Can designers help solve the planet’s water crisis in just three days? That’s the question WantedDesign Challenge: Water Cycle aims to answer May 17–20 during New York Design Week.
Posts Tagged ‘Sustainability’
Art Center Students Compete in WantedDesign’s International Water Challenge
Friday, May 17th, 2013Art Center Faculty and Alum Dive in to The Aquarium of the Pacific Series on Art, Science and Environment
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. will feature presentations by Art Center faculty members and an alumnus as part of its upcoming Aquatic Academy. Integrating art and science in order to enhance environmental communication, the Aquatic Academy offers a series of evening classes that foster dialogue on issues related to the ocean and environment.
Professor and Director of Sustainability Initiatives Heidrun Mumper-Drumm will be speaking on Thursday, April 25 from 7 to 9:30 p.m., while Vice President of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo and Alumnus Dan Goods, visual strategist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will speak on Thursday, May 9 from 7 to 9:30 p.m. The series of four evening classes will explore how art, design and science can intersect to create and deliver powerful environmental messages.
Art Center faculty will be speaking at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific.
Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of The Aquarium of the Pacific, says Goods, Mumper-Drumm and Amatullo bring an ideal combined expertise in the areas of engineering, design, visual communications and sustainability.
Designmatters Welcomes Fellow-in-Residency from Ireland, Sponsored Project Representative from Chile
Monday, March 11th, 2013
Dr. Muireann McMahon, Designmatters Post-Doctoral Fellow-in-Residency. Photo by Alex Aristei.
Art Center welcomes Dr. Muireann McMahon who joins the Designmatters Department as the inaugural Designmatters Post-Doctoral Fellow-in-Residency through August.
McMahon is dedicating her six-month sabbatical, generously funded by the University of Limerick in Ireland, to contribute her teaching and research expertise to a variety of courses and projects during her time at the college.
For the Spring term, McMahon is embedded in the Product Design Sustainability course led by Heidrun Mumper-Drumm and Dice Yamaguchi. Her intent is to gain a close understanding of the transdisciplinary teaching methods and project-based learning that occurs across the college, with a particular focus on studying Designmatters courses, and the collaborative models the department has in place to structure social impact projects that yield real-world outcomes.
We caught up with McMahon during a mid-term presentation by a different group of Designmatters students, collaborating on the Coaniquem project led by Graphic Design faculty member Guillaume Wolf. The in-depth creative proposals they unveiled—for a campaign to raise awareness and funds to prevent and treat childhood burns—belied the short six-week time frame the 12 students had to develop them.
The Colombia Experience: Design is a Two-Way Street
Thursday, July 14th, 2011The following post is from the Designmatters blog.
Guest Blogger Mariana Prieto di Colloredo (Product Design, 6th term) is the lead contact of Art Center’s social impact student organization Mustard, a member of the sustainability-focused student organization EcoCouncil and a candidate for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact.
Sustainability is more often than not linked to the responsible use of our planets resources to assure its availability for future generations. As true as this is, sustainability can also be applied to our own lives. As designers, we can “burn out” when we drain our creative resources but we can prevent this by refreshing and recharging ourselves from time to time.
While we are in school the opportunity to go out and research different cultures in a new, exciting and relaxed setting is limited, to say the least.
Because of this, EcoCouncil has taken the initiative to plan a research trip to explore a new country in a different and exciting way. This last spring Eco Council traveled for ten days to Colombia to remove ourselves from our comfortable surroundings and to work on a design project at an organic mango plantation in Anapoima, Colombia (a small town located 2 hours outside of Bogota).
Our goal was to come up with one design project during our time there while doing physical work at the farm and learning the inner workings of an organic plantation in Latin America.
After days of wielding a pickax, teak planting, mud fishing, milking, horseback riding and learning all there is to know about mango trees, we agreed the most valuable experience was working together with the farm workers through every step of the design process.
Just Add Water
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010The 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.
The Summit is Here!
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010It’s not too late to attend the fourth Art Center Summit, Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design. This year’s event will highlight our association with the Opportunity Green Business Conference at L.A. Center Studios, today through Friday.
Tomorrow will feature breakout sessions Beyond the Peanut: Using Life Cycle Assessment to Develop Goals and Strategies and Creative Strategies: Sustainability by Design and the main stage presentation, Product Design in the Sustainable Era, will be held tomorrow afternoon. There will also be an exhibit of student work, featuring art and design addressing environmental, social and economic sustainability, on view throughout the conference.
Learn more at the Summit website. See you there!
Register Today for the Art Center Summit
Monday, September 13th, 2010It’s almost here: The fourth Art Center Summit, Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design, will be held September 22 through 24. This year’s event will highlight our association with the Opportunity Green Business Conference at L.A. Center Studios.
Even better news: Previous Art Center Summit participants and attendees, as well as Art Center alumni, students and friends, are eligible for special discounted rates.
Don’t delay — learn more about this year’s event, and register today.
Art Center Summit 2010: September 22-24
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010We are pleased to announce that the fourth Art Center Summit will be held in September. Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design will highlight our association with the Opportunity Green Business Conference, taking place September 22 through 24 at L.A. Center Studios. The conference, developed alongside Art Center’s Sustainability Summits, seeks to innovate, collaborate and inspire industry leaders and the next generation of thought leadership, helping to develop and implement sustainable business solutions.
In 2007, Art Center successfully launched and hosted a series of annual Summits, bringing international leaders and experts in topics related to sustainability and mobility to the College. Envisioned as a five-year program, the first three Summits took a critical look at environmental, social and economic issues surrounding sustainability supporting the College’s desire to integrate sustainability into its curriculum. In this fourth year, we are taking components of the Summit to Opportunity Green to share with a broader audience how we are integrating the lessons learned so far.
Learn more at the Summit website.
The Art Center Summit 2010: Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010The theme of this year’s Summit, Projects and Partnerships in Sustainable Design, will highlight Art Center’s association with the Opportunity Green Business Conference, taking place September 22—24 at L.A. Center Studios. The conference, developed alongside Art Center’s Sustainability Summits, seeks to innovate, collaborate and inspire industry leaders and the next generation of thought leaders, and to develop and implement sustainable business solutions.
In 2007, Art Center successfully launched and hosted a series of annual Summits bringing international leaders and experts in topics related to sustainability and mobility to the College.
Envisioned as a five-year program, three Summits have taken a critical look at environmental, social and economic issues surrounding sustainability, and supported the College’s desire to integrate sustainability into the curriculum.
We’ll bring you more information about the Summit soon; for more on Opportunity Green, including the schedule of events and speaker line-up, visit opportunitygreen.com. For more information about the Art Center Summit series, email artcentersummit@artcenter.edu.
Art Center Joins Designers Accord
Thursday, May 6th, 2010We are pleased to announce that Art Center has joined the Designers Accord, a global coalition of designers, educators and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact.
Sustainability is a subject of great concern at Art Center, and we recognize that design has a responsibility to address its many challenges and opportunities. The College believes that design, with its ability to see the big picture and integrate multiple interests, is uniquely capable of creating sustainable systems and solutions.
Over the past five years, Art Center has been introducing a comprehensive design approach recognizing environmental, social and economic interests. Through new courses, research in design process and lifecycle methodology, and active partnerships with other colleges, communities and organizations, this College-wide initiative is slowly transforming how design is taught.
At the same time, Art Center is in the often difficult stage of integrating teaching with doing. Progress with re-making the campus is slow, but steady. Support for sustainable practices comes from all parts of the college community, though students remain the strongest advocates.
Through participation in the designers accord, Art Center hopes to learn from others and share what we know. We want to keep improving in all aspects of what we do. We also hope to inspire and mobilize the ingenuity of our students and faculty towards creating solutions that support human and natural systems, over the long term.
