Category Archives: Social innovation

‘Stand With Us’: Students find kinship with Homeboy’s gang intervention program

This spring term I had the privilege of directing a short film as part of a Designmatters studio hosted by the Graphic Design Department, which was structured in partnership with Homeboy Industries, the country’s most successful gang intervention program.

Addressing Homeboy’s real and ongoing need for fundraising, we put together a video called Stand With Us. It brings together the insights of longtime donors to the organization with the stories of two former gang members, whose lives were transformed for the better at Homeboy.

Homeboy decided to screen Stand With Us on May 3 as an opener for the Lo Maximo Awards, the organization’s annual fundraiser. It was a fabulous night with food and drink, glamorous people (some of whom were tattooed) and lots of hugs, laughs and even some tears. It was a special moment for me as I got to see an eclectic and undoubtedly grateful crowd cherish my work—and the fruits of a successful collaboration between my school and one of LA’s finest institutions.

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Life after ICFF: Q&A with Environmental Design alum Chris Adamick

Chris Adamick

Chris Adamick (BA 07 Environmental Design) is the manager of Global Marketing, Store Design at Gap’s New York headquarters. He is an award-winning designer whose multidisciplinary, large- and small-scale work includes commercial, civic, educational and residential design. Adamick maintains his own studio, Chris Adamick Design, for independent projects, and has collaborated with Bernhardt Design, among others. Bernhardt honored Adamick in 2011 by featuring his Audio chair in a retrospective at ICFF of its ongoing interdisciplinary studio with Art Center College of Design, which educates students in the process of designing products for production in the commercial market. Today Adamick’s client list includes Bed Bath and Beyond, W Hotels, Disney and Haworth and he has held prominent positions at Pentagram, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, ByLissoni, Studio Gaia and other high-profile companies.

The Dotted Line: What drew you to Art Center?

Chris Adamick: Jorge Pardo [the noted sculptor and an Art Center graduate], one of my professors at UCLA, opened my mind to art existing in the world beyond fine art—in architecture, in product design. He suggested Art Center. I looked at the Fine Art program first and it was stellar, just stellar, but when I saw the design work going on there [at the College], I instantly knew that was what I wanted to do.

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Scholarship seeds a new generation of sustainability designers

From Sam Julius’ ‘Sustainable Urban Housing’ entry

Our homes, cell phones and laptop screens are filled with thoughtful and functional design. But what about art that creates social impact? Can design influence change on global issues like sustainable housing, access to clean water and empowering disadvantaged women?

Projects featuring practical solutions to these concerns designed by Product, Illustration and Environmental Design students were selected as the winners of the 2013-2014 Denhart Family Sustainability Scholarship competition. Created by a generous gift from Gun Denhart, and son, Christian Denhart (BS 10 Product), the prizes are annually awarded to students addressing environmental and social causes in their work. The scholarships are devised to increase awareness of art and design’s unique capacity to advance sustainability.

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SXSW Interactive 2014 wrap-up: Chelsea Clinton, Neil Young and Toms.com

Chelsea Clinton at SXSW Interactive 2014

The final day of SXSW Interactive has now taken on a different cast; in light of the tragic car crash that claimed two festival-goers’ lives and injured many more. Our deepest condolences go out to the families of those victims.

Even though the festival was technically winding down; passion, engagement and insight revved high throughout the day’s panels and presentations. The conference had successfully lived up to its interactive title. Many themes in the 2014 program were plucked from a virtual suggestion box, including this year’s focus on tech’s role in social change, culminating with Chelsea Clinton’s galvanizing closing keynote address (more on that later). In fact, all of the events we attended on that final day—from presentations by TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie—were informed, either directly or indirectly, by a socially conscious approach to technological innovation.

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Art, science, wearable tech and viral video: Art Center at SXSW Interactive

There are as many ways to describe a day immersed in South by Southwest Interactive programming as there were LED screens lighting up every available space around the Convention Center in downtown Austin. But, like many of the tech pilgrims who made their way to this digital mecca, our epic first day at the conference was spent soaking in a free-flowing cascade of ideas about how innovation and technology can be leveraged to improve the way we interact with our work, home, communities, passions and the larger world around us. And at the end of an enlightening eight hours’ worth of events, we came away feeling more energized than exhausted—as if we had just taken a multi-vitamin full of more than the daily recommended amount of inspiration.

This is noteworthy because the same cannot be said of the movie or music components of SXSW, or any other festival for that matter. Skeptical? Good. Read on.

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Clothing that bites back and bridges the gender gap in Uganda

MDP Student Barb Natali designed these “barbed-shorts” to provoke dialogue about gender relations in Uganda

Last fall I spent six weeks in Uganda as part of the Media Design Practices program. While there, a few classmates and I attended a crowded performance and had multiple, local men inappropriately grab us as we attempted to navigate the throng. I caught one teen in the act and yelled at him. He grinned at me during the tirade, but was for the most part unfazed.

A few days later when the anger subsided, I reflected on the experience. The incident had provoked questions about the interactions and power dynamics between men and women in Uganda. In order to develop an understanding of these aspects of the society I decided to create a series of designs to facilitate conversations about Ugandan experiences, reactions, and negotiations of the dynamics between men and women, specifically in regard to sexual harassment and inequality.

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Art Center’s first Myspace occupation concludes. Prepare for phase 2!

We came. We saw. We influenced change as we learned to create.

Beginning last October, we enlisted four Art Center students to lead the charge in a week-long homepage takeover of the recently relaunched Myspace. The first-wave social network had reinvented itself as a community and breeding ground for artists and creative types of all stripes to exchange work, feedback and inspiration in the digital sphere. In other words, Myspace had become a sandbox custom-built for Art Center students and alums. And, as is our way, we came ready to play.

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LAUSD and Art Center partner against gun violence

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second largest public school system, has joined forces with Art Center’s renowned social impact department, Designmatters, to implement Designmatters’ cutting-edge health curriculum, Where’s Daryl? Designed to get teens and tweens talking about gun violence in an effort to prevent it, the middle school classroom toolkit is part of Uncool: The Anti-Gun Violence Project, an award-winning program supported by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and dedicated to the memory of Norman Schureman (Product Design ’85), a beloved Art Center instructor who lost his life to gun violence in 2010.

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Mirka Meyer: Designmatters alum addresses visual communication needs in humanitarian aid context

Kenya-based Designmatters alumna Mirka Meyer

Mirka Meyer started her career in 1995 as a graphic designer in New York. She has since built up a successful career as a communication and branding specialist for various corporations and agencies in New York, Los Angeles and Frankfurt. In 2002 she came to Berlin with Pentagram and shortly thereafter co-founded the branding agency ‘metorical’ as well as the gaming magazine [ple:]. In 2008 she redirected her professional career from the creative industries to the humanitarian sector, managing acute and chronic emergencies with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF / Doctors without Borders) in the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Haiti, Chad, DR Congo and South Sudan. Her current project brings her knowledge of visual communication together with the pressing practical communication needs of humanitarian emergencies in developing countries. Mirka received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in the year 2000, and currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

When people see my CV nowadays I usually get a few puzzled looks and definitely a few questions. It is neither the most common, nor the most obvious path that I have taken. But I have always strongly believed in “thinking outside the box.” I know that this belief has given me a very unique view of the world and very valuable insights into the importance of visual communication within the context of humanitarian emergencies.

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Grateful for what designers bring to the table: Honesty––its power to change the conversation and the world

©2013 Wendy MacNaughton for LEAP Symposium

A new video by alum Erik Anderson — about the convening at Art Center of social innovation design students and educators, corporate and nonprofit leaders — has made Good’s 2013 Top 10 list. Illustration © 2013 Wendy MacNaughton for LEAP Symposium

“For all of you designers who need inspiration to conquer the wicked problems we face in the world today,” says Mariana Amatullo, “let’s remember that honesty, coupled with a good measure of bold determination and ingenuity, can help us leap forward.”

For Amatullo, Art Center vice president and co-founder of the social impact department Designmatters, honesty is an ethos that informs all of her work with her team at the College and with a growing cohort of young designers leading a global movement using “design thinking” to address seemingly intractable challenges—from homelessness and gun violence to water poverty and gender inequality—in ways that have never been tried before.

“We’re at a point where thousands of students across the country, in high school and college and graduate school, are joining [this] movement to participate in and impact the world around us,” says William Drenttel, an award-winning designer, publisher and design leader.

Along with Drenttel and like-minded colleagues at Art Center and around the country, Amatullo recently organized a national gathering of professionals and students to explore opportunities for strengthening the movement and shaping its future. A chief concern of the LEAP Symposium: How to make design for social innovation a viable career with navigable pathways, and how to prepare both students and potential employers for an era in which designers will be—must be—at the table in discussions large and small about solving the world’s “wicked problems.”

Here’s an idea. Try this out around your own Thanksgiving dinner table: When you’re sharing what you’re grateful for this year, be completely honest. Continue reading →