excellence in art and design education at Art Center. Following the inauguration of our fifth president in April, and a community-wide Day of Service in June, the College continues its celebration with a special 80th Anniversary Weekend.

On Saturday, October 16, Art Center will honor four prominent alumni—industrial designer Yves Béhar, car designer Frank Stephenson, contemporary artist Pae White and blockbuster filmmaker Zack Snyder—with the Creative Spirit award at a gala to raise scholarships for students in Art Center’s undergraduate, graduate and public programs. The following day, Sunday, October 17, is Art Center’s beloved Car Classic. This year’s theme, Freedom of Motion, celebrates the powerful combination of technology and passion that allows humans to move well beyond their own physical abilities.

For more information about the gala, call 626.396.2338. Tickets and details about Car Classic are available at artcenter.edu/carclassic.

Register Today for the Art Center Summit

It’s almost here: The fourth Art Center Summit, Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design, will be held September 22 through 24. This year’s event will highlight our association with the Opportunity Green Business Conference at L.A. Center Studios.

Even better news: Previous Art Center Summit participants and attendees, as well as Art Center alumni, students  and friends, are eligible for special discounted rates.

Don’t delay — learn more about this year’s event, and register today.

Safe Agua Project Celebrated in Shanghai

More great Designmatters news: The Safe Agua project, which we’ve told you about before, is the focus of an Art Center exhibition at the Cumulus conference, Young Creators for Better City & Better Life,  held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo in China. Throughout the conference, panel presentations about the collaboration between Un Techo para mi País (UTPMP) and Art Center will bring together the lead creative team of Safe Agua to discuss how design education can be a catalyst for societal change. (Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, is tweeting from the event.)

The transdisciplinary Safe Agua team brought together 12 Art Center students from five majors who spent two weeks in Chile last fall to research and visit communities in desperate need of clean water. The team designed six innovative water solutions at a range of scales: a low-cost portable shower, a water purification kit for a 5-gallon bucket, a gravity-fed system to simulate running water, a multipurpose kitchen workstation, a community laundry and gathering space and a campaign and publication for people living in campamentos (“slums”) to share their own inventions. The families from Campamento San José, in preparation for real world implementation, tested prototypes from the class.

“Our ultimate goal is to create one Latin America, without abject poverty, where every family has a decent house and access to opportunities to improve their quality of life,” said Julián Ugarte, director of UTPMP’s Innovation Center. “Our work with Designmatters at Art Center has proven that that such a future is possible.”

Learn more about the program in this Icsid article and at the Safe Agua Chile blog, and be sure to check out the student-made video about the project below:

Mariana Amatullo Discusses New Designmatters Concentration

These are pretty exciting times at Art Center: this fall we’re launching a new Designmatters concentration. Core 77 recently caught up with Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo to discuss this new course of study, offered to undergraduates wishing to focus on the use of art and design for meaningful social impact.

Amatullo says: “For us, it’s a great chance to educate artists and designers to think about becoming involved in local, national and global issues right at the strategic and leadership levels, the beginning of the life-cycle so to speak of an issue, instead of coming at it at the end to simply style or package a cause.

“For our students, it’s a great chance to connect academic practices to design-based explorations of real world issues. They have the opportunity to step into this space while still a student; at the same time, they’re also asked to step up in the way they look at, confront, research and address real world issues.”

Read more: The Designmatters Concentration at Art Center College of Design: Q&A with Mariana Amatullo, and follow Designmatters on Twitter.

Are You Excited About Attending Art Center?

Recently, Art Center’s Admissions Office asked their Facebook fans to answer a simple question: Are you excited about attending Art Center? They expected to receive a quick note or video, but never anything as moving as incoming Entertainment Design student Saiful Haque created. Watch his beautiful, well-crafted and poignant film expressing his feelings about attending the College below.

We would love to hear from more incoming students as well. Feel free to send us a paragraph, a video, a drawing—whatever helps you express how you feel about becoming the newest member of the Art Center family.

Putting Alumni Relations to Work for You

Career Resource Workshops are free to alumni and offer opportunities for networking and polishing presentation skills.

Calling all Art Center alums: Do you know what your Office of Alumni Relations can do for you?

Sure, when you think Alumni Relations, you probably think networking and social events. But two new alumni programs deserve special mention: career resource workshops and a mentorship program for entrepreneurs.

Read more: New Directions for Alumni Relations