Category Archives: Product Design

Art Center Revs Up For Car Classic ’11

Art Center's annual Car Classic. Photo: © Steven A. Heller/Art Center College of Design

This Sunday Art Center presents Car Classic, the College’s 11th annual celebration of the best in automotive design. The event will feature an incredible array of more than 100 rare automobiles and innovative vehicles on display in Art Center’s panoramic Sculpture Garden.

The theme for this year’s event is “California Design: Influencing Change,” meaning that in addition to enjoying all the classic cars on display—including a 1968 Peter Brock Triumph TR 250 K; a 1942 Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 SS Berlinetta Aero Dynamica; and a 1932 Doane Spencer Hot Rod—visitors to Car Classic will learn about the continuing global influence that Southern California has on transportation design.

Why Southern California? As home to more than 20 advanced automotive design studios, as well as forward-thinking companies that are leading the way in new mobility and alternative energy, the region continues to shape the how, what and where of transportation on a large scale.

Also leading the way is Art Center’s curriculum, which is expanding to further impact the evolution of the automotive industry and the broader field of transportation with a new Graduate Transportation Design program launching in Fall 2012. To coincide with this evolutionary growth, attendees to this year’s Car Classic will be treated to innovative designs for cars, bikes, planes, boats, materials and design tools influenced by Southern California culture.

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In Case You Missed It

Ana Serrano's "Salon of Beauty" installation at Houston's Rice Gallery. Photo: Nash Baker.

There’s always something happening when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty. Sometimes there’s almost too much happening!

If you have any Art Center-related news items you’d like to share with the community, send us an email at editorial at artcenter dot edu.

Pancake Creator Contest Deadline Extended

Product Design alumna Bryce Butcher, an industrial designer at Bradshaw International, visited Hillside Campus last week with Graphic Design alumna Grace Karabachian to hand out Pancake Creators.

Wendee Lee's Pooh Pancake

Did you pick one up? Well, you’re in luck—the deadline to submit your pancake designs to the Pancake Creator contest has been extended to Oct. 7.

Get to work on whipping up some original designs, and you could win a $200 gift card to Swain’s.

Just email your designs to pancakecreator@goodcook.com or visit pancakecreator.com for more information.

This super-cool product was designed by Bryce along with Graphic Design alums Karabachian and Annie Gonzalez, so this product is a real Art Center success story. Bryce tells us that the product is just beginning to hit store shelves.

“The Pancake Creator scores a perfect trifecta for me: it’s a kitchen gadget, it made me laugh, and it was designed by a former student of mine,” says Product Design faculty member and alumna Wendee Lee, who tipped us off about last week’s giveaway.

Check out the video of the Pancake Creator below:

Inspired Designs: Meet Saturday High Instructor Jeffrey Jones

Jones at Angkor Wat in Cambodia

Jeffrey Jones, a senior designer for Samsung Design America’s mobile unit, spends his days designing smartphones like the Galaxy Mini and the Corby II, but on Saturdays he teaches Introduction to Product Design at Saturday High, Art Center College of Design’s program for high school students (grades 9 through 12).

Jones—who studied at Art Center at Night and went on to earn a B.S. in Product Design at the College in 2007—was first turned on to the field of Product Design at Pasadena City College, where he took a class taught by Art Center instructor and alumnus Stan Kong PROD ‘83. While at Art Center, Jones interned at Vans, where he designed skateboarding equipment for the Vans Equipment Group, under the leadership of Art Center alumnus, Safir Bellali TRANS ‘01.

Before being hired by Samsung, Jones freelanced for Boombang, a creative think tank led by another Art Center alumnus, Tylor Garland PROD ‘94, where he worked on the design of two video game accessories—a fishing rod for The Strike and a rifle for The Hunt—for outdoor retailer Bass Pro Shops.

We recently caught up with Jones to learn more about his Saturday High class.

Dotted Line: Tell me about Introduction to Product Design.
Jeffrey Jones: Last term was the first time I taught the class, so I’m still fine-tuning it, but essentially it’s a 10-week course that I’ve broken up into three phases: the research phase, where students figure out what kind of product to design and for whom they’re designing; the ideation phase, where students develop their ideas, push the envelope, and select their very best concepts; and the refinement phase, where they further develop their best idea and present to the class exactly what their product is and how it works. I invited Joonsuh “Justin” Kim, the director of Samsung Design America to attend the final, and he sat in as a guest crit.

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Please, Play With Your Food

Product Design alumna Bryce Butcher, an industrial designer at Bradshaw International, is returning to Hillside Campus today to hand out Pancake Creators at the south entrance (off the student parking lot). Students can submit their own pancake designs to the Pancake Creator website for view in their gallery—and one lucky designer will win $200 to Swain’s!

This super-cool product was designed by Bryce along with Graphic Design alums Grace Karabachian and Annie Gonzalez, so this product is a real Art Center success story. Bryce tells us that the product is just beginning to hit store shelves.

“The Pancake Creator scores a perfect trifecta for me: it’s a kitchen gadget, it made me laugh, and it was designed by a former student of mine,” says Product Design faculty member and alumna Wendee Lee, who tipped us off about today’s giveaway.

Stop by, pick one up, and have some fun playing with your food! Bryce and friends will be there between noon and 2:30 p.m.

Check out the video of the Pancake Creator below:

Ideas that Stick: Meet Saturday High Student Lana Vong

Saturday High student Lana Vong

Every one of us has stared in frustration at a poorly designed product and boldly declared, “I could design something better than this!”

But how many of us actually get to work on doing just that?

This past summer, San Gabriel High School junior Lana Vong took Introduction to Product Design through Saturday High—Art Center College of Design’s program that helps high school students become better artists, designers and thinkers—and created the concept for Stikitti, a cat-shaped foam sticker maker.

“Lana’s foam sticker maker project is a classic example of how product designers have the power to improve the things they love to do,” says instructor Jeffrey B. Jones. “On the first day of class, I simply asked her what she liked to do. She pulled out one of her foam stickers and said, ‘Well, I like to make these.’ I asked her how she could improve the way kids make stickers, and the rest was history.”

We caught up with Vong to learn more about the story behind Stikitti.

Dotted Line: How did you find out about Saturday High?
Lana Vong: I joined my high school’s art club, and the club’s president was going to enter Art Center’s Graphic Design program this year after graduation. I was interested in product design so I started asking her for advice and she suggested Saturday High.

Dotted Line: How long have you been interested in product design?
Vong: For about a year. Joining the art club made me more open to creative careers, and I thought product design was a good balance between creative and critical thinking.

An image from Vong's class presentation

An image from Vong's class presentation

Dotted Line: Tell us about your Introduction to Product Design course.
Vong: Our instructor, Jeffrey Jones, had us do one major project throughout the course. There were three stages to it. The first stage was the research stage, where we planned out our project based on the idea we had in mind. Next was the exploration stage, which is where we started drawing and testing out different ways to approach the project. And the last stage was the refinement stage and the making of the final product.

Dotted Line: Had you ever been involved in a similar three-step creative process?
Vong: No, it was all new to me. When I first heard of Introduction to Product Design, I thought we’d be learning about marker techniques. But we ended up focusing more on the thinking and reasoning behind our products. It was almost like solving a math problem. I really liked it.

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Yves Béhar Receives INDEX Award


Great news: Art Center Product Design alumnus and Creative Spirit award winner Yves Béhar has received a 2011 INDEX: Awards for See Better to Learn Better, a program that distributed free eyeglasses to children in Mexico. In 2007 he won one for his design of the XO laptop for the One Laptop Per Child organization.

Mediabistro’s UnBeige reports:

Béhar plans to use the 2011 award purse of €100,000 (approximately $144,000) to fund the next phase of See Well to Learn Well. The project will expand into the U.S. this fall, beginning with the San Francisco Bay Area. Since its launch in 2010, See Better to Learn Better has given free eye exams to 500,000 children in Mexico and has supplied 358,000 of them with glasses. An additional 240,000 kids and 20,000 adults are expected to receive glasses during the 2011-2012 school year.

Congrats, Yves!

Verbien: See Better to Learn Better from INDEX: Design to Improve Life on Vimeo.

Great Teacher Award Recipients Announced

Earlier this year, the Art Center Student Government, together with Student Affairs and the Provost’s Office, together reinstated an annual Great Teacher Award.

The relaunched and revised awards will be presented annually at Summer Term graduation to one full-time, one part-time and one new faculty member, beginning at next week’s ceremony. The recipients are determined through a nomination process open to all enrolled students and a confidential selection committee of students.

The awards are sponsored by the Provost’s Office and Art Center Student Government, and coordinated by Student Affairs. We’re pleased to announce the Great Teacher Award recipients for 2011:

New Teacher:
AFFONSO BEATO
Undergraduate Film Department

Part-Time Faculty:
ERROL GERSON
Humanities and Design Sciences Department

Full-Time Faculty:
HEIDRUN MUMPER-DRUMM
Graphic Design Department
Product Design Department
Humanities & Design Sciences Department

Student Government has requested that Heidrun Mumper-Drumm deliver the Summer 2011 Graduating Class Commencement Address on August 20. The ceremony will begin at 5 p.m. and will be immediately followed by Graduation Show.

Congratulations Affonso, Errol and Heidrun!

Art Center is also taking nominations for the 2011 Art Center Alumni Awards, presented annually at Fall Term Graduation. The Alumni Awards provide Art Center an opportunity to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni.

Nomination categories are: Lifetime Achievement, Outstanding Service and Young Alumni Innovator. Please send all nominations to the Alumni Relations office, alumni@artcenter.edu by Oct. 15.

Product Design Student Named NCIIA Student Ambassador

We are thrilled to announce that seventh term Product Design/Designmatters concentration student Mariana Prieto has been named a NCIIA student ambassador for 2011-12.

Prieto

NCIIA, the National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance, is an organization whose grants, competitions, networks and ventures actively promote innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education. Art Center has been an active member of the organization in the past three years through Designmatters.

Prieto is one of 12 students selected by NCIIA for their outstanding leadership skills and commitment to practicing and promoting the entrepreneurship and social innovation mandate of NCIIA.

In her role as ambassador, Mariana receive ambassador training on the East Coast, and then work with our community to promote the programs, student grants and conferences that NCIIA offers to institutes of higher learning across the U.S.

Prieto is excited about her new role.

“Significant changes in the world come about by making small improvements within developing communities,” she says.

“The combination of NCIIA’s entrepreneurial spirit, Designmatters’ passion for social change and Art Center’s high quality standards catalyze the application of design thinking to identify such small improvements, consequently helping make the world a better place. I am deeply honored to be a part of this team and look forward to working with them during this next year.”

Congratulations, Mariana! She’ll be keeping us updated on her time as ambassador. In the meantime, check out this interview we conducted with her back when she was a second term student.

A Sustainable Vision of the Future

Product Design faculty member Liliana Becerra shares her experiences participating in the National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance’s (NCIIA) first Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab held at Colorado State University for the Designmatters blog.

Becerra with Paul Polak of D-Rev

About a month ago, I was offered the opportunity to attend and participate in the first Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab hosted and organized by NCIIA (National Collegiate of Inventors and Innovators Alliance) at Colorado State University. I attended with my colleague Nathan Allen—we’re both Art Center faculty, I’m in Product Design and Nathan is Grad ID.

NCIIA is an alliance of faculty and students working to advance the teaching of invention and innovation in American higher education. This practice is highly and mostly rooted in focused innovations seeking to benefit under-resourced populations through scalable solutions. NCIIA has awarded several grants to Art Center in recent years supporting the creation and incubation of academic projects on design for social impact hosted by Designmatters, the social impact department of the College.

I had had the opportunity to meet some of the people from NCIIA when I attended “Open Minds,” the NCIIA annual conference in Washington, D.C., last March. I participated in a panel examining lessons learned from two of my recent classes, Creating Social Value Through Design held in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala and Safe Agua in Santiago, Chile. From my first interactions with NCIIA members, I quickly realized that most had an engineering background, and design professionals were rather underrepresented.

When I first arrived to the Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab in June, it was slightly intimidating and humbling to suddenly realize that I was part of a group who by profession call themselves inventors and innovators–after all, the word “innovation” has been overused and misinterpreted during the last decade, losing a lot of validity and excitement.

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