Tag Archives: internship

Designmatters student Adriana Crespo hones her human-centered design skills in Nigeria

Designmatters student Adriana Crespo

Designmatters student Adriana Crespo

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to be part of an incredible team of creative people with backgrounds in business design, interaction design, industrial design, engineering and writing, to mention a few. This multidisciplinary group of people make up IDEO.org, a non-profit born from design consultancy (IDEO).   IDEO.org saw the power and success of design thinking and human-centered design, and decided to apply these methodologies to solve pressing issues of poverty around the world.

Being a Designmatters Concentration student, I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to start exercising my design skills in the social impact field. My title of “graphic design intern” only partially describes all the tasks and challenges I was asked to take on.

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Getty Foundation Awards Multicultural Internship to Art Center Library

Internships can create powerful futures. Just ask Rachel Wen-Paloutzian. In 2009, she held a summer internship at Art Center’s James Lemont Fogg Memorial Library, supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of its Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program. The internship proved to be a critical step toward her current career as special collections librarian at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library.

Rachel-WP

A Getty Foundation grant to Art Center made it possible for Rachel Wen-Paloutzian to intern in our library.

“Art Center was where I came up with the ideas that led to my master’s thesis at UCLA and where I first learned about metadata and digital collections,” Wen-Paloutzian explains. “Today I enjoy working with historical materials and rare books, as well as encouraging academic communities to come discover the hidden treasures of the Library. The Art Center internship was an important milestone for me.”

This summer will be the 10th year that the Foundation has awarded an internship grant to Art Center. The internship program provides full-time summer work opportunities for outstanding students who are members of groups currently underrepresented in museums and arts organizations. Since the program’s founding in 1993, 150 local arts institutions and museums, as well as the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, have hosted over 2,800 internships, exposing these students to career possibilities in the arts.

For Art Center students, faculty and staff, the opportunity to work with individuals from a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives enriches the Art Center experience. Diversity and inclusion are among the College’s six governing values and principles and broadly represented throughout Art Center’s strategic plan, and the Getty Foundation grant is helping to expand the College’s efforts in this area.

For Vanessa Samaniego, a senior at the University of Notre Dame, last summer’s Multicultural Undergraduate internship was similarly transformative. “I’m grateful to have learned so much about the Library and the College,” she says, “and to have discovered a whole new field of interest — design.”

Samaniego’s library responsibilities included digitizing images, developing library materials, helping curate student work for an exhibit, cataloging children’s books, planning and promoting library events and color-editing a fashion magazine. “After being surrounded by so many entrepreneurial design students,” she continues, “I went back to school and was able to implement design concepts in an entrepreneurial course this past fall.”

The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. More information about the Foundation’s grant-making is available online at getty.edu/foundation.

Related:

Art Center Receives NEH Grant to Preserve Industrial Design History

The Librarians Have Landed! And They’re Coming to Art Center

In Search of Textured Stories: An Illustration Student Explores Children’s Books by African-American Illustrators

Student Shares Product Design Internship Lessons

Sometimes, the lessons learned in the field are the ones that stick the most. Geoff Ledford, a graduating Art Center student in Product Design, recently wrote an article for Fast Company detailing his experiences interning at Soulcake Creative in San Clemente, California.

“As a designer, I draw and work in 3D – communication via pictures and sketches,” said Ledford. “But prior to deciding to become a designer, I was a writer. My thought was that if I shared some of these lessons, they might help someone else.”

Product Design graduate Geoff Ledford.

Geoff Ledford talks about his design internship experiences in a recent Fast Company article.

His lessons boil down to four points:

  • Kill your ego. “A tinge of hubris can quickly contaminate an otherwise good relationship,” said Ledford. “And with so many capable design consultancies all ready to do the same job, it’s important to stay humble.”
  • Bring passion to your presentation. While working at Soulcake, one of the partners at the studio explained, “A good presentation shouldn’t just give me information–it should evoke emotion.” Ledford realized that his work could not solely rely on analytical justification, but rather worked best when it incorporated emotional elements.
  • Find your own voice. No matter what kind of work, this advice is crucial to anything creative. Ledford makes his case with jazz musician Freddie Hubbard who had to find a voice that was his own instead of being an imitation of Miles Davis. Likewise, when Ledford said he tried creating work he thought his boss would want, “the result was a bunch of concepts that lacked my voice and, consequently, weren’t authentic.”
  • Work will always be there.Wanting to make a good impression, one day Ledford opted to go in the office early to work rather than surf with one of the owners. Instead of pushing Ledford into the office, the owner responded that he thought Ledford should surf: “There is always work and the waves aren’t always this good.” Like any creative endeavor, exploring opportunities outside of design (like surfing) gives fresh perspective.

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