Electric cars have their criticisms: failing batteries, lack of plug-ins and egg-shaped designs.
Design veteran and Art Center alum Henrik Fisker — who worked on the BMW Z8 roadster and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage — recently told the Wall Street Journal there’s not a “huge” market for electric cars.
Interestingly, Fisker has also spent the past seven years designing one.
Since leaving Aston Martin in 2005, the Danish-born designer raised more than $1.2 billion to start his own company. Fisker Automotive last year launched its only product, the aptly named Fisker Karma, the world’s first luxury, electric, extended-range vehicle at a price tag of $100,000.
About 1,500 Karma models have sold in the U.S. and Europe (high-profile customers include Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber) and the company has plans to expand into Dubai and China.
A Vespa LXV-150, one of the many vehicles Piaggio brought on campus for students to study. Photo: Chuck Spangler
Did you happen to notice a swarm of motorcycles earlier this term at Hillside Campus?
The reason for the two-wheeled gathering was Piaggio–the fourth largest producer of scooters, motorcylces and compact commercial vehicles in the world–is sponsoring a Transportation Design project this term titled Envisioning Personal Mobility in 2022. As part of the course they brought a variety of their current vehicles for students to study up close.
In the course, the Italian vehicle maker–whose brands include Piaggio, Vespa, Aprilia and Moto Guzzi–has challenged Art Center students to envision how young people, between the ages of 18 and 25, will move around 10 years from now.
Questions Piaggio has posed to the students include: In 2022 will people have the same buying power they have now? Will they be able to afford personal mobility? Will they have jobs that change more frequently?
Piaggio, which plans on opening a design center in Pasadena, hopes that the students creations both inspire its employees and provides them with insight into opportunities of important areas of growth where the company should be engaged a decade from now.
And with Car Classic ’12 right around the corner, we’re reminded of an interview we did with Art Center alumnus Miguel Galluzi TRANS ’86, Vice President of Design at the Piaggio Group, for Car Classic ’09: By Air, Land & Sea.
Google's self-driving car and the technology to power it.
Commuters could soon be sharing the road with self-driving cars: Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Tuesday that would allow the vehicles to be tested and operated on California roads.
“We are looking at science fiction becoming reality in a self-driving car,” Brown said during a ceremony at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Caltech, Google and other companies have been developing the cars, which use radar, video cameras and lasers to navigate freeways sans human input. (The legislation, S. 1298, requires a licensed driver to be at the wheel in case something goes wrong.)
Top transportation designers, car collectors and auto enthusiasts merge minds Sunday, Oct. 21 at the annual Art Center Car Classic.
Held at the Hillside campus, this year’s theme “Inspired Design” will showcase a highly curated field of rare automobiles, surprising classics and innovative vehicles from the 1930s to present that served as inspirations for Art Center alums around the world.
Special guests include Ron Hill, Art Center alum and former Chair of the Transportation Design Department, who counts Corvettes, Camaros and Cadillacs among his designs.
Auto aficionados Dave Kunz, KABC automotive reporter; Barry Meguiar, host of Speed Channel’s Motor Trend; and Ed Justice Jr., co-host of Motor Trend radio, will serve as emcees.
Impromptu interviews with transportation designers and car collectors called “Stories Behind the Design” will be broadcast during the event. Patrons can also tour Art Center’s design studios, rapid prototyping facilities and galleries.
The event is free for students, faculty, staff; $35 for their guests; and $35 for alumni. General admission is $55 online, $65 at the door.
Art Center Car Classic
When: Sunday, Oct. 21, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Art Center College of Design, Hillside Campus, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena Info:artcenter.edu/carclassic
Beijing Team “Ghost” Top Winner in 7th Annual Design Competition
For the first year ever, the Formula-E Race has gone global. Known as the race where the rubber meets the road, Formula-E is the annual contest of rubber band-powered miniature cars designed by teams from Art Center and Pasadena Community College. But 2012 will be remembered as the year the Department of Industrial Design at Beijing University of Technology joined the competition – and when the dust settled, the international visitors smoked the locals.
Devoted race fans endured sweltering heat at the August 9th event on Art Center’s Hillside campus to witness Beijing’s team “Ghost” take first place in two races plus Best in Show. Art Center’s team “Ahn and Ahn” took first in The Sinclair Hill Climb track and the team from Pasadena Community College won TheEckles Design, Build, and Approach Award.
A highlight of Art Center’s Graduate Industrial Design (GradID) program, the race is judged by a panel of distinguished industry leaders. This year, the panel included designers from Honda R&D, Disney, BMW Group Designworks USA, LEGO Concept Lab, Tesla Motors, Fisker Automotive, Mattel Hot Wheels, Calty, and Nissan. Judging was based on a variety of criteria including quality, craftsmanship, materials, style, engineering, branding, innovation, and, of course, performance.
Sweating it out as MC for the event was the humorous Matt Gallant, host of ABC’s American Inventory and Animal Planet’s The Planet’s Funniest Animals.
The purpose of the class project is to teach lessons in strategy, product development, science, engineering, design, fabrication, branding, communications, and event planning through a fun and real world product-development experience. In the process, students learn about competition, teamwork, setting goals, and creating design plans that are then executed to varying degrees of success. Continue reading →
A tender moment from "Tron," which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Disney’s Tron, the movie which introduced a generation to light cycles, identity discs and a glowing spandex-clad Jeff Bridges. It was also the first time most filmgoers marveled at computer-generated special effects.
The history and evolution of Tron wouldn’t be the same without the work of a number of members of the Art Center community who were involved in the groundbreaking film, its 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy and the current Disney XD animated series Tron: Uprising.
To celebrate three decades of “the grid,” let’s take a look at how Syd Mead TRAN ’59, Eric Barba TRAN ’92 and current Entertainment Design student Annis Naeem helped shaped Tron’s digital frontier. Continue reading →
Art Fitzpatrick at Art Center College of Design. Photo: Chuck Spangler
Considered an icon in the milieu of automotive painting and design, Art Fitzpatrick, recently visited Art Center to share his life work and lessons with students. With a career that stretched over seven decades, Fitzpatrick, is best known for his more than 700 auto advertisements. His 1959-71 “Wide Track” campaign for Pontiac is considered by many to be the most recognizable, successful and influential auto ad artwork of all time.
Transportation Design faculty member Richard Pietruska is currently working with Fitzpatrick and arranged for him to visit with students.
“He is an amazing illustrator who has influenced many of us in the automotive design world from the 60′s and 70′s up to the present,” said Pietruska. “His work captures the true essence of what the cars of that era represented and his passion and skill comes across in his brilliant technique.”
Fitzpatrick continues to produce paintings of his favorite cars today but now works mainly on the computer at his home in Carlsbad, California. He is also an honorary member of the Automotive Fine Arts Society who exhibit at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
Find out much more and see his beautiful work at www.fitz-art.com
Transportation Design alumna Michele Christensen inside the 2010 Acura ZDX she designed.
Yes, transportation design is still an industry dominated by males. But things are changing and these days female designers, while still a minority, are no longer a rarity.
One of the more dramatic success stories of recent memory is Transportation Design alumna Michelle Christensen, who graduated from Art Center in 2005. While still a student at the College, Christensen began working on a groundbreaking design that caught the attention of Acura recruiters. Immediately after graduating, she was hired at Acura and became that company’s first female exterior car designer.
She spent the next several years transforming her class project into what eventually became the groundbreaking 2010 Acura ZDX crossover vehicle. “We’ve worked on almost nothing else for three years,” she told The New York Times of the process of bringing the ZDX to life, just as it was preparing to make its debut at the 2009 New York Auto Show. “You have to fight for, and justify, every element.”
What made Christensen interested in designing cars? “Growing up, my interests ranged from sketching prom dresses for friends to wanting to work in a pit crew for a racing team,” Christensen told Marie Claire in 2010. “In junior high I learned about exterior car design; it was the perfect melding of my interests in design, cars, and working with my hands.”
Later that same year, in an episode of the online show Moto-Man that focused exclusively on the ZDX, Christensen told host George Notaras that she first became aware of Art Center and car design as a profession when her dad, at a Bay Area car show, pointed out Art Center alumnus Chip Foose TRAN ’90 in the crowd.
“I asked him who Chip Foose was and he said, ‘He’s a car designer,” said Christensen. ‘And I thought, whoa, pump the brakes, he’s a what? I want to do that!”
Graduate student work will be on display at 4 Hours Solid on April 18. Photo: Four Eyes Photography.
U.S. News & World Report has released its annual Best Grad Schools rankings, and we’re proud to report that Art Center made quite a splash in its Fine Arts Schools list.
According to U.S. News, these rankings were based on the result of a peer assesment survey—art school deans and other top art school academics were asked to nominate up to 10 programs noted for their excellence in each specialty, with the schools receiving the most nominations being listed.
Currently on view at the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, Syd Mead: Progressions is a retrospective that spans more than 50 years of artwork by legendary visual futurist and Art Center alumnus Syd Mead TRAN ’59.
The exhibition—which includes paintings of everything from extraterrestrial vehicles to interplanetary resort destinations—is a spectacular opportunity to get an up-close-and-personal view of Mead’s work and to appreciate his uncanny ability to translate contemporary concepts into believable visions of the future.
To help celebrate Progressions, Art Center College of Design and Forest Lawn are co-hosting a special presentation at Forest Lawn Museum next Thursday, March 8, from 7–10 p.m. Mead will speak about his work at 8 p.m. and a book signing will immediately follow.
Forest Lawn Museum is located at 1712 South Glendale Ave., Glendale, CA 91205.
Head past the jump for a gallery of additional images and the featurette “2019: A Future Imagined,” in which Mead reflects upon the nature of creativity and how it drives the future.
