Category Archives: Uncategorized

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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Art Center in the News, July 2013

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Alumnus Jim Root, art director at Cramer-Kasselt, was featured in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

From fuel efficiency standards changing the look of your car to top ranked film schools, from Gibson Guitartown to backyard beehive designs – here’s where you can catch up on any Art Center news you may have missed with our latest media roundup.

The Hollywood Reporter, “The Hollywood Reporter Unveils the Top 25 Film Schools of 2013” July 31, 2013: Art Center moves up from #23 to #15 in  annual film school ranking.

The New York Times, “Carlab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline for More Efficient Vehicle”  July 9, 2013: Transportation Design instructor Eric Noble featured throughout the Wheels blog about rethinking the size of the natural gas tank.

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Plumbing the depths of innovation: Mazda unveils student-created concept car, Deep Orange 3

It’s innovative engineering inside and out. And it’s all the work of students.

A next-generation Mazda concept vehicle, designed by Art Center College of Design student Fredrick Naaman and engineered by a team of Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) automotive engineering students, was revealed in Traverse City, Mich., today during the Center for Automotive Research Management Briefing Seminars.

The official unveiling marks the completion of the Deep Orange 3 Mazda-sponsored vehicle, the third-generation Deep Orange vehicle prototype, which is a completely new vehicle, inside and out.

Derek Jenkins, design director for Mazda North American Operations, said that to be part of a college program of this caliber that focuses not just on one aspect of a vehicle, but the vehicle as a whole, is really an automaker’s dream come true.

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

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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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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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Transgender Portraits Celebrate Courage and Community

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From the series Transformational Project by Jen Rosenstein.

Jen Rosenstein will never forget the first time she met a transgender person. A lesbian and, at the time, a student at Art Center College of Design, Rosenstein was curious. But her curiosity backfired. “I had so many questions for him, and he took it wrong,” says the 2008 Photography and Imaging graduate. “He misunderstood my intention.”

Still, Rosenstein and her new friend Mir kept talking and later he invited her to visit his home in West Hollywood. There she set up an impromptu studio to photograph Mir and some of his friends — the first portraits in what would become the series Transformational Project. “I went back to his house every weekend for several months,” she recalls, “and people were literally lining up to have their portraits taken.”

Five years on, Rosenstein has made nearly 70 portraits of trans men and women in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. The ever-expanding series, “a platform for the trans community to express themselves any way they want,” has been featured by ABC News and presented in a gallery show at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center. On Saturday, June 22, her roving portrait studio returns to LAGLC’s Village at Ed Gould Plaza in Hollywood, and she has put out an open call to the trans community to come and be photographed there.

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Jackie Robinson Movie Features Concept Art by Alumnus Brandon Gonzales

This week, Warner Bros. film 42 opens in theaters, showcasing concept art and matte paintings by Art Center alumnus Brandon Gonzales, Entertainment Design class of 2011.

Directed by Brian Helgeland and starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford, the film is about the life of baseball player Jackie Robinson. 42 focuses on the 1946 deal that signed Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American player to break the baseball color line.

Movie poster for 42

Gonzales created the matte painting that became the movie poster art for the Jackie Robinson film 42.

“Before we even started, I did a lot of concept work on what the stadium could look like by researching black-and-white images of those stadiums,” said Gonzales. “This way the director and production designers would be confident we could make the stadiums look like they did when [Robinson] actually played there.”

One of the matte paintings he worked on became the final one used in the movie poster. “It was one of the main shots I worked on,” said Gonzales. The final picture shows baseball player Pee Wee Reese with his arm wrapped around Robinson on the field.

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Alum Nicholas Alan Cope’s book launch March 28 in New York highlights seven-year project documenting Los Angeles architecture

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From ‘Whitewash’ by Nicholas Alan Cope, published by powerHouse Books.

Nicholas Alan Cope sees Los Angeles as a city of contrasts, with “dueling public narratives of glamour and cynicism” legible in its stark, modern architecture. In his new book of black and white photographs, Whitewash, he dramatizes that contrast by making elegant use of the extremes of light and shadow produced by the intensity of the Southern California sun.

Published by New York’s powerHouse Books, with a foreword by California-born, Paris-based fashion designer Rick Owens, and distributed by Random House, the book’s April release will be celebrated with a launch party at Mondo Cane in Tribeca on Thurs., March 28, on the opening night of a gallery exhibition of Cope’s large-format photographs from the book. The exhibition continues through April 13.

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Alum Jason Hill wins MIT Accelerate Grand Prize for next-gen prosthetic design

Art Center alum Jason Hill, a human factors researcher and industrial designer, is part of a four-person, interdisciplinary team that won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the MIT Accelerate Contest, for a prosthetic socket designed to change its shape throughout a patient’s lifetime.

Hill and his team have formed The BETH Project (Benevolent Technologies for Health), dedicated to developing high-impact, low-cost healthcare solutions for underserved populations. Their February 19 win over seven other teams qualifies The BETH Project for a spot in the series’ final round, the MIT Launch Contest, whose top prize is $100,000. The results of the Launch Contest will be announced May 15, 2013.

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TEDxYouth at Caltech: Brain Food

TEDxYouth served up generous helpings of Brain Food at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Among the cooks in the kitchen: Art Center Trustee Bill Gross; Professor and Director of Sustainability Initiatives Heidrun Mumper-Drumm; and Product Design alumna Mariana Prieto, who completed the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact.

The day-long event took place January 19, 2013, and 8-minute videos of the talks were recently made available online. If you have an appetite for fresh ideas, watch!

A Perfect Storm of Opportunity: Bill Gross at TEDxYouth@Caltech

Bill Gross is a lifelong entrepreneur who has been starting companies since he was 12 years old. He has personally started more than 100 companies in the last 42 years, of which more than 40 have gone public or been acquired. Gross is the Founder and CEO of Idealab, a “company factory” based in Pasadena, which he started in 1996. Gross is credited with starting the first online business directory company with CitySearch, the first online car retailed with CarsDirect, the first paid search engine with Goto.com/Overture, and the longest-running technology incubator where he has been the creator of all these companies. A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, Gross currently serves on its Board of Trustees. He also serves on the Board of the Art Center College of Design, and more than 20 technology companies in California.

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