Jennifer Steinkamp’s Murmuration
Summer 2014 has yielded a bounty of freshly produced works, events and ideas by Art Center alumni. And look for future editions of this dispatch to be equally flush, given July’s bumper crop of kickstarter campaigns. Read on to learn more…and get in on the fun(ding).
Foggy Lights, an interactive light show experience by Inae Song (work-in-progress shots).
Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Inae Song was drawn to the multidisciplinary Interaction Design program at Art Center as a field of possibility, a place to envision the future of design even beyond existing technologies and, she says, to apply without constraint all of her far-flung interests–architecture, computer science, art and digital products. Ultimately, says the co-creator of the Art Center Orientation App, what she’s really exploring is “what an interaction designer’s role in the real world might be.”
The Dotted Line: When did you first learn about Interaction Design as a creative discipline?
Inae Song: It was really hard to decide on a major, due to my wide interests. After I checked out Art Center and its new program, Interaction Design, I researched it and realized that I could combine everything together in this field where designers are not limited by a specific context and can extend their ideas to limitless media. That’s what made me want to come to Art Center.
Christine Park at the Cadillac Design Studio in Michigan. (Photo courtesy of General Motors)
Christine Park began her career in the highly competitive field of luxury car design with an internship at the GM Advanced Concept Design Studio in Los Angeles. She has been with General Motors ever since. Now lead exterior designer at the Cadillac Design Studio in Michigan, Park’s design projects include interior themes for the 2013 and 2014 Cadillac XTS and the Cadillac CIEL convertible.
Everything, Park said, starts with the customer.
“We look for inspiration in the customer’s needs and wants. We also look for artistic inspiration: we look at internet blogs and magazines, we go to museums.” Among the many design sketches that result, a very few are chosen to be rendered by clay sculptors as 3D scale models, Park said. Some of these will be turned into full size clay models. The whole process is clay,” she explained, “because clay is easy to put on and take off and it’s very flexible.
Art Center students visit alum Matthew Manos’ verynice design studio in Venice. (Photo by Stella Kalinina)
Professionally speaking, alumnus Matthew Manos (MFA 12) was precocious. At age 19 in 2008 he founded his own design studio, verynice, a service free to nonprofits using design as a tool for problem solving. By 2012, with a full-time staff of two, verynice was providing $300,000 in pro bono services.
Today, with offices in Los Angeles and New York and a staff of 10 and growing, Manos’ innovative studio has donated the equivalent of more than a million dollars in services to some 250 nonprofit organizations with the help of skills-based volunteers around the globe. Manos’ book, How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free, open-sources his 50% pro-bono business model. His givehalf.co platform is inspiring other companies to do the same.
Agustin Garza
For many designers, the most gratifying moment in any project arrives with the unveiling of the visual and conceptual deliverables laid out before a satisfied client. But not Agustin Garza (GRPK, ‘81). The principal and founder of The Garza Group made a pivotal discovery about his own value proposition several years back when it became clear that the real, lasting benefits of his work lie in the meticulous research process he undertook to assess corporate leaders’ mission, vision, values and goals.
For Garza, and ultimately his clients, the journey became the destination. “The irony is that work really is not what you see but how you get there,” says Garza, principal and founder of Garza Group Communications, whose clients include City of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Coca Cola, Luxe Hotels and American Express. “That’s true in most careers. It’s getting to that one solution that is the real job.”
Acton Global
Today, the BBC’s Autos section published the following story about Art Center Grad ID alum, Peter Treadway’s ingenious antidote to urban commuter blues: RocketSkates. Treadway (MS, ’08) began devising these motorized shoe attachments (which resemble a futuristic take on the Roman chariot, with two large red wheels attached to a metal carriage) as part of his thesis project at Art Center. Seven years later, his high concept roller skates have come to fruition, lending new dimensions of fun and functionality to the booming wearable tech space. Read on to learn more.
Fine Art alumni William Kaminski and Evelena Ruether, founders of Control Room gallery in downtown L.A. (Photo by Jennie Warren for Art Center)
A mutual interest in installation art brought photographer Evelena Ruether and painter William Kaminski together as friends and sometime collaborators in Art Center’s Fine Art program. After graduating in 2009, and sharing a desire to maintain the strong community of fellow artists they had bonded with at Art Center, the pair co-founded Control Room, an independent artist-run space that facilitated artist projects and group exhibitions in industrial downtown Los Angeles. Ruether and Kaminski went on to graduate school while pursuing their own work and curating Control Room shows. The space was active for four years, attracting mid-career artists and ushering in a nascent arts district in the area.
The following post, originally featured on InnovatePasadena.org, offers a window into the process and results of the creative partnerships Art Center fosters with the corporate community. These alliances have always been fundamental to the College’s educational philosophy, grounded in an empirical hands-on to empowering students to transform their ideas into professional quality works of creative ingenuity.
The Art Center alumni community has been instrumental in sustaining this tradition. In this case, Eric Ayzenberg (Adv), founder of Pasadena’s Ayzenberg Group, lead that charge, enabling current Advertising students to experience the inner workings of a full-service agency’s approach to a social media campaign.
Harvest is Daniel C. Young’s augmented reality mobile app for selective eaters
As a visual interaction designer with Google Creative Lab, 2012 Graphic Design alum Daniel C. Young can’t talk about the specifics of his confidential work. Rather he describes it in general terms, as “product vision, a kind of subfield within both visual design and interaction design. We design interfaces for a vision of what, for example, Google might do five years from now. It’s somewhere between a real product, real digital product design and science fiction.”
Soon after graduating and completing an additional Art Center Honors Term, Young landed his new job with remarkable speed. This self-described simplicity evangelist found his calling. “Let’s just say it this way: I feel like I’m impacting the actual direction of where everyday computing might happen and how to make technology less annoying and more kind of delightful and fun and playful.”
Saeri Dobson designed these wallets to support Bangladeshi girls and women rescued from brothels.
The following letter pays tribute to Art Center alum Saeri Dobson’s tireless and selfless work on behalf of Bangladeshi girls who have been rescued from brothels. Dobson (MFA 00 NEWM), whose ethically-minded creative practice is embedded right in her company name: By SaeRi: Design + Humanity.
“I founded By SaeRi, Inc. to tell the stories of amazing human lives through my design,” says Dobson, who produces several lines of handmade bags and wallets ranging from bright and funky to chic and understated. She donates 10% of her profits to Speak Up for the Poor, a non-profit supporting displaced Bangladeshi girls and women. “Each By SaeRi bag is one of a kind, designed and made entirely in the USA. I handpick all the materials and oversee the production process.”
This letter, by the founder of Speak Up for the Poor, offers a snapshot of social impact design in action, exemplifying the vast potential for designers to change the world by bringing their social conscience to bear on their creative practice. We salute Saeri’s commitment to her cause, not to mention the elegant leather craftsmanship she brought to the entirely covetable Project Hope line of tote bags.
I am writing to express my organization’s support for the work of By SaeRi, Inc., a business which has generously supported our work for several years. Speak Up for the Poor, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, serves girls in poverty in Bangladesh. We remove girls from brothels and fund a home for rescued girls; we run a large education program keeping girls-at-risk in school and out of child marriage and other forms of abuse and exploitation; and we do legal casework and advocacy for girls in poverty who have been abused.
Speak Up relies on the generous support of individuals and businesses. By SaeRi, Inc. has been a faithful financial supporter of our work for several years, giving generously since 2011 to help fund several of our projects in Bangladesh.
Starting in 2011, By SaeRi became a funder of our work at the Alingon Home, a place for girls removed from brothels. In Bangladesh many young girls who are born to mothers working in brothels are themselves destined for forced prostitution as minors, and By SaeRi’s generosity helped fund our important work to remove and rehabilitate girls at the Alingon Home.
Similarly, By SaeRi’s generous financial support towards our Girls Education Program in 2012 and 2013 helped Speak Up build four Learning Centers in impoverished villages in southwestern Bangladesh, school rooms where hundreds of girls in our program receive academic support and mentoring to rise out of poverty and avoid the pitfalls of poverty. Several of Saeri Cho’s students have also contributed generously to our general fund, further catalyzing our efforts to serve girls in poverty in Bangladesh.
Speak Up is thankful to By SaeRi, and in particular, to the founder Ms. Saeri Cho Dobson for her hard work and generosity in supporting our work. We enthusiastically support their continued business expansion. We encourage you to extend every courtesy possible to enable By SaeRi to grow in its important mission as a socially responsible business.
Please contact me with any questions.
Sincerely, Troy Anderson
Founder and International Director, Speak Up