FEBRUARY 2007

Linda Yoon (M5)
will be presenting her paper, "Public Display of SMS: Beyond Personal Social Networks and into the Realm of Public Discourse," at the 6th annual Wireless Telecommunications Symposium, Cal Poly Pomona, April 26-28, 2007. The paper discusses the research and development of her project in the course, Interactive Objects and Spaces 2, as well as potential applications of the system.

JANUARY 2006

Angel Lin (M5)
is completing an internship at Sun Microsystems Labs where she has been working with the Experience Design and Sun SPOTS groups.

SEPTEMBER 2005

David H. Schwarz '04 - Alumni, Elliot Lim
collaborated on a short animation titled "Nostrum: Or How I'd Kill My Cold" that was accepted into the Vancouver International Digital Festival, VIDFEST. "Nostrum" is a quirky tale of a stuffy nose in a stuffy environment. When the main character finds something within himself - quite literally - he is welcomed by a breath of fresh air. VIDFEST 2005 ran from June 15-17 in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.

JULY 2005

Elliot Lim
is a finalist for Digital Illustration at the Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA) 2005. ADAA will award and showcase the finalist in a July 21st ceremony at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

SEPTEMBER 2006

MDP Announces New Acting Chair -- Anne Burdick
The MDP is happy to announce that award-winning designer, inspired educator, and noted design thinker Anne Burdick has been appointed Acting Chair.  Anne is the principal of the Offices of Anne Burdick and is renowned for her design of complex text-based projects across a variety of media environments. She is one of the most lauded transmedia designers in America, winner of everything from the Liepzig Prize for the Most Beautiful Book in the World to I.D. Magazine's award for interactive design. She went to Art Center for her undergraduate education and holds a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Prior to teaching at Art Center, she taught at North Carolina State University, CalArts, and Otis College of Art and Design. A member of the MDP’s Core Faculty since 2002, she has been instrumental in the program’s rise to prominence.   
   
 With Anne as Acting Chair, the MDP looks forward to continuing its work redefining graduate design education. MDP students will benefit from her continued presence in both studios and seminars, MDP faculty will draw upon her curricular expertise and leadership, and the Art Center community as a whole will feel the effects of her commitment to design as a way of understanding the world and to the importance of graduate education.  

FEBRUARY 2006

Phil Van Allen
developed a new, large scale sensor system that was used in the Infiniti exhibit at the 2006 Detroit Auto Show (and will continue with the kit for the Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles shows). This system detects a person's hand position in front of a flat surface without any sensors on the sides of the display or behind the user. The mirror concept was developed for The George P. Johnson Company by MDP graduate Nikolai Cornell based on his thesis project. For more information, video, and pictures of the system, see:

www.interactivemirror.net

MAY 2005

Anne Burdick
will be lecturing this Spring as part of the California College of
Art's public lecture series in San Francisco. Anne is one of the headliners in Full Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers. Her design for the W'terbuch der Redensarten, a dictionary project which won the Leipzig Award (Most Beautiful Book in the World), is included in Ellen Lupton's latest contribution to design scholarship, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students as well as the just released Size Matters from RotoVision. Anne spoke recently on the panel "Information
Visualization and Media Design" at the 27th Annual 4S Conference (Society for Social Studies of Science). Engagements for the 2006-2007 school year include a public lecture and workshop at the School of the Arts in Philadelphia, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Peter Lunenfeld
has been appointed as a fellow for Fall 2005 at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris. The Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall offers a setting in which outstanding scholars from different parts of the world may pursue their individual and collective research while interacting with other scholars in France and throughout Europe. He'll be taking a sabbatical from Art Center and working on his forthcoming book, The Cultural Uses of Computing. Peter Lunenfeld's new book, USER: InfoTechnoDemo, visuals by Mieke Gerritzen, will be coming out in September. USER is a part of the Mediawork project, of which Lunenfeld is editorial director, and supported by grants to ACCD by the Soros and Rockefeller foundation. Mieke Gerritzen, the director of the graduate design program at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, will be a Toyota speaker at ACCD in October 2005.

Philip van Allen
recently showed an interactive audio installation he designed in collaboration with Graduate Industrial Design student Colin Owen at Nucleus Gallery . The experimental project, part of a group show called Corporate Delicti , created a collaborative soundscape reflecting the dystopia of office cube corporate culture. Multiple participants activated the space by interactively building a synchronized soundscape with seven independent speakers located throughout the gallery. Crows sonically flew out of a file cabinet and roosted a few moments later on the other side of the room. A fax machine phone initiated machine voices around the room speaking the terms of a contract. Pressing the copier button and opening the file cabinet remixed music, creating a synchronized soundtrack for the entire space. van Allen continues to be interested in the application of multiuser, multichannel installations to a variety of public environments, from retail stores to open plazas.

APRIL 2005

Bruce Sterling - Visionary-in Residence
has completed Mediawork pamphlet, Shaping Things , designed by Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things, published by MIT Press, is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything, writes Bruce Sterling.

APRIL 2006

The MDP SuperStudio project, BLUX, investigated the lives of 6-year-old boys in the US in terms of media messaging, social intelligence, and the construction of manliness. The research and design project will be presented on April 20 in the LAT Theatre at the Hillside Campus.

MARCH 2006

The MDP has just conducted its first invitational Open House for prospective students.

APRIL 2005

UpNext: Media Design 2005
On April 14, 2005 the MDP will host a new annual showcase. UpNext: Media Design 2005 puts the unique educational initiatives of the MDP in direct dialogue with an emerging design community committed to design at the strategic level.

FEBRUARY 2005

In 2005, the Media Design Program announced the formation of the MDP Brain Trust, an elite group of advisors including Andrew Blauvelt, John Seeley Brown, Paul Dourish, BJ Fogg, Ric Grefé, Christopher Ireland, Somi Kim, Davis Masten, Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Nathan Shedroff, Eric Zimmerman.

JANUARY 2005

Bruce Sterling
America’s premiere futurist/design thinker – will be spending 2005 in residence at Art Center, hosted by the MDP. In his own words, Sterling wants to do “’design fiction’ skullwork” with Art Center’s students, encouraging long-term thinking about making products based on potential technologies.

Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid - MDP Brain Trust
His Mediawork pamphlet, Rhythm Science, designed by COMA Amsterdam/New York, and published in 2004, was named a book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly in the US and the Guardian in the UK, and has been chosen as one of the 50 best designed books by the AIGA, as part of AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers competition.

SEPTEMBER 2004

This fall's Super Studio
The MDP was host to the first-ever graduate funded educational project. Hewlett-Packard Consumer Systems and Applications Lab was the sponsor for Graduate Design Research (including the MDP M1 students and four second-year Industrial Design students) and the first term of Super Studio. The research was aimed at learning about "tweens" - kids ages 11 to 14. Our students explored this age group through questionnaires, dyad interviews, home visits, and photo audits. They also focused on designing research findings and interpretations in actionable ways - an art that, though rarely taught in school, is critical to successful design research. The project also generated concepts for transmedia systems that serve this demographic at the intersection of technology, personal agency, and engagement. The highly innovative and provocative representation of the students' findings, along with their excellent research methods, won high praise from an audience of about 50 HP researchers in Palo Alto, California.

Design Dialogues
MDP Core faculty member Peter Lunenfeld's seminar, Design Dialogues, brings students together with renowned designers, scientists, theorists and other powerful culture workers.This spring's speakers include industrial designer Lisa Krohn, designer and brand expert Somi Kim, and Matthew Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). Last spring, we created WebTakes for four presentations and two off-campus visits to give a flavor of the human bandwidth that this unique class offers. See the Web Takes and this term's schedule on the design dialogues page.

JUNE 2006

Jen Tarara, '04
along with the San Francisco-based, Zaudhaus Design Group, recently completed an interactive, online global storytelling exhibit for the International Museum of Woman called, "Imagining Ourselves, A Global Generation of Women." Jen was the lead Senior User Interface Designer on the project which launched on International Women's Day, March 8, 2006. The site has already received over 5 million hits in it's first 2 months.

Chien Hua Lin, '00
is working on a physical interaction project for clients in Taiwan.
Chien is a General Manager in A.I.Republic co. and also General Manager in Kidsstoryroom co. A.I.Republic focuses on physical interaction installation for AD events, Museum, night club, ect. The clients include Taipei 101, Nike, Adidas, Fareastone phone company Taiwan, TCC phone company Taiwan, BenQ, Acer, and National Palace Museum. I-land Museum. Kidsstoryroom creates physical interaction system for learning with a focus on the children of Taiwan and China. Chien is also teaching in the Digital Media Design Department of Ming Chuan University. Taiwan.

Alexander Cheng, attended '01 - '03
is the owner / creative director of instaMERSION studios, LLC . a web, print, and graphic design firm based in Honolulu, HI. Launched in January 2006, our company has been able to collaborate with Up and Riding Clothing, Easter Seals Hawaii, Filmworks Pacific, Pac Wave Marketing, Pro Digital Hawaii, The Wedding Ring Shop, Ascribe Data Systems, Entheos Interactive, and Fluxis Media to name a few. instaMERSION also has been partnering with a San Jose based firm, Viviant Design Group to span our services to the west coast. instaMERSION just finished directing and producing a short 30-second commercial for Up and Riding, which will air thru Oceanic and a few other major channels.

MARCH 2006

Syuzi Pakhchyan, '05  
brought down the house at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego and will have a booth at the upcoming Maker Faire sponsored by Make Magazine.

Laura Crawford, '05 
is now working as Creative Director at Maritz Interactions.

Adriana Parcero, '03 
has joined Nokia Calabasas as part of their Brand Experience Team, working in LA, London and Beijing.

David Keady, '04 
is working as a Senior Designer at Juice Wireless, a new start-up.

Scott Nazarian, '04 
is working at Sun Microsystems Labs in the Experience Design team, creating strange interfaces and making patent disclosures.

Matt McKissick, '04 
has been hired as an editor on Quentin Tarantino's new film "Grind House," the segment entitled "Death Proof."

OCTOBER 2005

Nikolai Cornell, '04
won silver in the 2005 IDEA awards competition, student category. "In Search of Identity" is an interactive exhibit that uses a human-scale display system to allow visitors to explore the photographic work of artist Tatiana Parcero. By projecting through a large pane of half-silvered glass and by embedding a diverse range of sensors into the physical display, Nikolai Cornell created an innovative way for users to be incorporated into and interact with the artist's work as well as a timeline of the her personal and professional history. Nikolai Cornell’s 2004 thesis project “In Search of Identity” has won many awards recently, here is an incomplete list of the most prestigous.

Art Directors Club (ADC) 84th Awards-2005
(Gold / Interactive category)

iF Communication Design Awards - 2005
(winner / Student Concept Award category)

Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) - 2005
(Silver / Student Category)

Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual 11-2005
(Selection)

I.D. Student Design Review-2005
(Honorable Mention)

Stephanie Sakkab, '02
has been working for BRC Imagination Arts (www.brcweb.com) for over 2 years. She was the creative lead on graphics as well as managed the production work on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, IL. Her next project will be redesigning the visitor's experience for the Empire State Building Visitors Center.

Aaron Rincover, '01
will exhibit the Eos Light Pillars at the 2005 California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The exhibition runs from June 17th - August 28th 2005. The Eos Light Pillar is a floor lamp that allows the viewer to assign a mood and luminosity to communicate with ones senses.

Yoonsun Joo, ‘04
is an engineer working on Flash at Macromedia where they have just shipped Flash 8. Yoonsun worked on many improvements including graphic filters, video and mobile features.

Jin Hyun Park, ‘03; Seungwon Chuh, ‘03
Jin is a professor at Kaywon school of Art and Design. While Seungwon Chuh is working on Nike’s Korea Brand Marketing team as a manager. Jin and Seung now have a baby daughter.

Jason Murphy, attended '03 - '05
is in the midst of Art Directing his first Global Photo Shoot for NIKE with critically acclaimed Alumni Michael Wong from the Photography dept.

David H Schwarz, ‘03
will be spending significant time in Buenos Aires, Argentina working on design and advertising campaigns, as well as music videos and short films for U.S. and Argentine clients. David will be collaborating with a talented studio called Amauta on some design projects.

David also was in the Aug/Sep issue of Australia’s premier design publication, Monument Magazine. He was named one of “2005 Hot Young Designers.”

David’s Short Film “Nostrum” was accepted to Vidfest 2005 - Vancouver International Digital Festival. Watch the film here: www.now-serving.com

Finally, David’s work is featured in IdN’s animation and motion graphics publication along side of Motion Theory, Digital Kitchen, Honest, Ne-O, Imaginary Forces, and many more!

Alexander Cheng, attended '01-'03
has been working as Senior Designer at the Jon Duarte Design Group in Honolulu, HI. Their clients include Centex Destination Properties, Alexander & Baldwin Properties, Sony, Hawaii Heart and Brain Center, The Contemporary Museum, and Systemmetrics. Alexander’s website (http://www.instamersion.com) will be published this month in Web Design Index, by The Pepin Press in Amsterdam, and will be distributed worldwide.

Fred Manskow Nymoen, ‘96
since graduating Fred established a design company, Rayon, which he left in ´03 to begin a personal practice. This fall he merged with the Norwegian consultancy Skiinfo, specializing in web based services for the travel industry, and is now the creative director for internal projects.

Yael Maayani, ‘04; Shawn Randall, ‘05; Sean Donahue, ‘02
all have key roles in the upcoming ACTION Exhibition and Discussion Panel on Design. Art Center is exhibiting its work in the community and the UN in an exhibition called ACTION with a discussion series about the new role of design in the marketplace, diplomacy and society.

MAY 2005

Aunali Khimji, '05
has received an Honorable Mention for his "Ikhaya Park" project from Siyathemba, an international design competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity.

Nikolai Cornell '04
was awarded the Bronze Medal for his project, Shadow and Light, in this year's I.D. Interactive Media Design Review.

Chul-ho Jang, '04  
recently relocated to accept a Senior Industrial Designer position at Motorola's Consumer eXperience Design group.