Author Archives: Jered Gold

You Can Create Change

Last year, the Art Center community came together to envision the College’s future and to design a plan to achieve it. Create Change, Art Center’s five-year strategic plan, came out of that process.

Create Change contains a bold educational agenda for the next five years built on three major themes:

The Conservatory Spirit reflects the intense, specialized and practical career preparation that is the hallmark of an Art Center education.

Convening Diverse Communities & Disciplines centers on broad access and the growth of intercultural and cross-disciplinary dialogues and programs.

New Spaces for Learning calls for providing our students with a superior educational environment by renovating and expanding our physical facilities and developing online learning opportunities.

We are already starting to implement the plan, and we invite you to join us. Your support—for scholarship, the Art Center Fund or seed funding for initiatives—strengthens our programs, creates opportunities for our students and ensures the College’s continuing leadership.

Together we created this plan, and together we’ll make it a reality. Help us create change today.

Alum’s Folding E-Bike: Will It Change Your Commute?

Many of us have been in the situation—you want to commute to work, but your local transit solutions don’t quite connect you from your home to office. There are a couple of miles between the stop and your destination. Who has time for a two-mile hike when you’re in a hurry?

Gabriel Wartofsky's Folding E-Bike

You give up and just get in your car and drive there.

Transportation Design alum Gabriel Wartofsky has a solution to this common problem: the folding electric bicycle. This sustainable personal mobility solution—which has the potential to help shape the future of commuting—is part of a system Wartofsky designed while a student at Art Center.

This lightweight folding e-bike, manufactured from recycled aluminum by smelters using hydro power in the U.S., is only a part of an integrated system that requires integration with futuristic thinking bus, rail and auto transportation manufacturers—many of whom are lead by Art Center alumni.

Director of Advanced Mobility Research at Art Center Geoff Wardle—the first advisory board member for Wartofsky’s newly formed Conscious Commuter Corporation—says that his product is the secret to solving the first- and last-mile commute problem.

Wartofsky’s folding e-bike is currently in prototype development, and a prototype is planned for display at an upcoming Transportation Design event at Art Center in September. He’s currently looking for strategic, go-to-market relationships with auto, rail and bus manufacturers—any businesses or individuals interested in assisting with the project can connect with him at gabriel.wartofsky@consciouscommuter.com.

IDB hosts Safe Agua Exhibit in Washington, D.C.


The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is hosting an exhibit on innovative and affordable designs to provide safe water, Internet solutions and entrepreneurship opportunities for people living in poverty.

The Design Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid exhibit will showcase solutions developed by the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, a non-governmental organization based in Santiago, Chile. Six different safe water solutions developed by Designmatters students in partnership with the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais will be on display. These safe water solutions were developed by connecting design students with families living in poverty with limited access to running water and other basic services. In 2010, these solutions were used to help hundreds of Chileans affected by the earthquake.

Read more: IDB hosts exhibit on innovative design solutions to improve the lives of the poor

HYPERBOLIC Opens Today


The highly anticipated exhibit, HYPERBOLIC: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason, opens today at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery.

HYPERBOLIC uses crochet to create sculptural form and mathematical complexity, forming a crochet coral reef. The extraordinary structures are tantalizingly beautiful, yet provocatively challenging in their commentary about the current health of Earth’s oceans. The exhibition is the creation of twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, directors of the Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit organization pioneering new methods for educating the public about scientific and environmental issues.

An opening reception will be held Wednesday, June 22. A panel discussion will be held featuring Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific and Margaret Wertheim, HYPERBOLIC co-curator, science writer and author. The panel and reception are free and open to the public. RSVP to events@artcenter.edu.

Check out this great article on the exhibit in today’s Pasadena Star-News: The artful science of crochet

HYPERBOLIC: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason Opening Reception
Wednesday, June 22, 7 p.m. (panel), 8 p.m. (reception)
Williamson Gallery
Art Center College of Design Hillside Campus

Art Center at Night Instructor on New Book, Film

Art Center at Night instructor Robert Mehnert recently completed the cinematography of Jinn, a supernatural thriller written and directed by Art Center Film alum Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad.

Jinn is based on the Middle/Far East myth of the Jinn, a race of beings that occupied the earth long before mankind evolved. The problem is that some of them want the world back for themselves. The story follows Shawn, the one man who can save humankind, on his quest to save mankind from a terrible fate.

The planned release date is this Halloween. Mehnert and Ahmad have worked together on three other films.

In a departure from the world of motion pictures, Mehnert has written a series of books, the first of which, Looking Down at the Sky, is now available on Kindle from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. An adventure in time and alternate reality, the story tells the story of a brilliant mathematician lost in a mysterious earthquake—only to wake in her own bed, discovering that seven years have passed.

Visit Mehnert’s website at bobmehnert.com.

MDP Grads Help Define Future of Mobile

Alex Braidwood's Synthetic Din

The L.A. Times Hero Complex blog has a great piece on the evolution of mobile apps, and even better—it features the thesis projects from recent Graduate Media Design grads Alex Braidwood and Scott Liao!

From the article:

Media artists such as Alex Braidwood, 32, are in fact harnessing smart devices as the means to a more aesthetically nuanced end. The Art Center College of Design graduate programmed the iPhone’s built-in camera to function as a sensor that detects blue, red and yellow tones. The Synesthetic Din program then translates the colors into an ever-shifting electronic composition that plays into a user’s ear buds as he or she walks down the street.

“To me the most interesting things about smart phones and iPads is that they have all these capabilities that are just waiting to be glued together in new ways,” says Braidwood. “I like turning these devices into little performance machines.”

Braidwood, who last month earned his master of fine arts in Media Design, notes, “Most apps are commodities that people get either because it helps them do something or it’s some kind of novelty game. But there’s this space in the middle where it’s not about guiding you to the best sushi restaurant in town but more about helping you wander around and discover something new that you did not see or hear before.”

Art Center graduate Scott Liao has similarly toyed with the innards of iPad tablets to create what he calls “enriched narrative.” His Anonymous Triangle piece allows viewers to aim a sensor-rigged iPad at projected short films to trigger back-story texts about the various characters. “With current tablet technologies,” says Liao, 27, “we have the chance to change our viewing behavior from passive to active.”

Read more: Apps evolution: A new wave of digital artists is adding whimsy to mobile gaming

Student Film Wins Art Directors Club Gold and Cannes Award

The following post about Voices From the Field, which we’ve featured here earlier this year, is from the Designmatters blog.

Guest Blogger John X. Carey (Film Department, 8th term) is the recipient of the 2011 Young Director’s Award from the Cannes Film Festival as well as the recipient of the Art Director’s Gold Cube Award for his film, Voices From the Field.

Designmatters put me and two of my fellow classmates at Art Center College of Design into a real world re-branding situation as part of a TDS studio last spring with an international aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). Kyle Murphy (Film), Jeremy Jackson (Photography & Imaging) and I pitched the idea of shooting a film in Africa about the humanity that PCI was working with everyday and the client decided to go with the idea.

Flying to Africa for a week and shooting the film and subsequently editing the 40 hours of footage down into a digestible five minute commercial pushed me way outside of my comfort zone but I couldn’t help but come away with a fresh perspective on my career, the world, and my place in both.

Our resulting film, Voices From the Field, went on to win an Art Directors Club GOLD Cube, which was a really gratifying way to cap off the entire experience.

Jeremy and Kyle were such amazing students to work with on the film. The job called for them to be both particle technicians and highly creative artists, and they were able hold both in the palm of their hand flawlessly.

The fact that I had such a good crew is just a testament to Art Center and how amazing the students are here.

I highly encourage people to investigate Designmatters and meet the program Director Elisa Ruffino and Vice President Mariana Amatullo, who are two of nicest people I know.

They spend their days helping Art Center students use their smarts, social status and personal voices to better mankind.

Ad Students Take Home the Gold

At the recent One Club student competition award ceremony in New York, three Art Center Advertising students brought home a most prestigious souvenir—a One Club gold pencil.

From left to right: Brandon Grande, Advertising Department Interim Chair James Wojtowicz, Dawn Kim, Josephine Yatar

The award is the ad student equivalent of winning an Oscar. Students Brandon Grande, Dawn Kim and Josephine Yatar worked as a team to develop an integrated branding campaign, NY Feeds NY, for City Harvest, a food donation service that helps feed the homeless in New York.

Art Center also picked up three merit awards for entries by three other teams.

Congrats to all, and be sure to check out all the Art Center winners at the One Club site!