Category Archives: Industrial Design

Fall 2013 Graduation Week: So many faces going so many places!

This Saturday, following years of all-nighters, critiques, finals, internships and hopefully some fun, 153 Art Center students will graduate. As that day approaches, we take time to celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world and, as is custom at our Fall Graduation, we also honor alumni who have already paved the way. Here’s the lowdown for the week.

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Thursday, December 12: Graduation Show Preview
Industry leaders, employers, corporate partners, donors and alumni get the first look at the Fall term’s graduating artists and designers at the invitation-only Graduation Show Preview. This event, hosted by Alumni Relations to welcome new graduates into the community, gives our graduating students an opportunity to network with potential employers and fellow alumni. The show features student projects from major fields of study at Art Center, including Advertising, Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Imaging, Product Design, Transportation Design, Graduate Film and Graduate Industrial Design.

Graduation Show Preview will be held at Hillside Campus from 6 to 9:30 p.m., with a private reception immediately following.

Friday, December 13: MDP Work-In-Progress Show
Media Design Practices is holding a work-in-progress show from 6 to 10 p.m. in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus (950 South Raymond). The MDP/Lab track will be presenting thesis work in progress from their Ciphertexts & Cryptoblob inquiry and the MDP/Field track with be featuring projects from Kampala, Uganda.

Saturday December 14: Graduation
Join us in the Sculpture Garden at Hillside Campus from 4 to 6 p.m. for our graduation ceremony. At the ceremony, we will honor three of our alumni who will be presented with Alumni Awards. This year, all the awardees received degrees in Product Design. Gordon Bruce will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Stan Kong will receive the award for Outstanding Achievement and Spencer Nikosey will receive the Young Alumni Innovator Award.

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ACCD reciprocity: Corporate partnerships seed design innovation and design careers

Meet the Clump-o-Lumps, designed by Max Knecht

Meet the Clump-O-Lumps, designed by Max Knecht

The day Max Knecht pulled a squid, a walrus, a deer and a bunny out of a bright green vintage suitcase is the day he landed his first big deal as a designer.

“It was a formal meeting in [Knock Knock company founder and CEO] Jen Bilik’s office,” recalls Knecht PROD 11, who was still a student at the time. “But bringing all those animal body parts in a suitcase broke the seriousness.”

These were no ordinary plush toys. An imaginative take on swapping identities, Knecht’s bright-colored animals had a clever postmodern flair. Each one separated into three segments, and he demonstrated for Bilik how these “lumps” could be zipped together in any combination. She loved the crisscross-creature concept and offered Knecht a buyout on the spot. Today six different Clump-O-Lumps are available on Knock Knock’s website.

It’s tempting to call moments like this magic, the proverbial rabbit pulled out of a hat. Or a lucky break, all about who you know.

But it was none of these.

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Inside the extended-play version of the Microsoft Surface DesignStorm video

 

Earlier this month, we posted a teaser trailer capturing highlights from a DesignStorm in which students conceived innovative uses for click-on attachments (code name: Blades) to Microsoft’s Surface tablet. The three-day session consisted of a group of students from the College’s various design departments facilitated by Graphic Design faculty member Gerardo Herrera along with Product Design instructor, Todd Masilko and Jeff Higashi, who teaches both Graphic and Product Design.

DesignStorms are Art Center’s trademarked immersive workshops which pair  expert faculty with select upper-term design students with sponsors to form multidisciplinary teams. Over the course of the collaboration, the teams apply an intensive design methodology to identify opportunities for deeper exploration and innovation.

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Art Center in the news, August – September 2013

Mego Lin and Jon Jon Augustavo on the set of “Same Love.” Photo by Craig Nisperos.

Art Center students, faculty, alumni and staff have been busy racking up awards, giving interviews and making news. Here is a selection of some recent coverage.

MTV.com, “Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Smash Hip-Hop Competition With VMA Knockout”
Two music videos directed by Art Center alum Jon Jon Agustavo with cinematography by Grad Film student Mego Lin earned some shiny Moonmen awards at the 2013 Video Music Awards.

SciArt in America
October issue featuring ACCD faculty Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Suspension (from OBSERVE, Williamson Gallery, 2008) on the cover and a 4-page interview with Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin.

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Dyson Foundation Grant: Less Time Paying Bills, More Time in the Studio

The Dyson Foundation was particularly impressed by this prosthetic socket, designed for BETH by Industrial Design alum, Jason Hill,

When James Dyson Foundation was looking for ways to inspire the next generation of design engineers, Art Center Industrial Design students kept appearing on the Foundation’s radar.

“We’ve consistently received strong entries to the James Dyson Award from Art Center,” says Erin Webb, Foundation manager, referring to the Foundation’s annual international design competition. “It was clear to us that the College has a very iterative approach to the design process and that Art Center students are challenged not just to come up with ideas but also to create prototypes.”

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Bright IDEA Awards: Art Center students collect a trio of medals

IDEA Award-winning designs by Nina Viggi, Marc Dubui and Shingo Mamiya

IDEA Award-winning designs by Nina Viggi, Marc Dubui and Shingo Mamiya

Art Center continued its legacy of award-winning leading-edge design with yesterday’s announcement of the 2013 IDEA Awards, which included three medal-winning student projects and eight finalists among the honorees of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s prestigious annual awards program.

“The IDEA awards program continues to be an effective witness to the state of industrial design and design education today,” explained Katherine Bennett, faculty member in the Graduate and Undergraduate Industrial Design Departments. “The process of articulating their designs for the IDEAs’ worldwide audience gives practitioners and students a forum for important causes we want to address, and to tell the story of design’s value to our clients, our customers and society as a whole.”

Each of this year’s trifecta of winning projects illustrates Art Center’s trademark focus on innovative design with real world social impact, informed by a meticulous, research-based approach. Graduate Industrial Design student, Nina Viggi’s One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe, durable footwear designed for sailors, received a gold medal. Product Design student, Marc Dubui, took home a silver prize for his hard hat suspension system, titled Oblikk, designed to protect the wearer from lateral and rotational impact. Finally, Product Design undergrad, Shingo Mamiya, was awarded the bronze for A Better Working Environment for Certified Nursing Assistants, a waste disposal system for the elderly.

Art Center students have long been a formidable force at the IDEA Awards, collecting a total of 70 medals over 22 years, with a wide array of inventive designs, ranging from the UnBathroom to the U-Haul Emergency Response Conversion Kit for the American Red Cross. This year’s winners were selected from a field of 687 finalists, to be announced live on August 21 at its 2013 International Conference in Chicago.

Dieter Rams Urges Graduates Toward a Responsible Design Ethos

Dieter Rams at Art Center

Dieter Rams receives an honorary doctorate of arts from Art Center President Lorne M. Buchman. He concluded his speech by invoking Gandhi’s admonition, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.”

“Tomorrow’s world will be designed by the design students of today — by you — and while this is a great opportunity, this is also a great challenge and a great responsibility,” Dieter Rams told graduating Art Center students during the 2013 Spring Graduation Ceremony on Sat., April 20.

Accepting an honorary doctorate of arts from Art Center, the legendary designer was introduced by Product Design Chair Karen Hofmann and delivered his speech in German, translated live by an English-language interpreter. Rams thoughtfully reflected on his past, sharing lessons gleaned over a long and influential career as a product designer and university professor, while voicing concerns about the future and stressing designers’ changing responsibility in a changing world.

“Today’s main challenges are the protection of the natural environment and overcoming mindless consumption,” he said, urging students toward “a design ethos that goes way beyond complacency and arbitrariness.”

He presented five essential dimensions of design, along with his “formula for sustainable production”: Less but better! Much, much less, and much, much better. He asserted that “Design is primarily an intellectual process. It’s a procedure and an approach to create innovation and new meaning.”

Following are highlights of Rams’ speech:

 

 

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