Category Archives: Designmatters

A Day in the Life: Safe Agua Chile

AshokaTech is following 12 Art Center students who travelled to Chile for the Safe Agua Chile collaboration with Un Techo Para Chile. Last week, we learned that storing water in multiple containers increases the possibility of water contamination, since containers are not always stored properly and often pick up dirt and germs. The conditions in the campamentos make it difficult to preserve water quality. Art Center students Erica and Elizabeth are working towards eliminating these contamination risks by designing easy and responsible solutions.

“Families in campamentos have tap water delivered but they store it for a long time in containers that are not kept clean. They do use chlorine for cleaning and purifying water, but the main problem is that they are not measuring safe chlorination. Thus, Erica and Elizabeth’s solution proposal is to enhance strong chlorine measuring education and to encourage the use of a low-cost water filter.”

Read more about Erica and Elizabeth’s study, and view their presentation, at AshokaTech.

Students Create New Identity for Organization of American States

Eight Art Center students participating in a transdisciplinary class through Designmatters were recently commissioned by the Organization of American States (OAS) to create a new identity for its upcoming 100th anniversary. Students were asked to promote greater awareness and reinvigorate enthusiasm for the OAS to the millennium generation. After much deliberation and research, a new identity and core message, “On Common Ground,” was created. This identity espouses the organization’s goals of democracy, human rights, security and development, while engaging a younger audience. 

Tomorrow, Dec. 3, the students will present to OAS leadership the campaign, which includes a Public Service Announcement for television, a new visual identity for the OAS Centennial events, a new website to help connect young people from across the hemisphere, and advertisements targeting the millennium generation. The event will take place at the South Campus Main Gallery at 10 am. Stop by and check it out!

A Student’s Account of the International Design Summit

On the Desigmatters blog, Graduate Industrial Design student Radhika Bhalla shares her experience at the International Development Design Summit in Ghana last July. The summit brought together people from around the globe to build appropriate technologies and develop the creative capacity of communities in the developing world. More than 90 attendees and organizers representing 21 countries from around the world participated.

Bhalla part of a group assigned to design and build child-friendly latrines.

She writes: “When all of us first got together, we had absolutely no idea how this was going to work. We had not one participant from the year before, and we started on a blank page. Little did we know that the IDDS vision of ‘prototypes, not papers’ would not be our biggest challenge, but how to get the prototype on a pick-up truck would be the hardest thing to do!”

Read the rest of her inspiring story on the Desigmatters blog.

A Day in the Life: Safe Agua Chile

AshokaTech is following 12 Art Center students who travelled to Chile for the Safe Agua Chile collaboration with Un Techo Para Chile. The latest installment has our students learning what it is like for the local people from campamentos, with no running, potable water.

“The students are starting to understand the issues affecting the lives of these families. They are now wondering: What if students could design a new system through which water is delivered? What if these families could actually have a running water system? What if there was a way to minimize the number of steps to their daily tasks? What if there was a way to bathe indoors? The students will have to work on these questions and find out how possible it is to make it a reality.”

Follow along with us at AshokaTech!

A Day in the Life: Safe Agua Chile

AshokaTech is following 12 Art Center students who travelled to Chile for the Safe Agua Chile collaboration with Un Techo Para Chile. This installment has the students arriving in Santiago, ready to spend 12 days living among the area’s poorest families in the slums.

“The excitement and incertitude are overwhelming. All they need to do now is focus on one question: How can they work with people living in Chile’s campamentos to develop new tools for using, storing and transporting water in order to help improve the quality of life?”

Follow along with us at AshokaTech!

Edge. Edgier. Edgiest.

We’re excited to welcome Jan Chipchase to campus for what will certainly be a fascinating lecture on Monday, Nov. 16 at 1 pm at Hillside Campus’ Ahmanson Auditorium.

Chipchase is a global traveler and corporate anthropologist working for Nokia as principal engineer of the Nokia Research Center in Tokyo. Drawing on issues related to the design research he conducts—in part on behalf of his employer—he writes about the collision of people, society and technology for his website, Future Perfect.

Chipchase will discuss the risks and rewards of conducting field research in less predictable environments, drawing on research from Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, India, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Uganda. The lecture is presented by Designmatters, Art Center’s social impact educational department.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information and to RSVP, contact Designmatters at designmatters@artcenter.edu.

The First Drop to a Life-Changing Story: Safe Agua Chile

The editors of the AshokaTech blog, a great reference on innovation and social enterprise, are running a series of articles detailing a current Art Center studio collaboration with the NGO Un Techo Para Chile. For the studio, facilitated by the College’s social impact educational department Designmatters, students are challenged to develop ways to help slum-dwellers store, transport, use and conserve water. Their challenge is to create low cost solutions that can really be used in the real world.

Such an exciting project. Be sure to follow along with us at AshokaTech!

Designmatters Project Creates Solar Water Distiller

 Adjunct professor Tony Luna writes on the Designmatters blog about the Agua Pura project, which tackled the problem of finding clean water in Guatemala.

The project arose from a joint class, Product Design for the Developing World, participated in by students from Art Center, Caltech and Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala. The goal was to create useful products for populations that make less than two dollars a day.

Luna explains: “What transpired over approximately the next ten months was truly amazing as our four students, together with their Landivar University counterparts, took the most basic low-tech concepts, built prototypes, did field studies and tests, and refined the products. Most importantly, they learned from each other.”

Read more about this exciting project on the Designmatters blog.