Organized by the California Mille, the Art Center Monterey Tour is a delightful two-day, back roads tour from Pasadena to Monterey, Calif.
After an overnight stay in Paso Robles, the tour concludes in Monterey to coincide with the beginning of a weeklong festival of classic car events.
The tour leaves from Art Center’s Hillside Campus Sunday and ends the following day. Honk and wave if you see participants!
Earlier this year, the Art Center Student Government, together with Student Affairs and the Provost’s Office, together reinstated an annual Great Teacher Award.
The relaunched and revised awards will be presented annually at Summer Term graduation to one full-time, one part-time and one new faculty member, beginning at next week’s ceremony. The recipients are determined through a nomination process open to all enrolled students and a confidential selection committee of students.
The awards are sponsored by the Provost’s Office and Art Center Student Government, and coordinated by Student Affairs. We’re pleased to announce the Great Teacher Award recipients for 2011:
New Teacher:
AFFONSO BEATO
Undergraduate Film Department
Part-Time Faculty:
ERROL GERSON
Humanities and Design Sciences Department
Full-Time Faculty:
HEIDRUN MUMPER-DRUMM
Graphic Design Department
Product Design Department
Humanities & Design Sciences Department
Student Government has requested that Heidrun Mumper-Drumm deliver the Summer 2011 Graduating Class Commencement Address on August 20. The ceremony will begin at 5 p.m. and will be immediately followed by Graduation Show.
Congratulations Affonso, Errol and Heidrun!
Art Center is also taking nominations for the 2011 Art Center Alumni Awards, presented annually at Fall Term Graduation. The Alumni Awards provide Art Center an opportunity to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni.
Nomination categories are: Lifetime Achievement, Outstanding Service and Young Alumni Innovator. Please send all nominations to the Alumni Relations office, alumni@artcenter.edu by Oct. 15.
The following is a guest post by Art Center Student Government President Erik Molano.
Photo by Katy Rose Malone
Over the past week, you may have noticed that there’s now a new, refined Art Center marquee marking the entrance to Hillside Campus. This beautiful new marquee fulfills a small dream I’ve had since starting at Art Center in 2009.
The marquee debuted when the Hillside Campus opened in 1976, along with the construction of the building by Craig Ellwood Associates. It’s been repainted a few times over the years, but the counters, or “negative spaces,” in the Helvetica Medium letterforms have shifted over time, creating a visual nuisance to Art Center’s community of designers.
I remember speaking with the late Doyald Young about the marquee, and I can still hear the frustration in his voice. He referred to it as “Art Center’s business card” and wished it refined as soon as possible.
Thanks to Senior Vice President, Real Estate and Operations George Falardeau, Jess Rivas and the Facilities crew, the marquee has been completely resurfaced! Last week they were hard at work sanding, priming, painting—and refining the letterforms, a task I was honored to oversee.
Take a quick glance when you drive onto campus, and I’m sure you’ll be satisfied with the new look. Check out the process in the photos below:
We are thrilled to announce that seventh term Product Design/Designmatters concentration student Mariana Prieto has been named a NCIIA student ambassador for 2011-12.
Prieto
NCIIA, the National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance, is an organization whose grants, competitions, networks and ventures actively promote innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education. Art Center has been an active member of the organization in the past three years through Designmatters.
Prieto is one of 12 students selected by NCIIA for their outstanding leadership skills and commitment to practicing and promoting the entrepreneurship and social innovation mandate of NCIIA.
In her role as ambassador, Mariana receive ambassador training on the East Coast, and then work with our community to promote the programs, student grants and conferences that NCIIA offers to institutes of higher learning across the U.S.
Prieto is excited about her new role.
“Significant changes in the world come about by making small improvements within developing communities,” she says.
“The combination of NCIIA’s entrepreneurial spirit, Designmatters’ passion for social change and Art Center’s high quality standards catalyze the application of design thinking to identify such small improvements, consequently helping make the world a better place. I am deeply honored to be a part of this team and look forward to working with them during this next year.”
Congratulations, Mariana! She’ll be keeping us updated on her time as ambassador. In the meantime, check out this interview we conducted with her back when she was a second term student.
Photo from Automotive Magazine
The amazing Pagani Huayra made its North American debut yesterday at Art Center. Horacio Pagani himself was on hand to introduce the $1.2 million supercar to the Art Center community and journalists.
From Automobile Magazine:
What really gets me about the Pagani Huayra are the leaf-like side mirrors, glancing away from the bodywork like errant shots on goal. These flourishes are within the European artistic tradition, bringing to mind Picasso’s crazy faces or Modigliani’s stretched women. When everybody else is trying to make mirrors disappear for aerodynamic purposes, replacing them with rear-facing video cameras, Horacio Pagani, a short guy with a great head of silver hair and a penchant for quoting Leonardo da Vinci, comes along and sticks out mirrors so they can cleanse California hillsides of skateboarders.
We’ll be bringing you more on the vehicle and an interview with Pagani soon; in the meantime check out the following links:
And check out the video below featuring Pagani and Transportation Design Chair Stewart Reed:
Product Design faculty member Liliana Becerra shares her experiences participating in the National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance’s (NCIIA) first Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab held at Colorado State University for the Designmatters blog.
Becerra with Paul Polak of D-Rev
About a month ago, I was offered the opportunity to attend and participate in the first Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab hosted and organized by NCIIA (National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance) at Colorado State University. I attended with my colleague Nathan Allen—we’re both Art Center faculty, I’m in Product Design and Nathan is Grad ID.
NCIIA is an alliance of faculty and students working to advance the teaching of invention and innovation in American higher education. This practice is highly and mostly rooted in focused innovations seeking to benefit under-resourced populations through scalable solutions. NCIIA has awarded several grants to Art Center in recent years supporting the creation and incubation of academic projects on design for social impact hosted by Designmatters, the social impact department of the College.
I had had the opportunity to meet some of the people from NCIIA when I attended “Open Minds,” the NCIIA annual conference in Washington, D.C., last March. I participated in a panel examining lessons learned from two of my recent classes, Creating Social Value Through Design held in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala and Safe Agua in Santiago, Chile. From my first interactions with NCIIA members, I quickly realized that most had an engineering background, and design professionals were rather underrepresented.
When I first arrived to the Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab in June, it was slightly intimidating and humbling to suddenly realize that I was part of a group who by profession call themselves inventors and innovators–after all, the word “innovation” has been overused and misinterpreted during the last decade, losing a lot of validity and excitement.
On a recent afternoon on the south lawn of Art Center’s Hillside Campus, Advertising student Tyler Jensen and Photography and Imaging student Lena Bujbara were part of an impromptu, Hollywood-style biker gang. 
Jensen and Abujbara recently met up with several models from L.A. Casting to work on a collaborative project for Cazadores Tequila.
As part of the Advertising Department-sponsored ShootSell class, the two art-directed and photographed a series of retro biker scenarios for an integrated ad campaign that takes a visual cue from “B” movies from the 1960s.
There were no fights reported.
In other Advertising Department news, don’t miss today’s Advertising Department Speakers Series, in which Monotype Imaging will be talking about developments in Web fonts. Today at 2 p.m. in room A13. Open to all students.
Art Center students recently completed a Designmatters-led studio class, in partnership with the Aquarium of the Pacific, focusing on public education and action strategies to address the crisis of sea level rise.
Project Coastal Crisis, held Spring Term, was a transdisciplinary project embedded in the “Design for Sustainability” Product Design curriculum. Students were challenged to translate urgent scientific data on sea level rise and coastal resiliency into easily accessible public awareness communications and educational tools.
“Projects like these are about educating you not by force, but by engagement,” explains Product Design Department Chair Karen Hofmann. These projects have touch points that linger long after the experience is over.”
Students formed four different teams, each producing mixed media communication strategies to educate Aquarium of the Pacific visitors and other target audiences, including California coastal communities and policymakers. Careful consideration was taken to ensure that the campaigns would be easily accessible to a wide audience.
Forward Motion: Advancing Mobility in California & Québec is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to hear leaders discuss the future of sustainable transportation.
Registration is now open for this half-day symposium examining the impact on vehicle and infrastructure design in California and Québec.
Expert panelists will compare and contrast Québec and California’s initiatives for the promotion of electric vehicles and public transit, and examine the new technologies and advanced materials that are rapidly driving North America forward. The panels will include discussions on the future of electric vehicles, urban transit systems and the required infrastructure. A networking reception and keynote luncheon will also be part of the event. Space is limited, so secure your spot today.
Forward Motion: Advancing Mobility in California & Québec
September 21
Art Center College of Design
Hillside Campus
As you know, there’s always something going on when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty.
Some of the latest: