Tag Archives: technology

Art Center @ SXSW Interactive 2015: Frank Lloyd Wright, Princess Reema and David Chang

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Let’s face it, the essential ingredients comprising daily life in the Digital Age are in a state of head-spinningly rapid change, we’re often just racing to keep up, unaware of the impact the onslaught of the new. Sometimes it’s hard not to wonder what’s been lost now that we have unlimited distractions, a highly curated set of entertainment options and no space for boredom. What are the unforeseen implications of the increasingly widespread adoption of the internet of things, artificial intelligence and the shared economy? How do we create a more inclusive and equitable environment for everyone who steps into the digital domain?

These were just a few of the thorny and thought-provoking questions addressed within the vast offerings of the 2015 SXSW Interactive program. In fact, this year’s lineup was so densely packed with timely, topical and totally useful panels, workshops and mentoring meet-ups, navigating the offerings was an exercise in content curation, information architecture and design thinking. Because so much of the subject matter covered within the festival’s many panels and lectures is so indisputably germane to the Art Center community, we attended the festival targeting the events most Art Center-relevant events, which we’ll recap to you in the form of key takeaways parceled out within a series of blog posts over the next three days.

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New Student/Space video features MDP student Kristina Ortega on the future of medicine and technology

Art Center has a reputation for putting students through their paces, challenging them to meet and exceed their wildest creative dreams. The work ethic instilled here is legendary as are the results of all that toiling, ideating, imagining and making.

But the journey from inspiration to finished creation has always been somewhat mysterious. So beginning last Fall, we set out to illuminate students’ creative process with the series of videos we’ve recently renamed Student Space. Now it’s become a bonafide ‘thing.’ Here’s how it’s done: We identify three students from different disciplines who are in the process of completing an ambitious project. Over the course of the term we work with them to create three videos capturing the launch, obstacles and completion of their finished work of art and/or design. At the end of the term, each student’s trio of episodes constitutes an intimate take on the agony and ecstasy of bringing an idea to life. The results have been fascinating, dramatic and nothing short of spectacular. Need proof? Check out this playlist on our YouTube page.

The Spring 2015 term, will feature just one student: Media Design Practices thesis candidate, Kristina Ortega. We have no doubt that the spellbinding complexity of her project, which explores the ways people currently use technology to forecast future uses for tech, will more than make up for the lack of confederates in this Student/Space cohort. She’ll investigate something she calls “the human microbiome,” and its uses for the future of medicine. There’s really no more to say about her groundbreaking research, which we’ll capture over the course of this term, except: watch and learn. Oh, and enjoy!

New series of alumni video profiles launches with this profile of tech design visionary Yves Behar

Yves Behar has spent much of the past two decades inhabiting the rarefied air at the peak of design innovation. After graduating from Art Center College of Design in 1991 with a degree in Product Design, Behar became an early adopter in bringing a design ethos into the tech space, conceiving product identities for the likes of Apple and Hewlett-Packard. And in the years since founding his own forward-thinking industrial design and branding firm, Fuseproject, Behar has become something of an iconic brand in and of himself.

The above video represents the first in an ongoing series of video profiles of Art Center’s vanguard of mold-breaking, creatively audacious alumni. Behar welcomed Art Center’s video team into the hive of creative activity that is Fuseproject’s warehouse-like studio in San Francisco’s Mission District. The cavernous space was designed to promote collaboration and co-creation, with its long communal lunch table covered with bountiful fruit bowls full of healthy snacks, ripe for the picking. SodaStreams are stationed throughout the facility. And broad worktables are covered with mockup designs for top secret products that will most certainly one day make many lives easier, if not better. We hope you’ll come away as inspired as we were by Behar’s reflections on his own creative trajectory and the ways in which he’s continuing the Art Center tradition of learning to create and influencing change.

Sweet bread, technology and democracy: behind the scenes at #techLA

Amy Shimshon-Santo (far left) moderates the #techLA panel at City Hall

Amy Shimshon-Santo (far left) moderates the #techLA panel at City Hall

“Mmm, pan dulce,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti. Around the Green Room table behind the Los Angeles City Council Chambers, diverse leaders gathered around cafecito and conchas de vainilla o chocolate. It was 8:30 a.m. on a cool Saturday morning. Our disciplines ranged from transportation and interactive design to Smart Grid technologies, and from electric vehicle infrastructure and urban planning to community economic development.

We came together at the invitation of Mayor Eric Garcetti and Peter Marx (Chief Innovation and Technology Officer) to galvanize the technology track of #techLA– the city’s inaugural Technology and Innovation Conference held in City Hall.

Tasked by Marx with facilitating a panel on the future of mobility, I seized the opportunity to spark an interdisciplinary conversation on the topic. Representing Art Center with me were two respected innovators: Geoff Wardle (Executive Director of the Graduate Transportation Design program) and Maggie Hendrie (Chair of the Interaction Design undergraduate program). Later that day, Art Center Graduate Transportation student, Retro Poblano, also presented his research on automated shuttles to the public.

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Grad Trans rolls its first grad off the line, fully equipped to change the future of mobility systems

David Day Lee

David Day Lee

Several semesters into Art Center’s Undergraduate Transportation Design program, and after an internship at one of the major automotive design studios in the Los Angeles area, David Day Lee realized that a career as a studio designer wasn’t his calling. He wanted to impact the automotive industry in a more comprehensive way. Lee talked to his professors and other faculty at Art Center about his wider interests—transportation mobility systems, integrated connectivity technology and cross-disciplinary strategic design solutions—and was invited to become the first student in Art Center’s vanguard Graduate Transportation Design program.

The approach would be a systematic one, “where you’re not just designing the vehicle,” Lee says, “but imagining vehicle design in the context of an ecosystem.”

Last week, he became the program’s first graduate. The Dotted Line caught up with him during his final term.

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