NPR’s Sonari Glinton interviews Art Center’s Geoff Wardle. Photo: Teri Bond
Art Center students, faculty, staff and alumni have been making news while making their mark at on the art and design worlds. For those who may have missed a headline or two, we curated this handy highlight reel of our recent media clips:
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.
Remember those days before the Internet? We hardly can.
GOOD points us to a super-cool interactive map by the BBC that shows how Web use has expanded across the globe in the last 12 years.
From GOOD: “In the beginning, it was just the States, Canada, Australia, and (what?) Scandinavia with lots of people online. Today, Africa stands out as the one continent that isn’t wired.”
Check out the graphic: SuperPower: Visualising the internet
Can great design films educate as they entertain? Writer Alissa Walker highlights five films from the last year that she thinks told the best design story in 2009.
Walker writes: “The last few years have seen the issues of winning documentaries tie directly into the issues of the day: When An Inconvenient Truth won in 2006 or The Fog of War won in 2003, it almost seemed like the Academy was voting against climate change or yet another Middle Eastern military engagement. This year, it seems that our gastronomical zeitgeist is behind Food, Inc., which is nominated for best documentary. It’s a pretty compelling and well-executed film that I think should probably win. But it makes me think about what an issues-oriented design film would look like—how could a documentary help convey the value and meaning of great design (designing!) to a wider audience?”
Read more, and see clips, at GOOD.
A major component to the mission of Art Center’s Designmatters Department, which invites students from all disciplines to address humanitarian and social challenges, is to lead “an ongoing exploration of design as a positive force in society.”
Part of this exploration takes place in the field—Designmatters has organized dozens of projects, including the recent Safe Agua Chile, in which students developed systems for storing, transporting and conserving water in impoverished Chilean neighborhoods—but another part happens right here on campus.
Special events give students the chance to meet provocative and inspirational individuals who are using design to make a real difference.
Two recent Designmatters-sponsored events at Hillside Campus did just that.
On January 28, Designmatters and Acting Chief Academic Officer Nik Hafermaas presented “Leading Change for Social Impact: Perspectives from Prominent Innovators,” a forum moderated by Adlai Wertman, professor at the USC Marshall School of Business.
The panelists for the evening event in the Ahmanson Auditorium included Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, who highlighted several recent departmental projects; Rhys Newman, head of strategic projects at Nokia Design, who explained how he uses his company’s extraordinary global reach to push environmental initiatives; and Jonathan Greenblatt, founder of Ethos Water and the open-source All for Good volunteering website, who discussed the business models behind his ventures and the power of the Web to effect social change.
Monday promises to be quite an exciting day at Hillside Campus, thanks to the Design Revolution Road Show. The traveling exhibition, book tour, lecture and workshop series is bringing “product design that empowers” to more than 30 design universities and high schools across the nation. A Project H Design initiative, the road show features a biodiesel-powered truck and Airstream trailer filled with tangible examples of humanitarian industrial design solutions (also showcased in the book Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People).The all-day exhibition, presented at Art Center in collaboration with Designmatters, Alumni Relations and GOOD, will feature a lecture by Emily Pilloton, founder and executive director of Project H Design. The airstream trailer will be parked in front of the main entrance at Hillside Campus, open for viewing from noon until 10 pm. An evening reception will be held starting at 6 pm. You don’t want to miss this!
Design Revolution Road Show
Monday, February 8
Art Center’s Hillside Campus
Open exhibition times: Noon-10 pm
Evening reception: 6-10 pm