Sterling Ruby, MFA 05, Art, courtesy KCET
Art Center’s students, faculty, staff and alumni continue to make news around the world. For those who may have missed a headline or two, we’ve curated this handy highlight reel of our recent media clips.
Cassini’s ringed target: Saturn.
“Right across the Arroyo, we’re making plans for a real close encounter,” says Dave Doody, whose Art Center At Night seminar, “Basics of Interplanetary Flight,” is currently recruiting participants for a class that’s literally out of this world. “My team has been piloting the gangly robot Cassini in wide orbits around Saturn since 2010. But in coming years we’re going to drop in for some up-close-and-personal visits. We’ll plunge the spacecraft between the rings and the planet 22 times before letting go of the spent machine so it can burn up in the gas giant’s atmosphere like a meteor.”
This 2016-2017 segment of Cassini’s 20 year mission has been temporarily dubbed the “Proximal Orbits” by mission planners at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Doody works as a senior engineer, currently leading the Saturn-bound spacecraft’s flight operations controllers. But after acknowledging that some creative person somewhere could almost certainly conjure a more mission-worthy name, NASA launched the Cassini Name Game, hoping for some better ideas.
“One thing about these orbits will be their huge roller coaster speed,” says Doody. “The camera-laden craft will reach more than 120,000 kilometers an hour as it screams past the innermost ring particles just above the hazy atmosphere. Next, it’ll slow down for three and a quarter days, coasting ‘up’ to the top of its 1.2 million kilometer-high peak, before starting to drop back in again for its next pass. Wild.”
David Day Lee
Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.
The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”
Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.
Like a field of tulips bursting with color, spring has sprung at Art Center in the form of last weekend’s Grad Show. With an eye-popping array of stunning creations and innovation, works from this term’s wildly talented cohort of graduating students exploded through the hallways and galleries of Hillside and South Campus. Potential employers, curious visitors, beaming family members and excited (yet relieved) friends fawned over the fruits of many years of work and sacrifice grads invested in joining the coveted club of Art Center alumni.
Dazzled as I was by the work, I was able to meet up with a few students. And the following survey offers but a small sample of the artists and designers who stood out for various reasons.
Update: Shortly after the Spring 2014 term passed its half-way point, our participating students (Myspacers?) produced a new set of videos tracking their progress on the path toward creative completion.
Starting a project is never easy. And finishing it is, arguably, even harder. But let’s not underestimate the challenges involved in persisting through the obstacle course of road-blocks artists often face once they’re deep enough into a project that starting over isn’t an option and the finish line isn’t yet in sight.
This extraordinary set of videos (featured on our Myspace page) offers a snapshot of the breathtaking range of creative activity happening at Art Center on any given day.
Photography student Roman Alexander Vargas takes us deeper into his sources of inspiration (Nan Goldin, primarily) for the very personal photo essay he’s creating as he chronicles his initiation into drag queen culture.
Interaction Design student, Inae Song, delivers a dynamic illustration of the iterative process involved in redesigning an interactive digital destination for AIGA, the American professional association for design professionals. For a young designer proving her mettle, it’s hard to think of tougher crowd to please than the members of AIGA. But Song remained undaunted and produced some incredibly compelling work that plays like a tutorial in website design.
Graduate Transportation Design Student, Nish Kamath, bowed out of this step in the process and will rejoin us with a final video revealing the finished product he creates based on his research into traffic patterns in the developing world.
Each of these students defies and exceeds any and all expectations they set forth in their initial videos, leaving us rapt in anticipation of their final installations. Stay tuned.
Last October, Art Center formed an alliance with the newly relaunched Myspace platform, which had reinvented itself as a social network for creative types. Myspace’s elegant interface seemed custom designed for the Art Center community, with each user profile centered around a portfolio of images and videos that comprise the user’s identity by showcasing the evolution of imagination and innovation. In other words, if Mark Zuckerberg had been a student at Art Center, not Harvard, Facebook might have looked a lot like the current iteration of Myspace.
Because Art Center is known for its students’ enterprise and productivity, that creative rigor became the focal point for this partnership. To illustrate this dedication, we recruited four students from four different disciplines (Product Design, Graphic Design, Illustration and Film) and asked them to document their creative process over the course of the term as they complete a project. The results were as inspiring as they were fascinating, providing a panoramic view of the geyser of creativity that is Art Center.
NPR’s Sonari Glinton interviews Art Center’s Geoff Wardle. Photo: Teri Bond
Art Center students, faculty, staff and alumni have been making news while making their mark at on the art and design worlds. For those who may have missed a headline or two, we curated this handy highlight reel of our recent media clips:
Top companies leading the innovation economy swarmed the Hillside campus scouting new talent during Fall 2013 Grad Show. Facebook, BMW, Snapchat and Square, creator of the revolutionary cube device that instantly transforms cell phones in to credit card machines, were all seeking the next wave of their creative workforce.
Sharing drawing techniques and opinions on design over dinner in Taiwan are (L to R) Jr Feng Kwan, Ying-Hsiu Chen, Raul-David Poblano and Russell Singer.
It was Friday at the end of week 12, summer 2013 term, and like most Art Center students I was busy. Unlike most students who were busy with drawings and artwork and projects, I was busy packing for a leap of faith. I would attempt to finish out my term from across the world in Taipei, Taiwan, as I participated in National Taiwan University of Science and Technology‘s (NTUST) International Summer Design Workshop. I finished packing, preoccupied with thoughts about school work and the unknowns of a distant place, when my phone buzzed. Cedric, my partner for two studios (and also a Taiwan native), had arrived to give me a lift to LAX. My classmate Raul-David would be joining me for the actual workshop, and so Cedric and I set off to pick him up. As we drove we discussed plans for our coursework, and he offered helpful tips about his home country; I realized I’d have to trust a lot of people this week, especially Cedric.
Alumnus Stuart Fingerhut on the Toyota Live stage at the L.A. Auto Show.
Stuart Fingerhut, associate creative director at George P. Johnson experience marketing firm, is gushing over the thrill of seeing people engage with his first big car show exhibition for Toyota and Scion. We caught up with him during the L.A. Auto Show media preview days leading up to today’s public opening. “This is like completely bonkers for me,” he says. “As a designer, it feels like the pinnacle.”
“We’re telling the story of the brand in a physical space,” the Art Center Environmental Design alumnus explained about the design that will travel to other car confabs including Detroit, Frankfurt and Tokyo in 2014.
Student Mathias Hintermann’s Aiguille short track speed skater headgear won a Spark! Award.
With designs ranging from a portable desk for low-income children in India to lighting inspired by the beauty found in Japanese metal craft, Art Center students and alumni brought home several awards last week from the 2013 Spark International Design Awards.
Students and professionals from more than 27 countries across the globe competed in the categories of Experience Design, Product Design, Spaces Design, Transport Design, Communication Design, App Design and Concept Design, with awards ranging from Bronze Awards to the highest award, the Spark! Award.
