Tag Archives: Students

MDP Showcased in Little Tokyo Design Week

Art Center’s Graduate Media Design (MDP) program will be among the international designers, architects, filmmakers, corporations and other educational institutions exploring the “New Urban Lifestyle” as part of Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City (LTDW) this week. LTDW celebrates the power and energy of cutting-edge design and technology emerging from Japan and its relation to current trends materializing in Los Angeles.

“We look forward to participating alongside world class designers, artists and creative thinkers and engaging the public in an exciting dialogue about the future of our cities and the future of design,” says MDP Chair Ann Burdick.

Taking place July 14 through 17, the free, four-day public festival will span the geographic breadth of downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district with a series of museum exhibitions, student installations, public happenings and temporary galleries in the form of shipping containers placed throughout the public plazas of Little Tokyo. Under the auspices of the MDP program, the College will produce three separate projects for LTDW exploring how design and technology will shape lives in the cities of the future.

“Grad Media Design emphasizes an approach that responds to issues without the assumption of a particular type or mode of outcome and, similarly, to resist the adaptation of common assumptions for topics of technological or social concern,” says Tim Durfee, core faculty and director of amp: Projects in Media and Architecture within the MDP program. “This ethic is in evidence for both our PLAN C installation and Metropolis of Me symposium, in which we approach familiar topics from somewhat novel directions in order to reveal overlooked opportunities or implications.”

There are three projects being produced by Grad Media Design for LTDW.

Continue reading →

Art Center Tops IDSA College Wins with Six Awards

Cadence by Seth Astle

Today the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) unveiled the winners of the 2011 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) program—a celebration of design excellence in products, sustainability, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts.

We’re excited and honored to report that Art Center topped this year’s list of college wins with six student and professional awards. In total, Art Center has won 59 IDEAs since 1991—more than any other school, and in the top 10 of any other institution, corporate or educational.

This year’s winners:

Product Design

Grad ID

Design Strategy & Management (professional category)

  • BRONZE: Mariana Amatullo, Elisa Ruffino, David Mocarski, Karen Hofmann, Liliana Becerra, Penny Herscovitch, Dan Gottlieb, Safe Agua project

Art Center also had many finalists:

  • German Aguirre, Centaur High Performance Quad Rugby Wheelchair
  • KC Cho and Jackie Black, SAFE AGUA: ReLava Kitchen Workstation
  • Jessica Yeh & Narbeh Dereghishian, SAFE AGUA: Ducha Halo Portable Shower
  • Stéphane Angoulvant, Dexter Work Sled
  • Joel Greenspan, Oplei Transitional Running Shoe
  • Jin Kim, Flameingo Sustainable Fire Extinguisher
  • Joey Wang, Lien Sustainable Funerary Ritual for Taiwan
  • Mark Huang, Orbital modular sport performance eyewear for POC
  • Mike Wang, STACK Traffic Control Products
  • Matthew Lim, Sennheiser Eco-Vinyl Turntable
  • Pengtao Yu, U-Haul Emergency Response Conversion Kit for the American Red Cross

Congratulations to all the students, faculty, and staff for your hard work and for a job well done! Co.Design has a nice gallery of the winners on their site.

Find Out How Your Garden Grows


Have you ever wondered how to grow a tomato? Are you looking for new ingredients to add spice to your cooking? Would you be willing to share your gardening secrets? Interested in learning more about sustainable growing practices?

Whether you have a green thumb, or are a gardening novice, EcoCouncil and Art Center invites the Art Center community to grab a trowel, put on your gardening gloves and plant with us. Our new campus garden is intended to be a learning, teaching and recreation space for the College community that allows us to experience what it means to live in harmony with our environment. It is a space for experimentation, investigation and exploration of concepts of lifecycle and sustainability.

The garden is the result of careful planning, partnership with Art Center Student Government and facilities, and the support of the College president and senior staff. This collaboration has resulted in a unique and beautiful garden design incorporating low-impact materials.

Become a “founding grower” and begin your garden! We’ll provide the soil, sunshine and water. Individual students, faculty and staff, or student groups can sign up for a planting bed, which can be used to grow organic food plants or ornamentals. Eat what you grow, or share your harvest. Go to the Garden’s Facebook page for more information and to reserve a plot. Spaces will be assigned for the term in the order received.

In Case You Missed It

Photo by Eric Curry

As you know, there’s always something going on when it comes to Art Center alumni, students and faculty.

Some of the latest:

Film Students Receive Honors

Our undergrad and graduate film students have been busy—several have garnered awards and recognition for their work recently.

Two Film students won Young Director Awards at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival: Y-C Tom Lee for his AIDS public service announcement and John X. Carey for his Voices From the Field documentary.

The Association of Independent Commercial Producers held their annual AICP Awards Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on June 7. Numerous film schools across the country competed in the Best Student Commercial category, and seven of the 10 national finalists were current Art Center film students. Undergraduate film major Ian Kammer won the highest honor— Best Student Commercial—with his North Face: Hibernation spot.

Other Art Center student winners included:

Undergraduate Film:
Gevorg Karensky: Adidas – Impossible Is Nothing
Y-C Tom Lee: Gatorade
Ted Marcus: Laphroaig Scotch Whiskey – Winter Revel

Graduate Broadcast Cinema:
Erik Anderson: Red Bull — Small Can of Big Whoop-Ass
Paul Linkogle: Band-Aid – Beginnings
Michael Lutter: Roaring Lion Energy Drink (shown above)

Congrats on these well-deserved honors!

IDB hosts Safe Agua Exhibit in Washington, D.C.


The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is hosting an exhibit on innovative and affordable designs to provide safe water, Internet solutions and entrepreneurship opportunities for people living in poverty.

The Design Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid exhibit will showcase solutions developed by the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, a non-governmental organization based in Santiago, Chile. Six different safe water solutions developed by Designmatters students in partnership with the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais will be on display. These safe water solutions were developed by connecting design students with families living in poverty with limited access to running water and other basic services. In 2010, these solutions were used to help hundreds of Chileans affected by the earthquake.

Read more: IDB hosts exhibit on innovative design solutions to improve the lives of the poor

MDP Grads Help Define Future of Mobile

Alex Braidwood's Synthetic Din

The L.A. Times Hero Complex blog has a great piece on the evolution of mobile apps, and even better—it features the thesis projects from recent Graduate Media Design grads Alex Braidwood and Scott Liao!

From the article:

Media artists such as Alex Braidwood, 32, are in fact harnessing smart devices as the means to a more aesthetically nuanced end. The Art Center College of Design graduate programmed the iPhone’s built-in camera to function as a sensor that detects blue, red and yellow tones. The Synesthetic Din program then translates the colors into an ever-shifting electronic composition that plays into a user’s ear buds as he or she walks down the street.

“To me the most interesting things about smart phones and iPads is that they have all these capabilities that are just waiting to be glued together in new ways,” says Braidwood. “I like turning these devices into little performance machines.”

Braidwood, who last month earned his master of fine arts in Media Design, notes, “Most apps are commodities that people get either because it helps them do something or it’s some kind of novelty game. But there’s this space in the middle where it’s not about guiding you to the best sushi restaurant in town but more about helping you wander around and discover something new that you did not see or hear before.”

Art Center graduate Scott Liao has similarly toyed with the innards of iPad tablets to create what he calls “enriched narrative.” His Anonymous Triangle piece allows viewers to aim a sensor-rigged iPad at projected short films to trigger back-story texts about the various characters. “With current tablet technologies,” says Liao, 27, “we have the chance to change our viewing behavior from passive to active.”

Read more: Apps evolution: A new wave of digital artists is adding whimsy to mobile gaming