Tag Archives: Art Center College of Design

Scholarship seeds a new generation of sustainability designers

From Sam Julius' 'Sustainable Urban Housing' entry

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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New librarian Mario Ascencio disrupts the bookish stereotype

 

Mario Ascencio named new librarian. Photo by Jason Hornick

New college librarian Mario Ascencio. Photo by Jason Hornick

As a first-generation library user (and son of immigrant parents from El Salvador) Mario Ascencio possesses an evangelical zeal for his work. A native Angeleno who grew up in South L.A.’s Huntington Park, Ascencio has become a fierce advocate for the equity of information for all. And as of Monday, May 12, 2014, the dedicated, nationally recognized leader will apply his passion for information science to Art Center’s James Lemont Fogg Memorial Library, where he was recently named librarian and managing director.

“I’m excited to return to my native city of Los Angeles,” he said, adding that he always insisted that he would only return to his hometown if the ideal position was offered by the ideal organization. “After almost 15 years living in D.C., I’m thrilled to join Art Center because of its mission, ‘Learn to Create, Influence Change.’ It’s at the core of my personal beliefs that the library and the staff have the power to help students explore and discover themselves as artists and designers, and to ultimately create a positive impact on their learning.”

Ascencio is keenly aware of the important big-picture issues faced by institutions and the role of the library in supporting overall goals and objectives. Looking ahead as the College continues its South Campus expansion close to downtown Pasadena, Ascencio envisions engaging with his colleagues to discover new opportunities to better serve the Art Center community.

Ascencio’s defining library moment occurred at age 17, when he helped an illiterate woman get her first library card. This empowering experience helped him realize how libraries can impact people’s everyday lives, particularly when it comes to the disadvantaged. A leader in promoting library services to Latinos and Spanish-speakers, he was named a Mover & Shaker by Library Journal in recognition of his commitment to improving and promoting library services at the national and international level.

Wearing your heart rate on your sleeve: Inside the wearable tech revolution

wearables_main

By now you’ve heard of Google Glass. But what about bracelets that measure sun exposure? Headphones that double as heartbeat monitors? Or jewelry that unlocks your front door? Are you ready for the dawn of smart watches, smart earrings, smart contact lenses and smart wigs? And no, that last one isn’t a joke.

The “wearables” field is in an early yet promising stage of its evolution. But Art Center, always striving to stay ahead of industry and cultural trends, has had wearables squarely in its sights for years. Today, our students, instructors and alumni are busy imagining where this technology might head next, creating the devices that are paving the way for the future, and questioning how a wearables-saturated world will change our behavior as human beings.

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New to Art Center? This orientation week survival guide may come in handy.

This week Art Center welcomes new students for a week of orientation and acclimation to life in the arroyo. Before getting down to the nitty gritty, here’s a few fun facts you may not know about the College:

  • The Sculpture Garden once held world-class sculptures on loan from LACMA.
  • Mary Lambert’s recent Body Love video was filmed on the sound stage at Art Center by alum Jon Jon Augustavo.
  • Some say the best bathrooms (and showering facilities) on campus are in the basement of 950 South Raymond.
  • Keep your eyes peeled for the deer wandering around and through Hillside campus. They are often photographed, frequently filmed and much loved.
  • Bears also make an occasional appearance. These appearances are less Facebook-friendly.

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Industrial Design grad Lindsay Nevard on her research into designing a better patient experience

Grad ID student, Lindsay Nevard interviews patients in the service of developing her products for improving patient experience

Grad ID student, Lindsay Nevard interviews patients in the service of developing her products for improving patient experience

Lindsay Nevard is a recent graduate of Art Center’s Graduate Industrial Design program whose thesis focused on improving patient outcomes in physical therapy. For the Dotted Line, Alex Moore interviewed Lindsay about the process of design research, juggling the roles of both designer and researcher, and the potential uses of technology to enhance patient experience.

Alex Moore: I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with the idea of design research. Could you elaborate?

Lindsay Nevard: Design research is doing the research so the product is smart. That means making sure that people are going to like it, that people are going to be able to use it easily, and that it fills a need. It can be as big as: “We are going to create something totally new, what are consumers’ latent desires?” Or it can be as detailed as: “How much should our new product cost and what color should it be?” In both cases it is really important to understand the user you are targeting. You also need to determine the appropriate questions or methods to get the answers you need. When doing interviews, you have to get people comfortable talking and into the right state of mind. You try to coax people into a more playful space. If you give someone a literal map of their workplace, they are going to give you a literal answer. But if you give someone LEGO bricks, they can’t build a literal interpretation and you will often gather more interesting information.

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Art Center’s David Doody moonlights running mission control for NASA’S Cassini Saturn exploration

 

Cassini's ringed target: Saturn.

Cassini’s ringed target: Saturn.

“Right across the Arroyo, we’re making plans for a real close encounter,” says Dave Doody, whose Art Center At Night seminar, “Basics of Interplanetary Flight,” is currently recruiting participants for a class that’s literally out of this world. “My team has been piloting the gangly robot Cassini in wide orbits around Saturn since 2010. But in coming years we’re going to drop in for some up-close-and-personal visits. We’ll plunge the spacecraft between the rings and the planet 22 times before letting go of the spent machine so it can burn up in the gas giant’s atmosphere like a meteor.”

This 2016-2017 segment of Cassini’s 20 year mission has been temporarily dubbed the “Proximal Orbits” by mission planners at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Doody works as a senior engineer, currently leading the Saturn-bound spacecraft’s flight operations controllers. But after acknowledging that some creative person somewhere could almost certainly conjure a more mission-worthy name, NASA launched the Cassini Name Game, hoping for some better ideas.

“One thing about these orbits will be their huge roller coaster speed,” says Doody. “The camera-laden craft will reach more than 120,000 kilometers an hour as it screams past the innermost ring particles just above the hazy atmosphere. Next, it’ll slow down for three and a quarter days, coasting ‘up’ to the top of its 1.2 million kilometer-high peak, before starting to drop back in again for its next pass. Wild.”

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Grad Trans rolls its first grad off the line, fully equipped to change the future of mobility systems

David Day Lee

David Day Lee

Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.

The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”

Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.

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‘Mother nature is the best designer:’ Highlights from Gordon Bruce’s spring 2014 graduation speech

Industrial Design alumnus Gordon Bruce (BS 72) goes bananas at Art Center's Spring 2014 graduation

Industrial Design alumnus Gordon Bruce (BS 72) goes bananas at Art Center’s Spring 2014 graduation. Photo: John Dlugolecki

“Maintain truth to your core and you will be beautiful and create beautiful things in your future,” Industrial Design alumnus Gordon Bruce (BS 72) told graduating students during Art Center’s Spring 2014 Graduation Ceremony on Sat., April 19, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award.

Saying that the award meant “more to me than you’ll ever know,” Bruce delivered  a lively speech in which he recounted: another college’s admissions counselor telling his dad that his son “didn’t have the right stuff” to design; sharpening pencils as a part-time office boy at the studio of architect and designer Eliot Noyes; meeting the “gods of design” through the College’s lecture series, including Charles Eames, Paolo Soleri and Niels Diffrient, the latter with whom he became best friends.

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Agents of boom: Advertising alumni Melissa Thomas and Jack-Anthony Collier

Creative duo Jack-Anthony Collier and Melissa Thomas star in their zine "Birdscouts"

Creative duo Jack-Anthony Collier and Melissa Thomas as featured in their zine Birdscouts.

She’s a copywriter at Deutsch. He’s a copywriter for Mullen. Together, they’ve worked on campaigns for companies like Taco Bell, AT&T, Carls Jr., Kia and JetBlue.

But Art Center Advertising alumni Melissa Thomas (BFA 12) and Jack-Anthony Collier recently put their professional interests aside to tackle one of today’s most pressing issues: the dreaded boom mic mistake. Their solution? CATBOOM.

Okay, on a more serious note, today these creative partners are preparing to channel their creative energy in a different direction. This summer, they’ll be teaching at Art Center’s continuing education program, Art Center at Night, helping students get their advertising portfolios in shape in Advertising Portfolio Workshop.

“We’ll be going through the students’ books, and offering suggestions on how to improve and tighten them up,” says Collier. “We’ll be reviewing their work from an agency’s perspective before they head out into the big wide world.”

And of course, there will be fun.

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Spring 2014 Grad Show: Making the world a better place, by design

Like a field of tulips bursting with color, spring has sprung at Art Center in the form of last weekend’s Grad Show. With an eye-popping array of stunning creations and innovation, works from this term’s wildly talented cohort of graduating students exploded through the hallways and galleries of Hillside and South Campus. Potential employers, curious visitors, beaming family members and excited (yet relieved) friends fawned over the fruits of many years of work and sacrifice grads invested in joining the coveted club of Art Center alumni.

Dazzled as I was by the work, I was able to meet up with a few students. And the following survey offers but a small sample of the artists and designers who stood out for various reasons.

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