Tag Archives: Graduate Transportation Design

Street to Screen Car Classic 2014 is around the corner. Start revving your engines!

On Sunday, October 27 2013, Pasadena’s rustic hillside played temporary home to an array of fierce creatures nonnative to these bucolic climes. On Art Center’s lawn alone, there were reported sightings of Barracudas, Mako Sharks, Stingrays, Cobras, Beetles and a herd of Italian bulls of the Lamborghini variety.

Last year’s “Inspired by Nature” theme of Art Center’s annual classic car confab inspired the above video, directed by Graduate Film student Tatyana Kim. And we have little doubt that this year’s version of the event, “Street to Screen,” celebrating the automotive stars of screens big and small, will similarly gun engines, spark plugs, charge batteries and maybe even catalyze converters.

This year’s fleet of cinematic concept cars will include Batmobiles through the ages, Bumblebee from the franchise (directed by Art Center alum, Michael Bay) and Herbie the Love Bug, among many others. Festivities kick off on October 26th at 11 am at Art Center’s Hillside campus. Advance tickets and information can be found here.

For more than 10 years, Art Center’s Car Classic has examined automotive culture and vehicle architecture through the lens of design. More than just another high-profile car show, this popular public event celebrates the very best in automotive design, showcasing the College’s strong ties to industry and honoring many of our noteworthy alumni.

This year, transportation designers, car collectors, filmmakers and auto and lifestyle enthusiasts will converge at Art Center’s annual event to hear from and meet the people who design the vehicles that we love to see cruising Sunset Boulevard, coasting along scenic byways or roaring to life on the big screen. This daylong celebration will provide attendees an up-close-and-personal look at a carefully curated selection of innovative vehicles, rare automobiles and stunning concept cars.

For those who can’t attend, keep your eyes on this space for our own video tribute to the icons of LA’s two defining industries, each dedicated to stylishly transporting us into other realities, literally and figuratively.

Watch the thrilling conclusions to the latest Myspace student video projects

This past spring, three students working in different disciplines (Photography, Graduate Transportation Design and Interaction Design) bravely chose to accept the challenge/opportunity (those last two words may as well be permanently fused—no slash necessary— when it comes to artistic endeavors) to reveal the agony and the ecstasy, the challenges and the epic fails that go into conceiving and creating a project over the course of a term. They had enlisted in Art Center’s ongoing collaboration with Myspace to highlight Art Center’s unique approach to creativity and diligently, digitally tracked his/her progress with a trio of videos shot at the beginning, middle and end of the creative journey.

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Grad Trans rolls its first grad off the line, fully equipped to change the future of mobility systems

David Day Lee

David Day Lee

Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.

The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”

Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.

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Grad Transportation student gets lost and found in translation in Taipei

Sharing drawing techniques and opinions on design over dinner in Taiwan are (L to R) Jr Feng Kwan, Ying-Hsiu Chen, Raul-David Poblano and Russell Singer.

Sharing drawing techniques and opinions on design over dinner in Taiwan are (L to R) Jr Feng Kwan, Ying-Hsiu Chen, Raul-David Poblano and Russell Singer.

It was Friday at the end of week 12, summer 2013 term, and like most Art Center students I was busy. Unlike most students who were busy with drawings and artwork and projects, I was busy packing for a leap of faith. I would attempt to finish out my term from across the world in Taipei, Taiwan, as I participated in National Taiwan University of Science and Technology‘s (NTUST) International Summer Design Workshop. I finished packing, preoccupied with thoughts about school work and the unknowns of a distant place, when my phone buzzed. Cedric, my partner for two studios (and also a Taiwan native), had arrived to give me a lift to LAX. My classmate Raul-David would be joining me for the actual workshop, and so Cedric and I set off to pick him up. As we drove we discussed plans for our coursework, and he offered helpful tips about his home country; I realized I’d have to trust a lot of people this week, especially Cedric.

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