Category Archives: Product Design

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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A bold LEAP in an emergent field: “Creative citizens” forge new pathways in design and social innovation

© 2013 Wendy MacNaughton for LEAP Symposium

© 2013 Wendy MacNaughton for LEAP Symposium

 

Editor’s note: This is the first in our Dotted Line series of three stories from “The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation: LEAP Symposium,” hosted by Art Center College of Design, Sept. 19–21, 2013.

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Can design propel social change? If reducing infant mortality risk from HIV in Africa or improving rice crop outcomes among low-income farmers in Asia are any measure, the unequivocal answer—as participants in a three-day immersive symposium at Art Center amply demonstrated—is yes.

Less definitive are answers to the question that prompted the gathering: If I am a designer interested in this kind of work, what kinds of career pathways are available to me?

Organized by the College’s social impact department Designmatters with curatorial contributions from a “braintrust” of pioneers in the rapidly emerging field of design for social innovation, the LEAP Symposium kicked off September 19 at Art Center’s Hillside Campus in Pasadena, giving more than 100 invited participants from across the country an opportunity to examine current professional practices, values and opportunities; share challenges and successes; and envision possibilities for the future.

Why LEAP?

“To leap is not to move timidly, but to advance with great determination,” said Mariana Amatullo, co-founder and Vice President, Designmatters, in her opening remarks in Ahmanson Auditorium. “Design offers an unmapped frontier for social innovation, and the symposium is intended to serve as a platform for creative leaps into that space.”

Amatullo noted that the symposium would be “seeded with probes and what-if scenarios” and that honesty was the most important element of the “genuine conversation and free exchange of ideas” she hoped to foster. She also thanked the many individuals, organizations, companies, networks and foundations that made the LEAP symposium possible, including The National Endowment for the Arts and the Surdna Foundation, along with private sector partners Steelcase, Adobe, Sappi and Autodesk.

She posed three main questions as a point of departure for LEAP: What is design for social innovation? How does it manifest? Why does it matter?

“This is a time when we recognize a sense of urgency for social change to happen—perhaps on a broader scope than ever before—and with it, a call for path-creating forms of collaboration, and generative modes of intervention,” said Amatullo.

Participants, comprised of 60 percent designers and 40 percent non-designers, ranged from leaders at global NGOs and design firms to still-in-school designers directing their education toward social innovation.

Students officially made up 10 percent of participants, but at LEAP, everyone was there to teach, and everyone was there to learn. Continue reading →

Khora leverages 3-D tech to add a personal dimension to home decor

The CNC machine creates 3-D objects from digital files

The CNC machine creates 3-D objects from digital files

In a world where personal branding has become a social and professional imperative, our surroundings and possessions have become vehicles for self-expression. And not just the kind we drive. This is particularly true of a person’s home and the things within it.  But for anyone attempting to work within an Ikea budget, creating a one-of-a-kind living space has always been more challenging than, say, buying a customized ride.

But that may not be the case for long, thanks to the team of Art Center designers behind Khora Image, a soon-to-launch start-up that will use 3-D technology to blaze a trail through the unexplored frontier of customized home décor. “We’re trying to democratize a process to everybody and get it out to as many people as we can and empower them to design their own things,” says Product Design student Jacques Perrault, who teamed up with Art Center alums Jason Pilarski, Steve Joyner Jonathan Kim and Ryan Oenning to create a company that would revolutionize the home furnishing space by providing a digital platform where consumers can use templates to create personalized wall hangings.

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Creativity 101: Harnessing the power of students’ imaginations

Photographs by Chris Hatcher, PHOT '05

Photographs by Chris Hatcher, PHOT ’05

In 30 minutes, visualize your creative process and recreate it using an 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheet of paper.

This is the first assignment in Creative Strategies, a popular undergraduate Product Design course taught by instructor Fridolin “Frido” Beisert PROD 98, INDU 08, faculty director of Art Center’s Product Design Department.

All 14 students accept the challenge. Walking to the front of the classroom, they each select a single sheet of colored construction paper and take a seat along the row of bare metal tables. As a digital timer, projected onto the wall, starts ticking, the students immediately start cutting, tearing, folding and drawing.

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How Alex Cabunoc set out to save the world, one laundry load at a time

Visitors to Art Center’s homepage may have found themselves wondering if that Brady Bunch-like grid of student selfies splayed out on Art Center’s homepage was some kind of post-modern meditation on ’70′s pop culture. And they’d be wrong. The real explanation —  a refreshed batch of student profiles — is a lot like Art Center itself: A practical solution to a real world need whose outcome is a lot more interesting than anyone might have expected going into the project.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. We’re kicking off the series with this look at Product Designer Alex Cabunoc’s truly impressive array of innovative social impact designs aimed at improving the lives of inhabitants rural communities in the developing world. For the project featured in the above video, Cabunoc teamed up with fellow student Ji A You to create the GiraDora foot-powered washing machine for a Designmatters challenge to alleviate the water shortage in Lima, Peru. The product he produced has vast potential to improve the health and quality of life of women in water-poor communities throughout the developing world. In the below Q&A, Cabunoc provides some personal context to his Art Center journey.

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Rockin’ the foundation: Alumnus Simon Davey on how Art Center at Night influenced his work

Simon Davey's Spiteful Table.

Simon Davey’s Spiteful Table.

Many successful Art Center students get their first taste of the College through Art Center at Night (ACN), the College’s continuing studies program. Take for example recent Product Design alumnus Simon Davey, whose student rebranding project for Dulce Mexico was recently highlighted on Adobe’s packaging form Designer Showcase.

I chatted recently with Simon Davey on how ACN influenced both his career at Art Center and his entire design process. Here are a few excerpts.

On the playful quality of his work:
I’ve heard people describe my work as playful or whimsical, and I don’t really shy away from that. At the heart of my design philosophy is an attempt to truly understand the context in which a problem exists. In other words, I like questioning how and why people are using their stuff. And that means sometimes the work I create borders on the ridiculous, like my Spiteful Table, a side table/rocking chair hybrid.

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Art Center student’s crowd-funded project Ribbon envisions a cleaner, brighter future for sunglasses

ribbon_300
Somewhere in some secret underground research facility an engineer is probably developing a pair of nanotechnology-infused lenses that will make cleaning our sunglasses a thing of the past.

But until that day becomes a reality, we’ll have to make do wiping our shades with napkins, T-shirts or whatever abrasive cloth we can find in the moment. Right?

Not if Patrick McCrory has anything to say about it.

Today, the Interaction Design student is launching a campaign on crowd-funding platform Indiegogo for his project Ribbon Sunglasses, which feature a retractable microfiber cloth tucked away inside the frame.

The concept lands squarely in “How has nobody thought of this before?” terrain, in that it offers a deceptively simple solution to a problem nearly everybody can relate to. But the journey McCrory’s project has taken from initial idea to crowd-funded campaign is far from straightforward.

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Watch and learn how KILLSPENCER came to life

Back in 2008, well before the concept of a design entrepreneur had been exalted by futurists as the driving force behind the next wave of innovation, Spencer Nikosey, was ahead of the curve, approaching his work as an Art Center Product Design student with the ambition and enterprise of an MBA. Nikosi staged his own pop-up product launch event at Art Center’s Grad Show, where he began selling his nascent line high-performance men’s luggage, bags and accessories. Five years later, Nickosey has turned KILLSPENCER into a sought-after brand and model of sustainability with a line of products produced in his workshop in Downtown L.A. and sold in his recently opened Silverlake boutique.

In the above video, produced by Bluecanvas magazine, Nikosey re-traces his path to finding his foothold as a design entrepreneur. He makes fascinating pitstops throughout the piece, exploring his approach to creativity, innovation, business and his dreams for a future that includes an oceanside multi-media creative collective, where he’ll make films and products and occasionally run and jump off the roof into the ocean. Judging by Nikosey’s track record thus far, it’s only a matter of time before he takes the flying leap.

Design as Strategy: Problem finding or problem framing?

Pentago Yu's U-Haul Conversion Kit

Pentago Yu’s U-Haul Conversion Kit

Katherine Bennett teaches advanced research in graduate and undergraduate industrial design at Art Center College of Design, where she pioneered the integration of professional-level design research into the product design curriculum. The following article was originally published in the current issue of the Industrial Design Society of America’s journal, Innovation. 

Stepping beyond problem finding to problem framing and the need to eliminate bias on the part of designers and clients—these are big topics in the world of research. But are they in industry? While techniques on their own won’t eliminate bias and properly frame the problem, it is necessary to address these issues.

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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.