Tag Archives: Graduate Industrial Design

Spring 2016 orientation: Back-to-school pro tips for surviving and thriving at ArtCenter

 

Student orientation

Student orientation

Ah, the first day of school. It’s an initiation fraught with the anxiety of the unknown and flashbacks to the horrors of middle school cafeteria mishaps. Fortunately, ArtCenter has built in a full schedule of activities to provide a soft landing to incoming students and their families.

Orientation Week’s busy agenda features social mixers and in-depth information sessions on everything from campus sustainability to the infamous ArtCenter critique. Students are also matched with Orientation Leaders, who act as guides, companions and resources for the latest insider information on navigating the academic, social and geographic peculiarities of life at ArtCenter

In the spirit of optimizing the orientation week experience for the incoming class of 2016, we’ve compiled the following authoritative collection of pro tips from our Facebook community of current and former students to help ArtCenter newbies avoid rookie mistakes.

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Food for Thought: GradID alums Anuja Joshi and Geetika Agrawal design a local solution to global wanderlust

Food for Thought founders Geetika Agrawal and Anuja Joshi

Food for Thought founders Geetika Agrawal and Anuja Joshi

Impresario is not often listed among the careers available to industrial designers. Then again, neither is chef, host or community organizer. But combine all those roles under the umbrella of entrepreneurial problem solving and you have the makings for a successful startup deeply rooted in ArtCenter’s Graduate Industrial Design (GradId) curriculum.

Food for Thought, the brainchild of Anuja Joshi (MS 09 GradID) and Geetika Agrawal (MS 04 GradID), is a digital portal curating events around the globe hosted by local cooks offering a menu of their favorite recipes. The result: a local solution to lonely planet ennui in the form of dinner parties satisfying a universal desire for community, good food and the wonder of discovery unique to exotic travel—minus the cost of airfare and lodging.

Not surprisingly, Food for Thought, has found some serious traction with wanderlusty foodies and adventurous flocking to events worldwide. Case in point: At the most recent gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, Manuel Nascimiento whipped up some of his favorite African-inflected dishes from his childhood for a sold out crowd.

Joshi and Agrawal’s traveling dinner party may not make it Pasadena for quite some time. So we tracked them down to answer a few questions about the origins of their intimate gatherings and their unorthodox approach to industrial design.

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Onward and upward: Art Center’s Spring 2015 Grad Show

Bruno Gallardo shows off his Zero Motorcycle prototype to alum Miguel Galluzzi of Aprilia/Piaggio. Photo by Jennie Warren

Bruno Gallardo shows off his Zero Motorcycle prototype to alum Miguel Galluzzi of Aprilia/Piaggio.
Photo by Jennie Warren

A fresh crop of creatives, 205 strong graduated from Art Center this past weekend, ready to harvest and haul their skills to the marketplace. The first pages of these grads’ yet-to-be-told professional narratives could involve launching a start-up, diving into a new position at a high-profile agency or escaping on a global adventure to see the world and collect some inspiration in the wilderness instead of the concrete jungle.

We decided to check in with a few during Spring 2015 Grad Show—our annual recruitment open house.

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Alum De Liu’s Xiaomi Inc. inspires China’s growing ranks of design entrepreneurs

Art Center alum De Liu

Art Center alum De Liu

Mr. De Liu, Co-founder and Vice President of Xiaomi Inc., graduated with a Master’s degree from Art Center College of Design in Industrial Design. Because of his outstanding academic performance, top U.S. universities began to cast their eyes at emerging design talents in China. As the saying goes, “it takes a decade to sharpen a sword.”

It was a long and arduous grind for De Liu to grow from being an ordinary designer to his current position as a successful business leader and entrepreneur. De Liu will share his experience as a designer and entrepreneur at the Create Change Design Forum to be held from September 19 to 20, 2015. Visit www.accdchina.com for more information.

Now let’s take a peek at how his Art Center design education impacted his professional ascent as well as the development of his personal abilities.

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Ready. Set. Snap! Corporate teams stretch boundaries at rubber band-powered Formula-E race

Formula-E 2014-7008

Team Mattel celebrates record breaking speed after competing in the new Formula-E race Pro-Class category.

Figuring out how to build and power a race car using a 16-foot long rubber band is not your typical corporate team building exercise. But, it turns out, that’s exactly the kind of creative boost the business world needs. For the first time, the international Formula-E race at Art Center included a “Pro Class” category with teams participating from Mattel in El Segundo and Axial, a remote control car company based in Irvine. Competition was fierce and teams were gunning for the gold in the 9th annual “day at the races” showcasing talented students, businesses and even a junior race car design set.

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The age of the rocket-powered roller skates has arrived, like a futuristic ’70′s fever-dream made real

Acton Global

Acton Global

Today, the BBC’s Autos section published the following story about Art Center Grad ID alum, Peter Treadway’s ingenious antidote to urban commuter blues: RocketSkates. Treadway (MS, ’08) began devising these motorized shoe attachments (which resemble a futuristic take on the Roman chariot, with two large red wheels attached to a metal carriage) as part of his thesis project at Art Center.  Seven years later, his high concept roller skates have come to fruition, lending new dimensions of fun and functionality to the booming wearable tech space. Read on to learn more.

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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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Speed making: Art Center students make a clean sweep in Dyson’s rapid prototyping workshops

Before James Dyson first mesmerized TV viewers with his early demonstrations of his sleekly designed and innovatively engineered vacuum cleaner, capable of coaxing the dirt from off any surface, home cleaning devices were many things but sexy wasn’t one of them. But after Dyson’s invention captured the popular imagination (not to mention a landfill’s worth of grit and grime) and became the industry standard for home suction, consumers’ perceptions (and expectations) of vacuums were forever altered, in terms of both performance and prettiness.

Though such paradigm shifting innovations are dependent upon a mysterious combination of luck, timing, research and inspiration. The Dyson company has continued to expand upon its success by upholding its high standards for innovative design and engineering. Cultivating the next generation of design innovators is another vital part of the company’s forward-thinking ethos. To that end, the James Dyson Foundation has been rewarding ground-breaking feats of creative engineering with the James Dyson Award, created in 2002, which offers a $45,000 prize to a design that “solves a problem.”

The foundation has recently started seeding the field by conducting design engineering workshops with K-12 students in Chicago. Last week that strategy graduated to the college level, when a team of Dyson engineers lead Art Center students from three departments — Transportation, Product Design and Graduate Industrial Design — in an exercise testing their teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and craftsmanship.

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Student designs the Air Jordans of high performance sailing shoes

Nina Viggi's high performance Dinghy shoe

IDEA gold medalist Nina Viggi’s One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe.

Since its inception in 1965, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has recognized “positive impact” in design. In 22 years of competition, Art Center students have taken 70 medals in IDSA’s highly competitive International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).

When IDSA announced the most recent IDEA winners, they included—among Art Center’s eight finalists in the 2013 competition—three medal winners. Graduate Industrial Design student Nina Viggi took home a gold medal for her One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe, designed for competitive sailing. Continue reading →

Beijing team’s rubber band-powered car snags grand prize at 8th Annual Formula-E race

Formula-E Best in Show winners, from Beijing University of Technology

Formula-E Best in Show winners, from Beijing University of Technology

Champagne flowed as winners and challengers celebrated after a long road of trial and error in the annual Formula-E race at Art Center on August 8, 2013.

Teams from three Southern California colleges and two universities in China were sweating it out as their remote controlled, rubber band-powered cars zoomed around the tracks for five hours in the afternoon sun.

The top award, Best in Show, was presented to team Final-E from Beijing University of Technology. The talented team members Sui Hao, Xuan Jinran and Zhang Han also placed in three other race categories. The only other competitor to do the same was Art Center’s team Tensegrity, consisting of Renee Mascarinas, Kun Huang and Jecky Chow. (See below for more race results.)

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