Tag Archives: Student Work

Your BlackBerry Can Do What?!

The BlackBerry Empathy concept phone has received a great deal of online buzz this week. Not only is the design striking, but the idea behind the device is quite interesting—it’s designed with an interface that can interpret and respond to the user’s emotions.

The concept was created by two Art Center Product Design students, Kiki Tang and Daniel Yoon (they’ve since graduated), for a RIM BlackBerry sponsored project at the College.

The user wears a ring that collects emotional data and graphically displays the user’s emotional state to their personal connections.

According to Yoon: “Each contact has an avatar that is encompassed by two colored rings.

The inner colored ring shows the contact’s previous emotional state, and the outer ring represents the contact’s current emotional state. It is important to show the shift in emotions in order to see how an event has affected that contact.”

The phone also features an “Emotional Health Chart,” monitoring the user’s emotions over time, and finds patterns in behavior and emotions (for instance, a person’s mood may repeatedly plummet after phone calls from a certain individual).

So what do you think? Revolutionary … or just plain creepy?

(Thanks to Yanko Design for breaking the story. More images on their site.)

Everyone Deserves a Roof—And You Can Help

It was while bicycling from Westwood to the beach in Santa Monica that film producer Peter Samuelson began noticing something disturbing—the number of homeless he passed regularly. He started counting. Sixty-two homeless. Just eight miles.

He began interviewing the homeless to find out more about them, how they lived, and what they needed. He conceptualized a mobile, single-person device that would facilitate recycling (a principal source of income for many homeless) by day, and at night convert into a tent-like enclosure for sleeping, with privacy and storage space. It would be called EDAR, short for Everyone Deserves A Roof.

Samuelson approached Art Center to sponsor a studio to design the EDAR. Students Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa designed the product, and have been working pro bono on the project since. EDARs are given free of charge to homeless individuals who are best able to benefit from their recycling and shelter capabilities. But EDARs don’t come cheap. Each one costs around $500 to produce.

For the next four days, Tonic.com is sponsoring a campaign to raise funds for 10 EDARs. That’s a roof over 10 homeless Angelenos.

Watch the L.A. Times video below to see the EDAR out in the field.

From Tonic.com’s article: The final EDAR design boasts a 7-foot-long mattress among an interior high enough for residents to sit up. The EDAR units live at shelters, soup kitchens, day centers, churches, mosques or vacant scraps of land throughout the Los Angeles area and are distributed free of charge, as resources allow. “We give the units to shelters and they give them to specific clients,” explains Samuelson. “The benefit is that they have an ongoing social services. You can push it wherever you want and you can sleep in it wherever you want, and you have to come back once a week, have a shower, have lunch, meet with your supervisor, etc. there’s ongoing counseling.”

Donate to the Tonic.com campaign.

Learn more:

Art Center Media Minute

Some recent media coverage featuring Art Center, our faculty, students and alumni:

Illustration student Jesse Tise was interviewed by Amelia’s Magazine.
Euphoria, by Jesse Tise
The Pasadena Star-News reports on an innovative pet carrier created by alums Melony Lee, Michael Leung and Greg Mote.
The Designmatters and Environmental Design Department’s Safe Agua project received a SPARK! Award, and was featured in Metropolis Magazine.
The Pasadena Star-News and the International Business Times wrote pieces on the Williamson Gallery’s ENERGY exhibition.
The Pasadena Star-News reported on Pasadena’s shop local campaign, designed in partnership with The Agency.
A recent post on Core77 focused on a conversation between Art Center President Lorne Buchman, Product Design Chair Karen Hofmann and frog design about the future of design education.
Art Center once again tops the DesignIntelligence rankings for undergraduate and graduate Industrial Design programs. Also, Karen Hofmann was named a DesignIntelligence “Most Admired Educator” for the second year in a row.
The most recent Los Angeles Times Magazine included an article on Tesla Motors, featuring alumni Franz von Holzhausen, Bernard Lee and Nadya Arnaout.

Safe Agua Wins Top Spark Award

The following post was written by Product Design alumnus Will Tang, Product Design student KC Cho and Environmental Design student Stephanie Stalker for the Designmatters blog.

Last October, our class of 12 students was still busily refining concepts, building mockups, and preparing for midterm presentations for Safe Agua, a sponsored project focused on addressing water issues in the campamentos, or slums, of Santiago, Chile.

Since then, six projects were developed including a shower solution, dishwashing station and community laundromat being field-tested by Un Techo para Chile.

A year later, on October 17, KC Cho made the long drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco to submit Safe Agua for the 2010 Spark Awards, an International Design Competition.

With guidance from Mariana Amatullo, Karen Hofmann, and David Mocarski, Liliana and KC worked diligently to complete the application process. Along with the oversized poster, the Safe Agua documentary by Elizabeth Bayne, Harry Gota by the Ming Tai’s motion team and the Safe Agua book by Lisa Wagner’s graphic team were delivered the next morning to the site of the Spark Awards at the Autodesk office on One Market Street.

Continue reading →

Safe Agua Update

More Designmatters news: Change Observer has a nice write-up on Designmatters’ Safe Agua project, which we’ve written about here before, and which was the focus of an Art Center exhibition at the Cumulus conference held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo last month.

A woman in the campamento tests the Relava kitchen workstation prototype.

From the article: “For the teachers and students in the Environmental and Product Design departments at Art Center College of Design who signed up for the Safe Agua project in Chile, the first engagement with the problem was very close to home. An ‘empathy exercise’ at Art Center’s Pasadena, California, campus, before a two-week field trip to Chile, forced the 15-member team to experience what it’s like to limit their daily water intake to one 5-gallon bucket, and laid the groundwork for understanding the challenges faced by the slum families.”

Three of the projects from this studio—the Ducha Halo portable shower, ReLava kitchen workstation and Mila community laundry facility—have already entered the implementation and testing stages.

The Tale of the Google 5

Do you remember earlier this year when Google ran an ad during the Super Bowl? Here it is below. Take a quick look—we’ll wait:

OK. What is interesting about this ad—despite the fact that it is for a company whose CEO once called advertising “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America”—is that it was created by a group of advertising and design students dubbed the “Google 5.” Recent Art Center Media Design program graduate Jonathan Jarvis was one of five chosen from a pool of 400 applications.

The Google 5: Tristan Smith, J. Smith, Anthony Cafaro, Michael Chang, Johnathan Jarvis

From AdAge: “The 5 program is an experiment launched last year by the Google Creative Lab and its executive creative director, Robert Wong. The company sent a call out to 12 schools searching for interesting talent who would work inside the Creative Lab for a year and then be sent out unto the industry. So, with the Google 5, the company gets new creative blood and the industry gets young talent that is schooled in Google, and, by extension, the post-digital/new advertising way—tech-forward, open-source, collaborative and smart.”

The 5 worked on a wide range of projects, from the Nexus phone to Hulu ads to the Google Christmas card. Their year-long tenure ended in June. But the new Google 5 have arrived—and it includes Chris Lauritzen, a designer/”wild card” from Art Center ‘s Media Design program.

We can’t wait to see what they produce. They’re already tackling projects including Google search, Google TV and the Chrome browser.

Read more in this fascinating story at AdAge: Meet the Google 5, the Team Behind ‘Parisian Love’ Super Bowl Spot

Just Add Water

The following post was written by 5th Term Transportation Design student Tom Harezlak for the Designmatters blog.

Who needs an alarm clock when you can wake to the sound of a choir of monks?

NikolausKloster, a 600 year-old monastery in Germany, has an atmosphere that I would describe as a charming castle mixed with frat house. This special place was home to me and 23 others for a week as we learned about key issues of sustainability and attempted to tackle some of them. This was the second Sustainable Summer School, and I was grateful to be sponsored as attendee by Designmatters, the social impact design department at my school, Art Center College of Design.

“Summer” is a loose term, however, because September in Duesseldorf can get quite cold as I discovered. The warmth of my company was tremendous; a point that illustrated the value of bio-diversity. Our culturally diverse group hailed from nine different countries and this added richness to the experience. All the workshop participants were either design students or practicing designers, but we were in the company of a philosopher, sociologist, artists, a CEO and ecological researchers. The program was born out of collaboration between faculty from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy and Ecosign, an ecologically focused design academy.

For the week we stayed in this sanctuary with little internet and poor cell reception; it was great. The brothers of the order made our food and much of it was grown on site. We left the countryside for one day to visit Cologne and hear expert speakers at Ecosign.

Biologists and a sociologist presented two points of view on swarms and swarm intelligence. Their research was fascinating and their debate heated. Experiments illustrated the dynamic probability of humans to behave like a swarm. All this while psychological factors would indicate that this behavior would never be predictable when applied to humans.

Another point communicated was that a group may be able to solve a problem that no one individual in the group is able to. Then it was up to our teams of designers to present the relevance we believed it had to design. Throughout the week I was elected to present as a native English speaker and because I was “the easiest to understand,” though there was a proper Brit on call. I suppose I have Hollywood to thank for that.

Continue reading →

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 a rticle and at the Safe Agua Chile blog, and be sure to check out the student-made video about the project below:

ArtCenter News

ArtCenter College of Design

301 Moved Permanently