Tag Archives: Students

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.

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Meet Gabriel Wartofsky

Transportation Design student Gabriel Wartofsky first learned of Art Center from an automobile magazine when he was a child.

He says that his goal as a transportation designer is to “improve the way we move around our neighborhoods, our cities and our planet with desirable, responsible design solutions.”

Read more about Gabriel and his Art Center experience in this great interview.

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:

Are You Excited About Attending Art Center?

Recently, Art Center’s Admissions Office asked their Facebook fans to answer a simple question: Are you excited about attending Art Center? They expected to receive a quick note or video, but never anything as moving as incoming Entertainment Design student Saiful Haque created. Watch his beautiful, well-crafted and poignant film expressing his feelings about attending the College below.

We would love to hear from more incoming students as well. Feel free to send us a paragraph, a video, a drawing—whatever helps you express how you feel about becoming the newest member of the Art Center family.

Meet Olivier Agostini

Broadcast Cinema student Olivier Agostini says that although he is pursuing his Master’s in film, the many other disciplines at Art Center undeniably have an influence on him.

“One of the biggest benefits of being at Art Center is the almost subliminal influence of the other disciplines finding its way into my own work,” he says.

Read more about Agostini’s thoughts on studying at Art Center in this great interview, and check out his student film, 5 Gallons.

Meet Steve Gavenas

Steve Gavenas had already earned numerous degrees, and enjoyed a successful career, before coming to Art Center to pursue his master’s in Graduate Art.

“I was looking for a world-class fine art graduate program that would challenge me and help me grow in my technical capability as well as the theoretical underpinning of my work, expand my artistic vision, and allow me to join the vibrant Los Angeles art scene,” explains Gavenas. “I also wanted a school that takes education seriously, with intensive faculty involvement and great classes—not just a residency program like some schools.”

Read more about Steve and his Art Center experience at in this great interview.

Art Center Visioning Update from President Buchman

Dear Art Center Community:

I am writing to update you on Art Center’s planning process and to outline the next steps to completion. As many of you know, we designed the entire process to consist of two major phases of work: the visioning phase and the strategic planning phase. The midpoint and fulcrum of the process took form by way of a retreat of the Board of Trustees (on June 23 and 24) in which the Trustees heard the work completed by the visioning task force committees to date, focused their priorities and set the course for the final strategic phase to be concluded by the end of the calendar year.

Art Center students, alumni, faculty and staff convened for visioning brainstorming sessions in January.

The Board, I believe, was energized by what they heard and were compelled by the fact that hundreds of participants representing a cross-section of the community were involved at various points in the deliberations. They were engaged during the retreat in a thoughtful and rewarding dialogue that included the chairs of the visioning task force committees as well as representatives from the Chairs’ Council, Faculty Council, Art Center Student Government (ACSG) and senior staff. The effort was inclusive and courageous.

The work of the retreat coalesced the findings of the task force committees into a cogent statement of educational purpose, a statement serving at once as a tribute to the heritage of the College as well as to a dynamic vision for the future.

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Meet Mikey Tnasuttimonkol

MDP student Mikey Tnasuttimonkol earned his BFA with an emphasis in advertising photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. He chose to come to Art Center to attend the Media Design Program.

“The program is designed in a way that allows me to bring what knowledge I had from my photo background, and combine it with design, rather than just totally abandoning what I have learned in the past,” he explains.

Read more about Mikey and his Art Center experience at in this great interview.

Foundation Awards $50,000 for Transportation Design Scholarships

Exciting news: The Pasadena Star-News brings us a great story today about the Collectors Foundation, a nonprofit created by car enthusiasts who has awarded $50,000 for Art Center Transportation Design scholarships over the next five years.

“We’re interested in historic vehicles and classics, and the board is funding education and training for students to create and build the next generation for collection enthusiasts,” says Bob Knechel, the foundation’s executive director.

Read more: Pasadena Art Center taps support from Classic-car collectors

Summertime Is Showtime

A number of our students and alumni are exhibiting work this summer in galleries around the country. A few current exhibits:

  • Photography and Imaging student Chase Koopersmith has work in the group show Inspired, opening at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York on July 14.
  • Advertising alum Ed Mell’s solo exhibit, Ed Mell: Paintings of the New West, is currently on display at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.

We’re sure there are some we’ve missed. If you know of any student or alumni shows, let us know.

(Pictured: Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike, Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl by Sharon Lockhart.)