Tag Archives: Mariana Amatullo

Thinking Beyond Boundaries: Art Center’s Designmatters Program


Alla Kazovsky has a nice piece about the College’s Designmatters program today in the Huffington Post.

From the posting:

Art Center College of Design prepares students for “an ongoing exploration of design as a positive force for change in society.” That’s the premise of Mariana Amatullo’s talk. Mariana opens her remarks by stating: “It is an interesting moment in time, a moment of change, when creative community — designers and architects — are engaging in social innovation.”

Mariana cofounded Designmatters and has led the program since its inception in 2001. In her capacity, Amatullo does compelling work. Let me tell you a little bit about it. Designmatters is an educational department that horizontally cuts across all of the design disciplines at undergraduate as well as graduate levels—product designers, fine artists and graphic designers work together on the same challenge.

It functions at three levels within the institution. It is a magnet and research division that infuses the curricula with content-based challenges, a consultancy that facilitates real world implementation of the projects with partner organizations and a hub for external relationships that advocates the role of design as a catalyst for social change. In fact, through Mariana’s leadership, Art Center is the first design institution to be formally affiliated with the Department of Public Information at the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO).

Read more: Thinking Beyond Boundaries: Art Center’s Designmatters Program

Ducha Halo at the 2011 NCIIA Open Minds Conference

The following post is reprinted  from the Designmatters blog.

Bright and brilliant minds gathered at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on Saturday, March 26, for Open Minds 2011, the student exhibition organized by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) in conjunction with the organization’s 15th Annual Conference, Open: Catalyzing Innovation. The conference was attended by more than 380 faculty and students throughout the country who share NCIIA’s vision and benefit each year from its mission: “to support technology innovation and entrepreneurship in universities and colleges to create experiential learning opportunities for students, and successful, socially beneficial businesses.”

NCIIA was established in 1995 with the support of The Lemelson Foundation, legacy of prolific inventor Jerome Lemelson. NCIIA provides student start-ups with early stage funding, business strategy development training, mentoring, and investment, as well as provides staff and faculty with funding for courses and programs, opportunities for recognition, and entrepreneurship education training and networking.  Since its founding, NCIIA has funded 325 experiential courses and new programs throughout hundreds of universities around the country and has leveraged more than 140 million dollars in additional funding, helping propel projects that have resulted in more than 100 new businesses.

Jessica and Narbeh at the NCIIA Open Minds event.

The Safe Agua “Ducha Halo” team, Jessica Yeh (ENV) and Narbeh Dereghishian (PROD) were selected among the innovator teams of the Open Minds exhibition and were one of 3 teams whose video of their social innovation was chosen as a top finalist by public vote as part of the  2011 Open Minds video competition.

The weekend also served as a valuable opportunity for  students to network and seek out potential investors and collaborators who can help advance their ideas.  “I can’t believe we had the opportunity to meet these wonderful people that are just as passionate about their projects as much as we are about ours. I have never met so many social impact innovators and bright minds in one setting. I learned so much and gained a different perspective about the whole business side of the project. I am still in the process of trying to soak all of it in! It was a really great experience and we did get some business cards and good questions that definitely challenge us to push the Ducha Halo forward,” reflects Yeh.

For the Art Center faculty engaged in 2 distinct NCIIA -funded projects through Designmatters, NCIIA was an important opportunity to be part of panel discussions and paper presentations.  Safe Agua lead faculty Dan Gottlieb, Penny Herschovitch (ENV) and Liliana Becerra (PROD) attended as well Steve Montgomery (GRAD ID), who along with Becerra (PROD) taught the  Creating Social Value through Design TDS in 2010.

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Not Another Year in Review

The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

As I sit down to write the final blog entry of the year, I am making a conscious decision to resist compiling another trite “year in review” about what we have been up to with Designmatters at Art Center. The truth is that the collective milestones we hit this year are many in number, vast in scope, and often pretty extraordinarily consequential in impact. When I run through a mental log of individual student journeys, staff, faculty and alumni accomplishments, presentations, publications, exhibitions, and project outcomes implemented with our partner organizations, I am quickly overwhelmed and humbled by the sheer power and complexity of it all.

William Ismael, Education for All, detail of poster for UNESCO, 2008

What dwells on, as I look forward to the year to come, are two key and interrelated concepts that were ubiquitous throughout the year, and in turn inform everything we are about: optimism and relevance. As I attempt to anticipate what new opportunities we might embrace, and what challenges we might fence off, these come up again and again.

Optimism–which is an idea so deeply entrenched in the definition of design itself–I always like to refer to Herbert Simon’s profoundly significant framing of design in The Sciences of the Artificial: “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And relevance–which is a concept so influential when you are striving to drive educational projects that are imbued with both at once a pedagogical and social impact mission.

I was taken by an insightful editorial in a recent issue of The Economist about globalization, titled “The Redistribution of Hope,” that canvassed some of the major forces at work in the world today. It captures how “optimism is on the move—with important consequences for the hopeful and the hopeless” and goes on to expose how much more vital it is turning out to be in emerging economies where it challenges the status quo, rather than in our more cushioned “first world” societies. The piece includes a testimonial by Nandan Nilekani who now heads India’s government technology committee and was the inspiring chairman of Infosys. He comments on the greatest achievement of his company being not that of producing technology but “redefining the boundaries of the possible.”

Here’s to us all having the strength and courage to pursue that impetus of shattering boundaries in 2011.

Certainly for us with Designmatters at the college the stakes are high: we are entering into the tenth year of this College-wide program, we are embarking into the first full year of granting our undergraduate students the option to pursue a course of study for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact, and we will welcome the 1st and early cohort of students for the new Media Design Matters Track MA by fall. So here’s also to optimism, full-on!

Better City, Better Life

The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

Art Center’s fall term started for us on the heels of an extraordinary week in Shanghai. Highlights included the opportunity to experience first hand the pageantry and wondrous scale of the 2010 World Expo; a spectacular day at TEDx Shanghai at the invitation of local curator extraordinaire Richard Hsu in which the theme that characterizes this city—fusion—was explored in myriad stimulating ways, meetings at the offices of Continuum and Frog, a window into a bygone China with a visit to the ancient city of Xitang, dinner with local alumni Marcus Lui and Clement Yip, and the presentation of the Safe Agua project at the Expo’s UN Pavilion and at Tongji University in the context of the educational Cumulus Conference Young Creators for Better City, Better Life.

Seeing through educational collaborations that go from the classroom into the world falls squarely within the Designmatters mandate, but even by our exacting standards of “tangible” outcomes, Safe Agua stands in a league of its own given the accelerated curve of implementation of some the solutions proposed by our students, and the depth of ongoing engagement we have with our partners at the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para mi Pais in Santiago and with the communities we are working with.

Shanghai was a global stage that allowed us to showcase the depth of all of the projects components with the Safe Agua exhibition and be there together with the exhibition’s lead team (David Mocarski, Penny Herscovitich, Daniel Gottlieb, K C Cho, Stephanie Stalker, Snow Dong and Ramon Coronado) and two of our partners from Un Techo, Andres Iriondo and Ignacio Gonzalez, to partake in the kudos from peer institutions worldwide.

We are now preparing to share the exhibition with our community at Art Center next spring. Around the same time, the project’s publication Safe Agua, will be hitting bookstores throughout the country, courtesy of DAP. Much to look forward to indeed!

Design Education and Designing for Change

Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo has a wonderful piece up at Core 77 about design education and designing for positive social change.

Amatullo writes: “Historically, designers have always strived to create positive social change, and many celebrated efforts—think back to the Bauhaus—started in schools.

Design intervention by Gavin Alaoen as part of a Graphic Design studio, Graduate Media Design

Both of those things remain true today. In fact, design education has a larger role than ever to play in challenging the status quo around the wicked problems of a crowded planet. Despite, and perhaps because of, the world being in such turmoil, this is a very exciting time for design and designers. I firmly believe that with an expanded tool kit, designers can be instrumental contributors to a conversation about the future that it is getting increasingly layered and multidisciplinary. If we are ever to reduce or curtail dire societal ills and achieve sustainable development—by definition, prosperity that is globally shared and environmentally sustainable—responsible design needs to be front and center as part of the equation.”

Check out the article, and view some student-made PSAs, at Core 77: Deserve Your Dream: Design Education and Advocacy

Safe Agua Project Celebrated in Shanghai

More great Designmatters news: The Safe Agua project, which we’ve told you about before, is the focus of an Art Center exhibition at the Cumulus conference, Young Creators for Better City & Better Life,  held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo in China. Throughout the conference, panel presentations about the collaboration between Un Techo para mi País (UTPMP) and Art Center will bring together the lead creative team of Safe Agua to discuss how design education can be a catalyst for societal change. (Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, is tweeting from the event.)

The transdisciplinary Safe Agua team brought together 12 Art Center students from five majors who spent two weeks in Chile last fall to research and visit communities in desperate need of clean water. The team designed six innovative water solutions at a range of scales: a low-cost portable shower, a water purification kit for a 5-gallon bucket, a gravity-fed system to simulate running water, a multipurpose kitchen workstation, a community laundry and gathering space and a campaign and publication for people living in campamentos (“slums”) to share their own inventions. The families from Campamento San José, in preparation for real world implementation, tested prototypes from the class.

“Our ultimate goal is to create one Latin America, without abject poverty, where every family has a decent house and access to opportunities to improve their quality of life,” said Julián Ugarte, director of UTPMP’s Innovation Center. “Our work with Designmatters at Art Center has proven that that such a future is possible.”

Learn more about the program in this Icsid article and at the Safe Agua Chile blog, and be sure to check out the student-made video about the project below:

Mariana Amatullo Discusses New Designmatters Concentration

These are pretty exciting times at Art Center: this fall we’re launching a new Designmatters concentration. Core 77 recently caught up with Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo to discuss this new course of study, offered to undergraduates wishing to focus on the use of art and design for meaningful social impact.

Amatullo says: “For us, it’s a great chance to educate artists and designers to think about becoming involved in local, national and global issues right at the strategic and leadership levels, the beginning of the life-cycle so to speak of an issue, instead of coming at it at the end to simply style or package a cause.

“For our students, it’s a great chance to connect academic practices to design-based explorations of real world issues. They have the opportunity to step into this space while still a student; at the same time, they’re also asked to step up in the way they look at, confront, research and address real world issues.”

Read more: The Designmatters Concentration at Art Center College of Design: Q&A with Mariana Amatullo, and follow Designmatters on Twitter.

It’s All Good: Designmatters Brings Innovative Guests to Campus

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.

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Leading Change for Social Impact Forum Tomorrow

Don’t miss tomorrow night’s forum: Leading Change for Social Impact: Perspectives from Prominent Innovators. Moderated by USC professor Adlai Wertman, the event will feature Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters; Jonathan Greenblatt, social entrepreneur and founder of All for Good and Ethos Water; and Rhys Newman, head of design strategic projects at Nokia Design and former Art Center faculty member.

The forum will be held tomorrow night, Jan. 28, from 7 to 8:30 pm at the Ahmanson Auditorium.

Designmatters at the Aspen Design Summit

Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, is back from the Aspen Design Summit and has posted a report on the Designmatters blog.

All 64 Summit participants were divided into six groups that were challenged to develop strategies for dealing with diverse challenges.

Amatullo writes: “I was thrilled to be assigned to the UNICEF projects and to reunite with a previous Designmatters’s partner, Christopher Fabian (head of the Innovation unit at UNICEF), and to understand more about the logistics and needs behind UNICEF’s current deployment of resources to reach underserved children and young girls.”

Read more about her experiences at the Designmatters blog.