Category Archives: MDP

Getting Ready for the Superstorm

The ARkStorm scenario, a massive superstorm capable of causing unprecedented damage to California, has gotten a lot of attention following the USGS ARkStorm Summit earlier this month. Art Center and Designmatters served as lead design partner for the summit, and a video made by MDP alumnus Theo Alexopoulos envisioning the event has been circulated far and wide.

From MSNBC’s Cosmic Log: “Experts say such a hurricane-style storm occurred over a 45-day period in 1861-1862, causing severe flooding and turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea. Today, that kind of storm could cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. The video [by Alexopoulos] paints an apocalyptic picture, made worse because ‘the public at large does not comprehend the extreme danger the storm poses.’”

View the video below, and read more:

Not Another Year in Review

The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

As I sit down to write the final blog entry of the year, I am making a conscious decision to resist compiling another trite “year in review” about what we have been up to with Designmatters at Art Center. The truth is that the collective milestones we hit this year are many in number, vast in scope, and often pretty extraordinarily consequential in impact. When I run through a mental log of individual student journeys, staff, faculty and alumni accomplishments, presentations, publications, exhibitions, and project outcomes implemented with our partner organizations, I am quickly overwhelmed and humbled by the sheer power and complexity of it all.

William Ismael, Education for All, detail of poster for UNESCO, 2008

What dwells on, as I look forward to the year to come, are two key and interrelated concepts that were ubiquitous throughout the year, and in turn inform everything we are about: optimism and relevance. As I attempt to anticipate what new opportunities we might embrace, and what challenges we might fence off, these come up again and again.

Optimism–which is an idea so deeply entrenched in the definition of design itself–I always like to refer to Herbert Simon’s profoundly significant framing of design in The Sciences of the Artificial: “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And relevance–which is a concept so influential when you are striving to drive educational projects that are imbued with both at once a pedagogical and social impact mission.

I was taken by an insightful editorial in a recent issue of The Economist about globalization, titled “The Redistribution of Hope,” that canvassed some of the major forces at work in the world today. It captures how “optimism is on the move—with important consequences for the hopeful and the hopeless” and goes on to expose how much more vital it is turning out to be in emerging economies where it challenges the status quo, rather than in our more cushioned “first world” societies. The piece includes a testimonial by Nandan Nilekani who now heads India’s government technology committee and was the inspiring chairman of Infosys. He comments on the greatest achievement of his company being not that of producing technology but “redefining the boundaries of the possible.”

Here’s to us all having the strength and courage to pursue that impetus of shattering boundaries in 2011.

Certainly for us with Designmatters at the college the stakes are high: we are entering into the tenth year of this College-wide program, we are embarking into the first full year of granting our undergraduate students the option to pursue a course of study for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact, and we will welcome the 1st and early cohort of students for the new Media Design Matters Track MA by fall. So here’s also to optimism, full-on!

Graphic Design Department Hosts Upcoming Events

Each term Art Center’s Graphic Design Department brings together three LA-based design professionals to discuss a particular topic of interest to their students. This term, 3×3 will look into the issues surrounding graduate school.

Speakers include Chair of Graduate Media Design Anne Burdick, Art Center professor and alum Ramone Muñoz and Mike Neal, freelance design writer and recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts with an MFA in design criticism.

The group will address:

  • What are the philosophical and creative differences in graduate and undergraduate programs?
  • What are the unique characteristics of the top graduate programs?
  • How have graduates from particular schools shaped our field?
  • How one can best prepare for a graduate education?

It’s a must-attend event for all Art Center Graphic Design students.

3×3: WHY GRAD SCHOOL?
Thursday, Nov. 4, 7:30 pm
Los Angeles Times Media Center

Also next week, the Graphic Design Department is holding an internship preparation workshop for Graphic Design students with faculty member Petrula Vrontikis, a designer, author and educator and creative director and owner of Vrontikis Design Office.

Internship Preparation Workshop
Monday, Nov. 1, 1-2 pm
Boardroom, Hillside Campus

Graphic Design students, don’t miss either of these great events!

The Tale of the Google 5

Do you remember earlier this year when Google ran an ad during the Super Bowl? Here it is below. Take a quick look—we’ll wait:

OK. What is interesting about this ad—despite the fact that it is for a company whose CEO once called advertising  “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America”—is that it was created by a group of advertising and design students dubbed the “Google 5.” Recent Art Center Media Design program graduate Jonathan Jarvis was one of five chosen from a pool of 400 applications.

The Google 5: Tristan Smith, J. Smith, Anthony Cafaro, Michael Chang, Johnathan Jarvis

From AdAge: “The 5 program is an experiment launched last year by the Google Creative Lab and its executive creative director, Robert Wong. The company sent a call out to 12 schools searching for interesting talent who would work inside the Creative Lab for a year and then be sent out unto the industry. So, with the Google 5, the company gets new creative blood and the industry gets young talent that is schooled in Google, and, by extension, the post-digital/new advertising way—tech-forward, open-source, collaborative and smart.”

The 5 worked on a wide range of projects, from the Nexus phone to Hulu ads to the Google Christmas card. Their year-long tenure ended in June.  But the new Google 5 have arrived—and it includes Chris Lauritzen, a designer/”wild card” from Art Center ‘s Media Design program.

We can’t wait to see what they produce. They’re already tackling projects including Google search, Google TV and the Chrome browser.

Read more in this fascinating story at AdAge: Meet the Google 5, the Team Behind ‘Parisian Love’ Super Bowl Spot

Made Up Events Explore Design Fiction

Art Center’s Graduate Media Design program (MDP) announces two events that explore a resurgent interest in utopias and an emerging genre called “design fiction.” The first Made Up event—a panel discussion, AS IF: alternate realities—will be held today from 3 to 5 pm in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus.

The panel, hosted by MDP faculty member Tim Durfee, will feature researchers-in-residence Sascha Pohflepp, an artist and writer whose design fiction video installation, SUPERCALIFORNIA! was produced during his Made Up residency; Norman Klein, a cultural historian, critic, novelist and author of the database novel, The Imaginary Twentieth Century; and Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist and researcher at the Design Strategic Projects studio at Nokia Design, as well as co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. Works from the 2010 MDP’s summer research fellows and current students will be on display to complement and inspire the discussion.

Next Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7 pm, the MDP and Broadcast Cinema will screen Utopia in Four Movements, a live documentary performed by Sam Green with music by David Cerf.  Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker whose feature, The Weather Underground, was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound artist and user interface designer at Apple who composed music for The Weather Underground. The screening, to be held at Hillside Campus in the Los Angeles Times Media Center, expands the Made Up project’s interest in utopias, dystopias and the fantastic.

Previous coverage of Made Up.

Alumna Laura Crawford Talks Art Center

Co-founder and creative director of Goodkin, Media Design alumna Laura Crawford received her MFA from Art Center in 2005. An entrepreneur, educator and creative director, Crawford’s experience in trans-media design disciplines and unique creative passions allow her to push the new evolution of technology, physical space and interaction design to find new incarnations of engagement.

In the video below, Crawford discusses her time at Art Center and some of the most valuable lessons learned here:

Something Made Up This Way Comes

Ah, summer, that time of year when research-led design turns to rocket scientists, parking lots, quantum physics and the formation of cults.

Daniel Salomon, Ingrid Hora and MDP students at a desert shoot for their "Suspension of Disbelief" project

These summer days have been far from lazy for Art Center’s Graduate Media Design Program (MDP), whose students, faculty and researchers-in-residence have been knee-deep in off-kilter research projects for the past 13 weeks. Their findings will be unveiled at “In/Conclusions: Results from the MDP Research Residencies,” tomorrow, Wednesday, August 18 at 1:30 pm in the Wind Tunnel Gallery (RSVP here).

“In/Conclusions” is just one of several events surrounding a newly-launched bi-annual program designed to identify and explore ideas that emerge from recent MDP faculty and student work. A related exhibition, Made Up, and panels, screenings and readings are also scheduled for the fall and spring, and all the activities will be captured in a publication released in Summer 2011.

For its inaugural year, MDP chose the theme Made Up, which it describes as a consideration of “the relevance of speculation, role playing, idealism, skepticism, and simple lying as instruments or objects of the design process.” This year’s researchers-in-residence—Sascha Pohflepp and duo Ingrid Hora and Daniel Salomon—were chosen by a jury made up of MDP faculty Sean Donahue and Ben Hooker; Fiona Raby, principal of design practice Dunne & Raby; and science-fiction author, WIRED columnist and former Art Center Visionary-in-Residence Bruce Sterling.

Continue reading →

In Case You Missed It

As you know, there’s always something going on when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty. Some of the latest:

Chip Foose, left, with castmates Lou Santiago and ACP

Meet Mikey Tnasuttimonkol

MDP student Mikey Tnasuttimonkol earned his BFA with an emphasis in advertising photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. He chose to come to Art Center to attend the Media Design Program.

“The program is designed in a way that allows me to bring what knowledge I had from my photo background, and combine it with design, rather than just totally abandoning what I have learned in the past,” he explains.

Read more about Mikey and his Art Center experience at in this great interview.

Student-Made PSA Airing on CNN International

CNN International has donated air time to the student-made United Nations Population Fund television spot, When Mother Died, the Family Fell Apart, running it throughout the month of June. The PSA was created in a Designmatters studio that developed an integrated multimedia awareness campaign in support of UNFPA’s Safe Motherhood Initiative. Art Center Advertising, Graphic Design and Graduate Media Design students participated in the project.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is an international development agency that promotes the right of all humankind to a life of health and equal opportunity.

If you missed the spot on CNN, watch it below: