Spike TV’s Framework, a furniture design reality show, features Product Design alum, Nolan Niu as a judge
From Oxygen’s Street Art Throwdown to Spike TV’s Framework to the 2015 Academy Awards to Toyota’s MIRAI—Art Center alumni were featured across the media landscape, doling out expertise on art and design-based reality shows and creating inventive animation and futuristic vehicles. See the full scope of this month’s alumni accomplishments below.
Media Design Practices students Kristina Ortega and Jenny Rodenhouse’s Wearable Services, created by the Intel-funded Connected Bodies course. Photo by Stella Kalinina
From business ventures to social justice, cultural research to experimental mediums, transportation systems to spatial experiences, Art Center’s renowned graduate programs offer designers and artists exceptional opportunities to create unique and personal career and life paths.
For the recently released 2015–16 Viewbook, Art Center Provost Fred Fehlau invited leaders from the College’s six graduate programs—Art, Environmental Design, Film, Industrial Design, Media Design Practices, and Transportation Systems and Design—to offer their perspectives on the current state of their fields, and what it means for prospective graduate students.
Hines Fischer drafts his “people-centric” designs
One of the first students to enroll in the Furniture and Fixtures track of Art Center’s Graduate Environmental Design program when it launched, Hines Fischer specializes in “people-centric” furniture design for office spaces. He is among a select group of students to represent the College at both the 2013 and 2014 International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) during New York Design Week.
Last year, he says, “it was really nice to get the chance to go to a show like this before I had jobs on the line, so that I could kind of take in the landscape. I took a lot of notes and met a lot of famous designers, which was an incredible experience.” Fischer also reconnected there with people he had met while interning at a furniture company prior to coming to Art Center. “I reminded them that I would be graduating soon.”
At last week’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York, 25 designers from Art Center were honored in a retrospective celebrating the completion of a series of five innovative interdisciplinary studios sponsored by Bernhardt Design.
Personally championed by Bernhardt Design President Jerry Helling and Environmental Design Chair David Mocarski, the course was created to educate students in the process of designing products ultimately viable for production. At the conclusion of each studio, Bernhardt Design selected products for introduction in the commercial market. Since its inception, the design-through-production studio concept has served as a model for other similar educational programs.
Bernhardt Design’s partnership with Art Center came about from the school’s strong relationship with industry as well as its reputation as a leading art and design institution for more than 80 years. The studio course, hosted by the Environmental Design Department, has successfully trained students over the past seven years to design products that are visually stunning, appropriate for the commissioning manufacturer, fiscally feasible and suitable within the constraints of mass production. The products developed from the Bernhardt Design studios have not only been award winning, but commercially successful around the world.
Former Art Center students have embarked on successful careers, from designing for Marcel Wanders in Amsterdam to starting their own creative studios to working with top-tier manufacturers worldwide. Furthermore, the work of 20 designers from the program are currently in production with Bernhardt Design including the Red Dot Award-winning Loft chair by Shelly Shelly, the Audio chair by Chris Adamick, and Linc tables by Chase Wills.
Check out more of the work at the Designing Experience website.