Innovations in lunch: The ultimate South Campus dining guide

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It’s hard to overstate the excitement that greeted the announcement that a fleet of food trucks would be adding Art Center’s South Campus complex to its rotation of regular stops. Clusters of giddy staffers congregated around 8×10 flyers, speculating over which roach coaches– Holy Aioli? Kogi? – would become the go-to lunch option within walking distance of 950 Raymond Avenue. Unfortunately, this culinary convoy was soon diverted away from South Campus, when turnout wasn’t big enough to justify a stop on the trucks’ lunch route.

On paper, this might have seemed a devastating blow to staffers as well as students tired of foraging for tasty eats in an industrial wasteland. South Campus sits at the heart of Pasadena’s Innovation Corridor, a name that may be more aspirational than descriptive of a neighborhood that houses a semi-functional power plant and a row of hulking industrial monuments to the last century’s love affair with molded concrete and steel. In other words, this is not exactly the kind of neighborhood where one might expect to find an operating vending machine, let alone a reasonably priced handcrafted meal.

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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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LEAP Day 3: Tools and takeaways to activate social innovation career tracks

by Wendy McNaughton

This is the third in our three-part Dotted Line series covering “The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation: LEAP Symposium,” hosted by Art Center College of Design Sept. 19–21, 2013.

Overheard (Random quotes from the day)

“Fire it up.”
“This has been like a wonderful summer camp.”
“I can’t tell you how in awe I am of the amazing, creative people I have met.”
“You fired every synapse in my brain, especially those that have been dormant for the last three or four years.”
“The conversation has really progressed since I joined this field in 2009 and it’s been like amazing to be a part of this.”
“I love the word designer. It’s sexy, it’s powerful and it’s dynamic just like me and that’s what’s important.”

Mind-blowing Ideation session at LEAP. Photograph by Terry Bond

Mind-blowing Ideation session at LEAP. Photograph by Teri Bond

Practical tools, next steps and taking action were the focus of the third and final day of the LEAP Symposium presented by Designmatters, the College’s social impact department. A key aim expressed by many attendees was to bring the valuable new tools they gained during the confab back to their home base organizations to help establish solid career pathways for young design talent and clarify the direct link between great design and success.

The last day was choreographed in three parts. First, working groups who had self-organized in to small thematic clusters, spent a few hours finalizing proposals that were later displayed on giant poster boards all around the student dining room, taking a page from grade school science fairs. Then, a spokesperson for each project pitched it to the larger group.

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LEAP Day 2: Designing strategies for the future of social impact design careers.

Overhead view of a LEAP design storm. Photograph by Dice Yamaguchi

This is the second in our three-part Dotted Line series covering “The New Professional Frontier in Design for Social Innovation: LEAP Symposium,” hosted by Art Center College of Design Sept. 19–21, 2013.

LEAP’s Day One established the event’s tone, methodology, purpose and goals as well as a set of burning questions facing the field of social impact design professional pathways. The following morning, participants arrived eager to drill down into the issues that arose during the previous day’s workshops. Leap’s faculty team of facilitators and student teaching assistants were ready to continue guiding the second day of collaborative ideation sessions. Leap’s core programming team which included Karen Hofmann, Sherry Hoffman and Heidrun Mumper-Drumm, had mapped out a programming flow for these charrettes based on Art Center’s tried and true Design Storm methodology, which enabled intense collaborative study, brainstorming, and problem solving throughout the day.

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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

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.

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 →

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How Photo student Dave Koga learned to listen to his intuition

by Dave Koga

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is by paying a visit to Pasadena and getting to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

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. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that landed Dave Koga in the Photography and Imaging Department of Art Center.

Self-portrait by Dave Koga

Why did you choose Art Center? I came to Art Center after leaving a 10-year career in the entertainment industry, where I served as a TV development executive. I have a prior degree in history and art history from UCLA. I have several friends who graduated from Art Center around the time that I graduated from UCLA. I’ve spoken to them a lot over the years about the Art Center curriculum and the quality of instruction and their collective feedback has been extremely positive. When I made the decision to change careers, Art Center was naturally my first choice.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
I’ve always been a rational and somewhat linear thinker who relied on logic and intellectual analysis to solve problems. While this mode of thinking served me well in the corporate world, I found it often got in the way of the creative process when I started at Art Center. Learning how to rely more on intuition and observation when faced with creative problems was the biggest challenge and/or breakthrough I’ve faced while at Art Center. I credit two instructors—Ken Merfeld and Mark Wyse—with helping teaching me how to trust and rely upon the intuitive side of my brain. [For more on this, check out Wyse’s essay on repression and creativity.]

What are your most reliable and/or unlikely sources of inspiration?
Inspiration comes in all forms, shapes and sizes. That said, I find that my most reliable sources of inspiration tend to be music, poetry, painting and graphic design.

Who are your biggest creative influences?
My biggest creative influences include Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Winters, William Eggleston, Miles Davis and Frank O’Hara.

What do you hope to do when you graduate from Art Center?
My goal upon graduating from Art Center is to build a successful commercial architectural photography business that will generate enough income to fund my gallery-oriented personal projects.

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Required reading: Digital_Humanities, by Media Design Practices Chair Anne Burdick

burdick What are the digital humanities? That’s the question posed in a new scholarly book co-authored by Anne Burdick, chair of the Graduate Media Design Department. And judging by the critical response—from movers and shakers in the field like Lev Manovich, Dan Cohen and Alan Liu—it’s a question many want answered.

In Digital_Humanities (MIT Press), Burdick—along with metaLAB (at) Harvard’s Jeffrey Schnapp and UCLA’s Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld and Todd Presner—explores geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics and other non-traditional modes of humanistic inquiry. Writing for Leonardo Reviews, media artist and scholar Dene Grigar urges everyone to read Digital_Humanities, no matter their academic discipline, as it describes an area of research that has “the potential of transforming higher education.” And in the Italian edition of WIRED, Matteo “Mister Bit” Bittanti names the book one of his best of 2012 and recommends that every Italian university student add it to their reading list. A free Open Access edition of the book is available at the MIT Press website.

This story originally appeared in Art Center’s Dot magazine. Check out Dot online for more news of alumni and faculty exhibitions, products, books, films and social impact.

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Glow shines a light on cutting edge artist and designer Rebeca Mendez

Rebeca Mendez brings her film, CircumSolar, Migration 1 to Glow

Tomorrow night, keep an eye out for a westward migration, as culture vultures flock to Glow, the dusk-till-dawn exhibit of immersive public art installations where the sea meets the sand in Santa Monica.

Those who do make it to the Burning Man-on-the-beach all-nighter will be poised to witness an extraordinary feat of long-distance migration on the 25-foot circular screen displaying CircumSolar, Migration 1, Rebeca Mendez‘ (GRAPHIC DESIGN’84; GRAD ART ’96 ) film which captures a small sea bird’s annual journey from the Arctic to Antarctic and back again.

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Storytelling across mediums: Award nominations and class video showcase recent transmedia projects

Graphic Design student Lois Kim tests her transmedia installation piece.

Pick up the current issue of Dot and you’ll find a feature–Transform, Transcend, Transmedia: The Changing Face of Graphic Design–that takes a look at the transmedia area of emphasis within Art Center College of Design’s Graphic Design Department.

One of the students whom we highlighted in that story, recent graduate Paul Hoppe, has just been named a finalist for the 2013 Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA)–an impressive feat considering that only 30 students out of a total pool of 3,752 submissions from around the world made it that far. Hoppe is a finalist in the category of Installation Design for his project ECHO: The Fragility of Moments Suspended in Time, which explores the rise and fall of a popular turn of the century tourist attraction in Pasadena.

Immediately after graduating this past spring, Hoppe became a teaching assistant for instructor Brad Bartlett’s Typography 5: Transmedia and Advanced Graphic Studio: Transmedia courses. He spent the Summer 2013 term at South Campus, helping two dozen Graphic Design students with their projects in which they dived deep into their personal interests to rebrand cultural institutions and create complementary interactive installations.

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

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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ArtCenter News

ArtCenter College of Design

Innovations in lunch: The ultimate South Campus dining guide

Art Center in the news, August – September 2013

How Photo student Dave Koga learned to listen to his intuition

Required reading: Digital_Humanities, by Media Design Practices Chair Anne Burdick

Glow shines a light on cutting edge artist and designer Rebeca Mendez

Storytelling across mediums: Award nominations and class video showcase recent transmedia projects

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