Art Center’s newest tradition is back for its second year. Join us for 4 Hours Solid, an annual showcase of work and ideas from Art Center’s graduate programs in Art, Broadcast Cinema, Industrial Design and Media Design. Enjoy four jam-packed hours of exhibitions, screenings, installations, presentations, food trucks and more. The event will be held at South Campus. You won’t want to miss it!
4 Hours Solid
Wednesday, April 20, 6-10 p.m.
South Campus
In December, five Art Center students were awarded generous scholarships through the inaugural West Coast Bright Design Challenge.
Sponsored by the National Association for Surface Finishing (NASF), the West Coast competition was co-sponsored by the Metal Finishing Association of Southern California (MFASC).
The West Coast Bright Design Challenge was incorporated into last term’s Material Explorations class, led by Art Center instructors Catherine McLean and Krystina Castella. A transdisciplinary team made up of Product Design, Environmental Design, Fine Art and Graduate Industrial Design students spent the term learning about surface finishing technologies and applications, and worked with local electroplating companies to enhance their understanding of the process. Students were challenged to create innovative works utilizing these technologies.
At the end of the class, students presented finished 3-D prototypes and presentations to a panel of faculty and MFASC judges. The students with the top three concepts as judged by the panel were each awarded $5,000 scholarships, and two additional students received honorable mentions and $2,500 scholarships.
Scholarship Winners:
Art Center and the MFASC were thrilled with the collaboration and plan to continue the West Coast Bright Design Challenge in 2011. Congratulations to the student winners!
(Pictured, from left to right: Edward Schofield, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Virginia Kan, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Bryan Leiker, K&L Anodizing; Carlos Vides, $5,000 scholarship award recipient; Dan Cunningham, MFASC executive director; Alan Olick, MFASC president and president, General Plating Co.; Byron Wilson, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Ji Hyun Lee, $2,500 scholarship award recipient; Gregg Halligan, former MFASC president.)
We’re celebrating 80 years of excellence in art and design education at Art Center. Following the inauguration of our fifth president in April, and a community-wide Day of Service in June, the College continues its celebration with a special 80th Anniversary Weekend.
On Saturday, October 16, Art Center will honor four prominent alumni—industrial designer Yves Béhar, car designer Frank Stephenson, contemporary artist Pae White and blockbuster filmmaker Zack Snyder—with the Creative Spirit award at a gala to raise scholarships for students in Art Center’s undergraduate, graduate and public programs. The following day, Sunday, October 17, is Art Center’s beloved Car Classic. This year’s theme, Freedom of Motion, celebrates the powerful combination of technology and passion that allows humans to move well beyond their own physical abilities.
For more information about the gala, call 626.396.2338. Tickets and details about Car Classic are available at artcenter.edu/carclassic.
Don’t miss one of our favorite events tomorrow, Super Thursday—the GradID Formula E Race! The race is the culmination of a GradID class in which students team up to develop high-performance scale racing vehicle prototypes, and then put them to the test on the track.
The vehicles will be on display from 11 am until 2 pm, during which time faculty, corporate sponsors and guests will judge the projects. Don’t miss the main event—three races will take place at 1, 2 and 3 pm. More than just a race, this fun event showcases design ingenuity and continues a new tradition at the College. Everyone is invited to take part in cheering on their favorite Formula E racers!
Get a sneak peek into tomorrow’s event from these student-made videos from last year’s class:
The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has unveiled the winners of the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition—and Art Center topped this year’s list of college wins with five awards!
A celebration of the year’s most inventive and creative product and product concept designs, this year’s competition received the most entries since its beginnings 30 years ago.
The 2010 IDEA jury, made up of 18 world-renowned designers and design thinkers, spent weeks previewing entries online and two-and-a-half days of face-to-face evaluation and debate. Judging criteria focused on eight areas of industrial design excellence: innovation; benefit to the user; benefit to society and natural ecology; benefit to the client; visual appeal and appropriate aesthetics; usability testing, rigor and reliability for the design research category; and internal factors, methods and implementation for the design strategy category.
Our winners:
Silver IDEA:
1881 “American Red Cross Fashion” Branding Strategy
Koo Ho Shin, GradID
Faculty: Andy Ogden, Steve Montgomery, Katherine Bennett
Bronze IDEA:
Spirit: New-Generation Sustainable Automotive Seat
Magdalena Paluch, GradID
Faculty: Heidrun Mumper-Drumm, Fridolin Beisert
Remax Snowboard Boot
James Yoo, Product Design
Faculty: Fridolin Beisert
Luxy Vespa Helmet
Daniel Shih-Tung Chang, Product Design
Faculty: Fridolin Beisert
Latrine Design
Juan-David Quiñones, Product Design
LA HAS FAULTS, PHASE 1 (Sean Donahue, Graduate Media Design Faculty)
The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook and the short film Preparedness Now, developed at Art Center as part of The Los Angeles Earthquake: Get Ready project, will be showcased in Cooper-Hewitt’s 2010 National Design Triennial, opening Friday. Art Center students, faculty, alumni and artists, in partnership with leading scientists and community experts, generated new research and visual communication tools about seismic safety as part of this Designmatters-led project. The project has become a national and international example of the power of design thinking applied to disaster preparedness.
“When we initiated the research phase for Get Ready, we were coping with the aftermath and systemic disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina, and seeking to understand how we could use the art and design expertise of our community as a catalyst for resiliency in our own backyard,” said Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, the College’s social impact educational initiative. “We wanted to provoke a conversation about preparedness and rally public attention around it. Today, we look back at this project that has engaged so many of our students, faculty, alumni and a multidisciplinary consortia of partners nationally through Designmatters with a great sense of accomplishment. The conversation we started keeps resonating with the same sense of urgency and relevance as before.”
Dubbed “the event with the intimidating title” by its organizers, the first annual 4 Hours Solid took place on April 21 at Art Center’s South Campus and marked the first time the College specifically showcased work and ideas from its four graduate programs—Graduate Art, Broadcast Cinema, Industrial Design (GradID) and Media Design (MDP).
Over 300 people attended the evening event, which included a panel discussion, exhibitions of recent student theses and work, student film screenings and a reception.
For the students showing their work, the evening provided a welcome opportunity to get feedback on their projects.
MDP student Haemi Yoon, who presented her thesis project that explores the down-time of everyday electronic objects, said she was surprised by the questions visitors asked her. “I thought people wouldn’t understand the project, but they totally got it,” said Yoon. “People asked me, ‘What do you think a future object will look like?’ and ‘Do you think these objects should have personalities?’ It was a great dialogue.” Continue reading
Join us Wednesday evening for 4 Hours Solid, an evening of work and ideas from Art Center’s graduate programs. Art Center’s Art, Broadcast Cinema, Industrial Design and Media Design departments will offer four jam-packed hours of exhibitions, screenings, discussions and presentations.
The event will feature “Screen/Culture,” a panel discussion of the ubiquity of screens in our everyday lives and their impact on makers of design, art and film. Panelists include Scott Watson, chief technology officer of Walt Disney Imagineering R&D; Kevin Mack, artist and Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor of What Dreams May Come; Mackenzie Wark, chair of culture and media at Eugene Lang College and author of Gamer Theory and Hacker Manifesto; and Anne Bray, founding director of Freewaves, a global arts organization dedicated to collecting and connecting innovative and culturally relevant independent new media.
The free event will offer an array of programming throughout the evening along with food from the Flying Pig Truck, Grilled Cheese Truck and Coolhaus. Yum! Find out more at the 4 Hours Solid Facebook page. See you there!
4 Hours Solid
Wednesday, April 21, 6-10 pm
South Campus
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.
GradID student Magdalena Paluch says that one of the most challenging aspects of Art Center can be prioritizing.
“Sometimes I feel like a little girl in a candy store, there are so many classes I want to take, so many instructors I want to work with, so many projects I want to do—and not nearly enough time to do it all,” says Paluch.
Read more about her outlook on Art Center, her favorite projects, and what it was like moving to Southern California from Poland in this great interview.