Simon Davey’s Spiteful Table.
Many successful Art Center students get their first taste of the College through Art Center at Night (ACN), the College’s continuing studies program. Take for example recent Product Design alumnus Simon Davey, whose student rebranding project for Dulce Mexico was recently highlighted on Adobe’s packaging form Designer Showcase.
I chatted recently with Simon Davey on how ACN influenced both his career at Art Center and his entire design process. Here are a few excerpts.
On the playful quality of his work:
I’ve heard people describe my work as playful or whimsical, and I don’t really shy away from that. At the heart of my design philosophy is an attempt to truly understand the context in which a problem exists. In other words, I like questioning how and why people are using their stuff. And that means sometimes the work I create borders on the ridiculous, like my Spiteful Table, a side table/rocking chair hybrid.
Simon Davey’s Knuckles.
On taking a problem apart:
I really enjoyed taking Introduction to Product and Transportation Design with Randall Smock. His assignments and critiques were great. One project brief he gave us was to design a fan. I quickly decided I didn’t want to design a traditional desktop fan. Instead I imagined an emergency device that would assist firefighters by clearing smoke out of a building. That project taught me that there’s value in deconstructing the problem you’re trying to solve.
Art Center alumnus Simon Davey.
On being a method man:
What resonated with me about Randall’s class, especially once I started as a Product Design student at Art Center, was the clarity with which he worked through our projects. I’d say that’s the most important thing I took away from Art Center at Night—an understanding of the foundation and the methodology that encompasses design. As an undergraduate student, I could definitely tell which students had taken Art Center at Night classes—they were the ones who had a better understanding of the design process.
Simon Davey’s student rebranding project for Dulce Mexico.
On the importance of exploration:
Another Art Center at Night course I really enjoyed was Creative Sketchbooks, Journals and Altered Books with Mary Yanish. In a typical design class you work on one project over multiple weeks. But in Creative Sketchbooks the focus was on filling a sketchbook with several pages of mixed-media work each and every week. Exploration was very much encouraged, and it was in that course that I realized the importance of narrative and crafting a story around a product experience. It really helped me creatively and was a welcome change of pace.
To see more of Davey’s work, visit his website.
Art Center at Night (ACN) offers nearly 200 courses in design and the visual arts. New courses for the Fall 2013 term include Introduction to Surface Design, Creating Brand Experience through Interaction Design and Conscientious Photography: Social and Cultural Investigations. Experience ACN for yourself at its annual Open House on August 14, 7-9 p.m. Registration for the Fall term begins August 12. Classes begin September 9.
