Author Archives: Christine Spines

LEAP Day 2: Designing strategies for the future of social impact design careers.

Overhead view of a LEAP design storm. Photograph by Dice Yamaguchi

Overhead view of a LEAP design storm. Photograph by Dice Yamaguchi

This is the second in our three-part Dotted Line series covering “The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation: LEAP Symposium,” hosted by Art Center College of Design Sept. 19–21, 2013.

LEAP’s Day One established the event’s tone, methodology, purpose and goals as well as a set of burning questions facing the field of social impact design professional pathways. The following morning, participants arrived eager to drill down into the issues that arose during the previous day’s workshops.  Leap’s faculty team of facilitators and student teaching assistants were ready to continue guiding the second day of collaborative ideation sessions.  Leap’s core programming team which included Karen Hofmann, Sherry Hoffman and Heidrun Mumper-Drumm, had mapped out a programming flow for these charrettes based on Art Center’s tried and true Design Storm methodology, which enabled intense collaborative study, brainstorming, and problem solving throughout the day.

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How Photo student Dave Koga learned to listen to his intuition

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by Dave Koga

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is by paying a visit to Pasadena and getting to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that landed Dave Koga in the Photography and Imaging Department of Art Center. 

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Self-portrait by Dave Koga

Why did you choose Art Center? I came to Art Center after leaving a 10-year career in the entertainment industry, where I served as a TV development executive. I have a prior degree in history and art history from UCLA. I have several friends who graduated from Art Center around the time that I graduated from UCLA.  I’ve spoken to them a lot over the years about the Art Center curriculum and the quality of instruction and their collective feedback has been extremely positive. When I made the decision to change careers, Art Center was naturally my first choice.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
I’ve always been a rational and somewhat linear thinker who relied on logic and intellectual analysis to solve problems. While this mode of thinking served me well in the corporate world, I found it often got in the way of the creative process when I started at Art Center. Learning how to rely more on intuition and observation when faced with creative problems was the biggest challenge and/or breakthrough I’ve faced while at Art Center. I credit two instructors—Ken Merfeld and Mark Wyse—with helping teaching me how to trust and rely upon the intuitive side of my brain. [For more on this, check out Wyse’s essay on repression and creativity.]

What are your most reliable and/or unlikely sources of inspiration?
Inspiration comes in all forms, shapes and sizes. That said, I find that my most reliable sources of inspiration tend to be music, poetry, painting and graphic design.

Who are your biggest creative influences?
My biggest creative influences include Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Winters, William Eggleston, Miles Davis and Frank O’Hara.

What do you hope to do when you graduate from Art Center?
My goal upon graduating from Art Center is to build a successful commercial architectural photography business that will generate enough income to fund my gallery-oriented personal projects.

Glow shines a light on cutting edge artist and designer Rebeca Mendez

Rebeca Mendez brings her film, CircumSolar, Migration 1 to Glow

Rebeca Mendez brings her film, CircumSolar, Migration 1 to Glow

Tomorrow night, keep an eye out for a westward migration, as culture vultures flock to Glow, the dusk-till-dawn exhibit of immersive public art installations where the sea meets the sand in Santa Monica.

Those who do make it to the Burning Man-on-the-beach all-nighter will be poised to witness an extraordinary feat of long-distance migration on the 25-foot circular screen displaying CircumSolar, Migration 1, Rebeca Mendez‘ (GRAPHIC DESIGN’84; GRAD ART ’96 ) film which captures a small sea bird’s annual journey from the Arctic to Antarctic and back again.

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Khora leverages 3-D tech to add a personal dimension to home decor

The CNC machine creates 3-D objects from digital files

The CNC machine creates 3-D objects from digital files

In a world where personal branding has become a social and professional imperative, our surroundings and possessions have become vehicles for self-expression. And not just the kind we drive. This is particularly true of a person’s home and the things within it.  But for anyone attempting to work within an Ikea budget, creating a one-of-a-kind living space has always been more challenging than, say, buying a customized ride.

But that may not be the case for long, thanks to the team of Art Center designers behind Khora Image, a soon-to-launch start-up that will use 3-D technology to blaze a trail through the unexplored frontier of customized home décor. “We’re trying to democratize a process to everybody and get it out to as many people as we can and empower them to design their own things,” says Product Design student Jacques Perrault, who teamed up with Art Center alums Jason Pilarski, Steve Joyner Jonathan Kim and Ryan Oenning to create a company that would revolutionize the home furnishing space by providing a digital platform where consumers can use templates to create personalized wall hangings.

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Microsoft cracks the Surface with an Art Center Design Storm

Earlier this month, Microsoft placed the latest iteration of its Surface tablet in the eye of an Art Center Design Storm. For the following two days, a group of tech-obsessed designers (the futurists of the future?) gathered in a classroom at Art Center’s Hillside campus for a super-charged idea generating session with a single directive: Conceive the most mind-popping attachments and accessories for the device imaginable.

A flood of innovative and enticing ideas flowed from this quintessential Art Center technique designed to stimulate creativity. Watching the above video — produced by Microsoft and shot and edited by Art Center Film alum, Erik Anderson — feels a lot like peering into the right side of a designer’s brain as it fires at full capacity.

Have a look and feel free to let loose with your own unexpected and innovative concepts for  Surface improvements in the comments section below.

Station to Station and Mirror place Doug Aitken at the epicenter of underground art

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All great art (and even some of the mediocre stuff) can be transporting. Conceptual artist Doug Aitken (ILLU ’91) took that idea into the realm of the literal with his latest project, Station to Station, a traveling public art project for which he has commandeered a cross-country train and turned it into “a moving, kinetic light sculpture, which will broadcast unique content and experiences to a global audience.” The traveling exhibit, which kicked off on September 6, brings together groundbreaking artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers and chefs for a series of pop-up festivals taking place at train stations along the two costs and at stops in between. And with Levis sponsoring the whole enterprise, don’t expect this to be a typical beer-in-plastic-cups underground art scene affair. Aitken managed to recruit a lineup of iconic creators, including Cat Power, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Beck, Urs Fischer, Alice Waters, Ed Ruscha and Rick Moody among others.

If you miss that train, don’t fret. Just book a trip to the Emerald City and be sure to stop by the Seattle Art Museum to see Mirror, a new permanent installation by Aitken that wraps itself around the downtown museum’s northwestern façade. Unveiled in March, the monumental LED display features a horizontal band of projected images that dissolve into narrow columns of light running up and down the building. To create the images, Aitken shot a vast archive of video footage of the Pacific Northwest that can be choreographed—for Mirror’s public unveiling, the work was synchronized to music by minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley—and that can also respond to the installation’s changing urban environment, so that ephemeral factors like weather and traffic all help Mirror decide what to reflect.

For more on Aitken and the Mirror exhibit, check out the Dot magazine story here.

LEAP Symposium kicks off with a line-up of pioneers in design and social innovation

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One hundred thought leaders and educators in design and innovation will converge at Art Center College of Design September 19–21 for the LEAP Symposium, a convening comprised of a series of focused conversations exploring new career pathways for designers in the emerging field of social innovation. For more information about LEAP, including participant photos and bios, please visit the newly launched website.

The weekend-long symposium was conceived and hosted by Mariana Amatullo, Vice President, Designmatters Department with a national braintrust that includes: Allan Chochinov, Chair Products of Design, School of Visual Arts and Partner, Core 77; Lee Davis, Scholar-in-Residence, Center for Social Design, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); William Drenttel, Director, Winterhouse Institute and Edirorial Director, Design Observer and LEAP Symposium Editorial Director; Robert Fabricant, Vice President of Creative, frog; Jocelyn Wyatt, Co-Lead and Executive Director, IDEO.org.

Portions of the event are open to students, faculty, staff and members of the public. Check out the schedule below. And if you can’t attend in person, you can also tune into the livestream of LEAP’s opening session and LunchTime Talks here.

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Entering the Matrix with Media Design Practices’ dialectical bus tour

The data center at One Wilshire

The data center at One Wilshire

“How do I talk about infrastructure?” Norman Klein wonders aloud as Media Design Practices’ annual dialectical bus tour of Los Angeles gets underway on a sweltering Friday morning in September. This annual odyssey through the pivotal places informing the city’s past, present and future has become a rite of passage for students pursuing a masters degree in Art Center’s forward-thinking program exploring the subtextual ideas at the intersection of design, social impact and culture.

Norman Klein

Norman Klein

Klein, a media and urban theorist who divides his time teaching classes on the relationship between Los Angeles, history and forgetting at Art Center and CalArts, has been presiding over this event since its inception some ten years ago. The tour takes its name from the original concept, which placed him dialogue with then MDP faculty-member Peter Lunefeld, who is now a professor in UCLA’s Design/Media Arts department.  That lively meeting of the minds then formed the basis for the tours future pairings with Klein acting as the constant.

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How Alex Cabunoc set out to save the world, one laundry load at a time

Visitors to Art Center’s homepage may have found themselves wondering if that Brady Bunch-like grid of student selfies splayed out on Art Center’s homepage was some kind of post-modern meditation on ’70′s pop culture. And they’d be wrong. The real explanation —  a refreshed batch of student profiles — is a lot like Art Center itself: A practical solution to a real world need whose outcome is a lot more interesting than anyone might have expected going into the project.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. We’re kicking off the series with this look at Product Designer Alex Cabunoc’s truly impressive array of innovative social impact designs aimed at improving the lives of inhabitants rural communities in the developing world. For the project featured in the above video, Cabunoc teamed up with fellow student Ji A You to create the GiraDora foot-powered washing machine for a Designmatters challenge to alleviate the water shortage in Lima, Peru. The product he produced has vast potential to improve the health and quality of life of women in water-poor communities throughout the developing world. In the below Q&A, Cabunoc provides some personal context to his Art Center journey.

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augh.: Streetwear with a conscience by Art Center students

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting

- e.e. cummings

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Aye Hasegawa models pieces from the Fall/Winter collection, entitled The Wanderer
Photography by Simia Rassouli

It is simple: You are who you are. If you cannot explain yourself to a child, then you do not understand yourself, which means that you have constantly complicated your life and confused yourself because you have listened to what others have told you instead of listening to your own inner self. You know that the right thoughts and the right words are simple: They are raw and elegant. You use common words to say uncommon things. Those words have force. Your presence is forceful. Life is very simple, but it is YOUR choice to live it simply or to complicate it.

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