Tag Archives: footwear design

Alumni video: adidas Head of Innovation Al Van Noy on the intersection of design, footwear and pop culture

Product Design alum Al Van Noy has spent the past twenty-four years devising adidas gear to make us stronger, faster, better and, yes, cooler. As the iconic athletic brand’s Head of Innovation, Van Noy oversees a large team of designers, technologists and sports scientists responsible for anticipating industry trends and creating products designed to serve a wide array of consumers’ needs and wants, ranging from high-performance footwear for professional athletes to a suite of classic and contemporary must-have kicks and sports accessories for everyone else. In other words, it’s Van Noy’s job to maintain and enhance the star power of those three stripes.

As Art Center’s Product Design department prepares to send another cohort of students to kick off its annual PENSOLE Footwear Design Academy Challenge, a two-week footwear design master class in adidas’ US home-base of Portland, Oregon, we’re proud to feature the above video tracing Van Noy’s steps from Pasadena to Portland and his ongoing journey into the stratosphere of footwear innovation.

 

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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Nike designer D’Wayne Edwards dares students to supersize their dreams

D'Wayne Edwards at Pensole demonstrating a few of the kicks he's designed

D’Wayne Edwards at Pensole demonstrating a few of the kicks he’s designed

“Are you awake?”

With these words, more of a challenge than a question, D’Wayne Edwards begins to make inroads into rowdy scrum of inner city high school students seated before him in Art Center’s Ahmanson Auditorium. The response: a cacophony of groans.

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a late October Monday morning and Edwards, founder of Pensole Design Academy and former design director for Nike’s Jordan brand, has come to Art Center to inspire and illuminate the opportunities available to creative students in various areas of design. He has spent enough time with teenagers to know that engaging them at this time of day can be a losing battle. And he’ll need to act quickly to establish that he understands where they’re coming from and, more importantly, he knows what they need to do to get to someplace worth going in the future.

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