Designing from the
Inside Out:
Environmental Design
at Art Center
continued
Creating for Change
Environmental designers, with their ability to look at experiences holistically, are increasingly being called on to affect social good. Why? Because whether designing restaurants, boutique hotels or airlines, they keep the experience of the consumer at the forefront. Simply change “consumer” to “end user,” and environmental designers can realign their skills and processes to suit nonprofit and humanitarian efforts. Well, perhaps it’s not quite that simple. “With humanitarian projects, students need to meet the people, do research and understand the whole situation,” said Mocarski, who added that such complex projects require students to elevate their level of engagement, as a problem isn’t going to be solved with aesthetics alone. “Historically, there are a lot of pretty ideas that don’t function and weren’t well thought out in the first place.”
Environmental Design instructor Chris Adamick ENVL 07 thinks another reason environmental designers are being called on to create for social impact is that space is becoming increasingly scarce. “If you look at the world, the larger trend is that we’re becoming urbanized,” said Adamick. “More than half of us live in urban centers. As space decreases, the quality of that space needs to become better.” An associate designer at the multidisciplinary Rios Clementi Hale Studios in Los Angeles, Adamick is working on the Civic Park project in downtown Los Angeles, which aims to reinvigorate 12 acres of land between the Music Center and City Hall by making them more pedestrian friendly and lush with greenery. The Los Angeles Times specifically cited the urban furniture Adamick designed for the park as a striking element both for their hot shade of magenta and the fact that they can be moved freely around the site.
The department often partners with Designmatters, the College’s social impact initiative that gives students opportunities to develop real-world solutions for local and global communities. This past summer, Adamick and fellow Environmental Design instructor James Meraz taught Teen Art Park: A Place for Self Expression, a two-term Designmatters course in which Environmental Design students, split into three teams, conceptualized and built full-scale 20-by-20-foot prototypes of a park for underserved teenagers in East Pasadena. In the class, students received first-hand experience dealing with multiple constituents—Art Center’s community partners for this project included Learning Works! Charter School, Flintridge Center and the Armory Center for the Arts, among others—site issues and the realities of funding and building a project for a group truly in need. The completed parks were presented to local teens—many who had provided input to the students—during the last week of the term. Features such as movable spray-paint friendly canvases, lounge furniture constructed out of foam pool noodles, and a miniature half-pipe for skateboarding were warmly received. “Some of these teens don’t have the opportunity to return to public high school,” said Adamick. “A lot of them are interested in art, music and dance, but they don’t have a place to either practice or to be shown that their creativity is an opportunity in their lives.”
In Fall 2009, the department hosted a transdisciplinary, Designmatters-sponsored studio called Safe Agua Chile: Using Design to Improve Life, in which students from the Environmental Design, Product Design, Graphic Design, Transportation Design and Film Departments traveled to the slums, or campamentos, of Chile to develop tools, systems and methods for storing, using and conserving water. The students were led by Environmental Design instructors Daniel Gottlieb and Penny Herscovitch, Product Design instructor Liliana Becera and Un Techo para mi País, a nonprofit that assists campamentos residents through the building of transitional housing and sustainable communities. “We spent two weeks doing field research, talking with the families we were designing for,” said recent Environmental Design alumna Stephanie Stalker ENVL 11, who designed MiLa, a community laundry facility which was actually put into production and has proven successful—particularly in the wake of Chile’s devastating 2010 earthquake. “We developed strong bonds with the families, and we felt obligated to come up with something great and actionable.”
Into the Future
A distinguishing trait of Art Center is its nimble curriculum that enables faculty to adjust courses and even a department’s direction as art and design disciplines evolve. For Mocarski, this flexibility is crucial, especially in a field that changes as rapidly as environmental design. “When I talk with educators from around the world, one of their biggest frustrations is that it can take them years to make adjustments to their curriculum,” he said. “Here, those sorts of changes are made sometimes throughout the term.”
Since designers today don’t work the same way they did 10 years ago, why should educators teach their students what was appropriate a decade ago? Mocarski believes he and his faculty must continually evaluate what sort of educational profiles their students need to have when they graduate. “We ratcheted up the intensity level of our undergraduate program about as far as you can possibly push it,” said Mocarski, who points out the work on view in the College’s student gallery is the work of first-term—not first-year—students. “After seeing that work, people constantly ask me, ‘If this is undergraduate work, what do you do in your graduate program?’”
Which brings us to the new Environmental Design graduate program currently under development. Scheduled to launch in the fall of 2012, the main goals of the program will be to allow students interested in environmental design to delve into personal areas of interest, and to help ensure Art Center stays at the forefront of innovation and leadership in the field.
What will this program look like? It will be composed of two dedicated tracks: one focused on spatial experience; and another focused on furniture and fixtures. Prospective students will interview with an advisory network, and depending on their experience and interests, may focus on one track or navigate between the two tracks. The department will also restructure its undergraduate program to match this new two-track system, meaning that in the fall of 2012, all incoming students will choose their area of interest. And if plans to move the department to a new larger space become a reality, all students will have access to technology that will enable them to experiment, innovate and build full-size prototypes of their designs.
“We’ve built a strong foundation with our undergraduate program, and we feel very satisfied with the educational outcomes our students have,” said Mocarski. “At the same time, the world is continually changing, so taking things to the next level with a graduate program is a natural and logical evolution.”
For details on the new graduate program in Environmental Design, visit: artcenter.edu/gradenvl
