Tag Archives: frog design

Art Center Business Club launches design networking tour through San Francisco’s most innovative design studios

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 2.25.08 PMHailing Uber cabs, grabbing a cup of the Bay Area’s finest coffee, snapping photos of Fisherman’s Wharf and meeting with some of the biggest design consultancies on the West Coast—it’s all in a day’s work for the the members of Art Center Business Club.

This past May, 14 members of the Art Center Business Club (ACBC) packed up for a week of exciting studio tours in San Francisco– ten in all. The agenda included meetings with such consultancies as IDEO, frog design, inc., and NewDealDesign, as well as print and media companies like Chronicle Books and WIRED.

In a time of unprecedented competition for art and design jobs, students actively seek out studios and companies they can join to jumpstart their careers. Students participate in internships offering a deeper understanding of a particular company’s creative ethos and workflow without the commitment of a full-time job. However, internships are seasonal and require a significant time commitment in order to determine whether that particular organization is a good fit. This is where studio visits come in. They deliver valuable insights into working culture, company culture, company structures—all the things you don’t learn as a student searching a firm’s website. With this knowledge, applicants emerge more informed and prepared to face the professional world.

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How embracing failure has helped John Ryan design solutions to life’s most puzzling questions

John Ryan (second from left) works with UNICEF and frog design staff on mHealth solutions

John Ryan (second from left) works with UNICEF and frog design staff on mHealth solutions

What was your background prior to Art Center?
I was born in Dublin, Ireland and studied multimedia as an undergraduate. I began my career working as a digital and web designer, and early on I knew that I really wanted to start my own studio. After working for a couple of in-house design teams, I couldn’t quite find the right fit: designers weren’t supposed to have the desire to move so broadly throughout the design process. So I started my own business and worked directly with clients throughout Ireland and UK. It was a fun couple of years and I learned a lot from the experience.

But I had always had a desire to go to grad school, and with my weird mix of interests across disciplines — design and art, technology and code, politics and culture — I became hungry for a new challenge that would integrate more of my own passions and curiosities into my design practice.

Art Center’s Media Design Practices program was exactly the kind of interdisciplinary environment I was looking for—innovative, experimental design work that would give me a platform to engage with the bigger ideas, concepts and questions that lay beyond the previous client work I had been doing.

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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

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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LEAP Symposium kicks off with a line-up of pioneers in design and social innovation

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One hundred thought leaders and educators in design and innovation will converge at Art Center College of Design September 19–21 for the LEAP Symposium, a convening comprised of a series of focused conversations exploring new career pathways for designers in the emerging field of social innovation. For more information about LEAP, including participant photos and bios, please visit the newly launched website.

The weekend-long symposium was conceived and hosted by Mariana Amatullo, Vice President, Designmatters Department with a national braintrust that includes: Allan Chochinov, Chair Products of Design, School of Visual Arts and Partner, Core 77; Lee Davis, Scholar-in-Residence, Center for Social Design, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); William Drenttel, Director, Winterhouse Institute and Edirorial Director, Design Observer and LEAP Symposium Editorial Director; Robert Fabricant, Vice President of Creative, frog; Jocelyn Wyatt, Co-Lead and Executive Director, IDEO.org.

Portions of the event are open to students, faculty, staff and members of the public. Check out the schedule below. And if you can’t attend in person, you can also tune into the livestream of LEAP’s opening session and LunchTime Talks here.

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The Collective Action Toolkit workshop equips designers and changemakers with versatile problem-solving techniques

David Sherwin leads the Collective Action Toolkit workshop.

David Sherwin leads the Collective Action Toolkit workshop. Photography by Takayuki Mark Kasuya

“Go ahead and join a group.” This was David Sherwin’s opening directive to the students and faculty members spilling into Art Center’s faculty dining room for the Designmatters-sponsored Collective Action Toolkit workshop.  Sherwin, interaction design director and researcher at frog design in San Francisco, was not merely suggesting attendees sidle up to strangers. It was a non-negotiable requirement, which I discovered when I suggested I would not join a group because I only present to observe and report. “This is all about collaboration, so why don’t you find a group and participate?”

Roger that. Next thing I knew, I had wedged myself into a table full of students seated near the back of the room. We then embarked on our first assignment — writing our names and special talents on separate pieces of paper, which we’d then merge into one document listing our group’s core competencies. This exercise represents the Collective Action Toolkit’s first step in assessing the resources available to each collaborative cohort. In our case, we possessed an unsurprising abundance of design, drawing and drafting skills along with singing, writing and storytelling. Though we had no idea what task we would be asked to perform; it was hard, at that point, to see how this hodgepodge of talents would meld into a whole that was stronger than the sum of its parts.

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