MDP Track graduates are prepared for a career defined by exploration and transformation.

It's about emergence

In the MDP Track, students work in a studio context where new practices, forms, and ideas unfold as they follow their curiosity, interrogate materials and processes, speculate and invent. MDP track students learn to create the conditions—the research questions, rule sets and stories—that can lead to surprising results. Students engage with issues that are on the cusp through topic studios, independent research, guest lectures, field trips, community participation, workshops and an eclectic mix of thesis advisors.

The result is work of incredible diversity from functioning Google hacks to provocative future fictions. Our students graduate prepared to set the agenda in any context dedicated to the next generation of communication, technology and culture.

It's about discovery

In Grad Media Design, we embrace the idea that the act of designing is a unique way of knowing about the world. In the process of making, we visualize, iterate, and critique, and we believe that it is through these activities that designers can gain unique insights. Through the art of prototyping designers get a feel for the potential consequences of new technologies and new ideas. The best work explores what it means to create the things—immaterial, material, symbolic, systemic, and artifactual—that give shape to everyday life.

MDP Track students learn to design in an open-ended way that can lead to discovery and innovation. With a grounding in design research, media theory and experimental design methods drawn from multiple fields, our students approach their work as researchers with the goal of generating new knowledge about themselves, about design, and about the world.

It's about hybridity

We are Media Designers, but that's not all. Our community is comprised of architects, filmmakers, artists, computer scientists, experimental musicians, interaction designers, anthropologists, linguists, historians, robotics specialists, cultural theorists, and more. Designers who have diverse interests have the ability to understand issues from multiple perspectives which makes them agile thinkers and makers—a valuable skill in a time of rapid change. While our roots are in communication, our students create work that is typically at the intersection of more than one domain.

Students work with collaborators and faculty advisors with expertise that aligns with each project. We encourage cross-disciplinary experimentation, but we are rigorous in our requirement that students are able to articulate their position, contextualize their work, and answer to a critique from all possible angles. This provides excellent preparation for work in interdisciplinary contexts.

What follows is an overview. Download a pdf to get the specific course descriptions and requirements. Students doing the 3-year option complete the Development Year prior to the coursework listed here.

Terms 1-2 / Fall-Spring: MDP Concept Year
Fall studio courses lay the foundation for the independent research that follows. Students are introduced to the challenges of working in multiple media, mixing disciplinary approaches, developing a critical perspective, anticipating and participating in technological change, and using design as a mode of inquiry. Students learn strategies for prototyping, people-knowing, computational literacy, networked and physical computing, and design fiction and speculation.

Each Spring, five "Topic Studios" explore emerging ideas that intersect with Media Design and align with faculty research. The courses expose students to contemporary issues and different approaches to critical making. Sample course titles include: Community Sensing, Good Living in Mixed Reality, The New Ecology of Things, and The Ubiquitous Moving Image. Students work with an advisor to select three from each year's offerings.

Term 3 / Summer: MDP X-Term
Over the summer, the program shifts gears, hosting research projects led by visiting researchers and faculty. Students take a 6-unit lite term and can apply to be an intern on a research project, do an off-campus internship, or take additional coursework in another domain.

On- and off-campus internships are carefully selected to expose students to new models of practice and tend to be research-oriented. Off-campus internships include places such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA, Nokia Research or the United Nations.

Terms 4-5 / Fall-Spring MDP Thesis Year
The thesis year is spent creating an individual thesis project. To support students in developing their own investigation and body of work, each student works with a lead thesis advisor, a writing advisor, and an interdisciplinary team of adjunct thesis advisors. The mix of expertise within a thesis committee reflects the mix of disciplines that intersect with each project. We've had projects that combine sound + mobile applications + urban planning, film + physical computing, or neuroscience + data visualization. The combinations are endless and the advisors are selected in response to students' interests.

Thesis Requirements
For all graduating students, the final deliverables include:

• Thesis project: a single project or body of work that makes a contribution to the field
• Thesis paper: sets the context for the project
• Thesis publication: web-based documentation designed for knowledge-sharing with specific communities of practice on the internet
• Thesis exhibition: a physical installation demonstrating the project and providing context, designed for public presentation and critique

MDM Track graduates are prepared to impact the critical issues of our time.

It’s about intersections

Where people meet the systems that determine access to information or the power to participate, MDM students are there, learning firsthand. Our work is centered on communication and its relationship to design, technology, social justice, and civic life. Things concern us like: censorship; information in crisis situations; social media and the public sphere; privacy and personal data. Critical issues and platforms for connectivity are exciting for us. We thrive on the urgency of this work.

Outcomes take many forms depending on the specific context. Examples include: a geographic information system (GIS) to support an election, a hand-made radio to connect families in rural areas, or a community center designed for information-sharing. The focus is on relationships and resources, not consumers and artifacts. We believe this is the way to do design in the 21st century.

It's hands-on

The MDM track is built upon a unique student experience — the MDM Practicum — involving a community, a partner institution, and a communication issue. Students travel wherever the Practicum takes them. In 2012-13 they will spend a total of ten weeks at UNICEF's Innovation Unit in Kampala, Uganda. (The cost of travel is included in tuition.)

Students divide their time between projects in the studio, participation in a community, and managing the world of NGOs and non-profits.

In the process they have to navigate cross-cultural communication and interdisciplinary teamwork. They have to operate in unfamiliar environments while working only with the materials at hand.

Students leave with a confidence that comes from confronting fears, connecting with people and cultivating friendships. Our students graduate ready to do design work of extraordinary complexity.

It’s about participation

The MDM track is for designers who are willing to take risks in public as well as in the studio. It takes courage to allow new ideas to emerge in the process of engaging with people you don't know. Students may find that the change they create is their own.

Importantly, our approach to design research is informed by anthropology: cultural exchange and reflexive participation are at the core. At the same time, we encourage students to connect with people and conduct research building upon their skills as designers. Students make the most of their ability to see the world through different eyes, to think laterally, and to communicate through images, experiences, and metaphor.

It's an outgrowth of success

We’re not new to this model of education, in fact, we’re proven innovators. We build upon a portfolio of successes from both Graduate Media Design and Designmatters, Art Center's social impact department.

With a reputation for defining new practices, the Graduate Media Design curriculum has long fostered innovative approaches to community engagement and design research. For seven years, students in our “Super Studio” curriculum worked on an interdisciplinary team on an applied project within the local community.

Working with Designmatters extends our reach to include the world of international development and projects that allow us to scale from a local to a global context. It allows us to create robust partnerships and provide support to students. But don't take our word for it: take a look at Designmatters' ten-year track record of concrete accomplishments in design for social impact.

What follows is an overview. Download a pdf to get the specific course descriptions and requirements. Students doing the 3-year option complete the Development Year prior to the coursework listed here.

Term 1 / Summer: MDM Critical Methods
A series of seminar and studio courses challenge students to consider: “what is the role and responsibility of the designer working toward social change?” Students learn issues, theories, histories, and methods drawn from anthropology, information and communication technology studies and design research. Students learn to design communication media for social participation. These approaches are mixed and applied in design projects within the local community to prepare students for the MDM Practicum.

Terms 2-3 / Fall–Spring: MDM Practicum
The MDM Practicum is at the heart of the MDM curriculum. Each year, the Practicum includes a community, a project partner and an opportunity for design students to learn by engaging directly with real-world conditions. Our project partner for 2012-13 will be UNICEF and the context will be UNICEF's Innovation Unit in Kampala, Uganda.

The Practicum enables students to learn in a synthetic way by working with their classmates and faculty to navigate the complexities of field work, negotiate cross-cultural relationships with people and organizations, and deal with the specificity of local communication technology resources.

The faculty provide support by connecting the students’ experiences with higher level learning objectives and contextualizing the field work to allow students to understand how approaches can be applied across a range of situations. The Practicum gives students direct experience in designing with partners and people that they may not have access to independently.

Terms 3-4 / Spring–Summer: MDM Thesis
In the Spring term students identify a direction for their thesis work and develop their role in the Practicum context with an eye toward their own development. Students begin to identify a thesis topic and interdisciplinary advisory team.

In the final Summer Term, students create a thesis project whose only requirement is that it provide a unique contribution to the field, an outcome whose form is specific to the project and the student’s career goals. Potential outcomes include continued fieldwork, media interventions, social entrepreneurship, design anthropology, open source tech development, theoretical designing/writing, or interface design for social agency.

Thesis Requirements
For all graduating students, the final deliverables include:

• Thesis project: a contribution to design and social change
• Thesis publication: documentation designed for knowledge-sharing with specific communities of practice
• Thesis presentation: a public presentation

With its focus on art and design education with a social impact agenda, Designmatters is now a concentration at Art Center, embedded across the college’s many disciplines.

In Designmatters projects, real world outcomes are implemented through a series of unique partnerships and alliances. Designmatters has worked with international development agencies, government, and leading industry and helped Art Center gain Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) affiliation with the United Nations.

Activities are organized at 3 key levels:

As an educational magnet and research division for the college, Designmatters conceives of projects for the curriculum, oversees the DM Concentration at the undergraduate level, and is a partner with Graduate Media Design on the Media Design Matters Track;

As an agent for social impact educational projects, Designmatters is a guarantor for implementation and assessment of projects led by students, faculty and alumni;

As an external relations center for strategic partnership building, Designmatters leverages art and design education as a tool for positive change in the world.

What follows is simply an overview. Visit Art Center's website for complete application instructions, forms and tools, including the Media Design Supplemental Application Form.

Deadlines and Calendars
Applications are due on the deadlines listed below for priority placement and scholarship consideration. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until each class is full. Art Center runs year-round on a trimester system. Each track operates on a different calendar.

MDP Track (Media Design Projects)
Application deadline: February 1
The MDP Track begins each Fall and runs for 20 months total. Students enter in September and graduate in April, enrolled in the following sequence of terms:

Fall | Spring | Summer (half-time) | Fall | Spring

MDM Track (Media Design Matters)
Application deadlines: December 1 (round 1); February 1 (round 2 when available)
The MDM Track is unusual in that it begins with the Summer term and runs for 16 months total. Students enter in May and graduate in August, enrolled in the following sequence of terms:

Summer | Fall | Spring | Summer

Choose 2- or 3-year Option
Applicants for each track select either a 2-year or 3-year course of study. 2-year students enter directly into their chosen track. 3-year students enroll first in the Development Year. The Development Year begins each September and runs for two terms:

Fall | Spring

Read more about the options.

Students are placed by the application review committee into one of the two options based upon their resume, design portfolio, personal statement and stated preferences on the Media Design Supplemental Application Form.

We are particularly interested in people who want to synthesize theory and practice and engage directly with the world in the hope of creating their own unique contributions as a designer.

For the 2-year path, we look for applicants with exceptional training and experience in the visual, spatial, interactive and graphic design fields who can realize high-level concepts with skill in visual communication and interactive design.

For the 3-year path, we accept both accomplished and burgeoning designers from a broad range of backgrounds. Applicants with degrees in fields such as philosophy, computer science, or biology—to name just a few—bring valuable perspectives to the practice of design. We welcome applicants from all domains.

MDP (Media Design Projects):

Thesis Year Ricardo Bojorquez Brooklyn Brown Aurelia Friedland Adam Fischbach Chiao Ho Link Huang Dee Kim Michael Manalo Matthew Manos Salvador Orara Rubina Ramchandani Bora Shin Aarti VashishtJayne Vidheecharoen Dustin York

Concept Year Ji Su Choi Jojo Chongjaroenjai Sang In Chung Jeremy Eichenbaum Will Frohn Geoffery Ka'alani Matthew Kizu Jessica Lee Katherine Miyake Andrew Nagata Annie Needham John Ryan Tanner Teale

Development Year Greg Ahn Ian Besler Eric Battin Walt Chui Sangwoo Han Shawn Jackson Nancy Kwon Gene Lee Emily Teague

MDM (Media Design Matters):

Development Year Judy Bartek Jacob Brancasi Jeff Hall Betsy Kalven Maria LaMadrid

The Chair provides a vision for the department as a whole while each degree track is headed by three core faculty members who work together to define the curriculum and mentor students.

Department Chair

Anne Burdick is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the future of graduate education and research in design. She designs experimental text projects in diverse media and participates in the nascent field of the Digital Humanities. BFA, MFA, graphic design, California Institute of the Arts. anneburdick.com

Media Design Projects Track Core Faculty

Tim Durfee is an architect and partner of Los Angeles-based Durfee|Regn. His work includes exhibitions, urban sign systems and interfaces. He was formerly director of Visual Studies at SCI-Arc. MArch, Yale University; BA, Literature, History, University of Rochester durfeeregn.com

Ben Hooker collaborates with architects, industrial designers and computer scientists working in the field of human-computer interaction and has a background in screen-based multimedia design. Hooker was formerly visiting faculty at Intel Research in Berkeley and taught at Central Saint Martins College and the Royal College of Art, London. MA, computer-related design, Royal College of Art; BS, electronic imaging and media communications, University of Bradford. benhooker.com, hookerandkitchen.com

Phil van Allen is an interaction designer, educator, researcher and technologist with 30 years experience at the intersection of technology and the creative arts. He is the creator of the NET Lab Toolkit, free software designed for project sketching and production that enables novices and experts to integrate hardware, media and interactive behaviors for products, installations, and research. BA, experimental psychology, UC Santa Cruz. www.netlabtoolkit.org, philvanallen.com

Media Design Matters Track Core Faculty

Elizabeth Chin is an anthropologist whose research interests include children and childhood; consumption; dance; race; urban geography; Haiti. She approaches these from an ecumenical theoretical perspective, grounded in political economy, critical theory and a good dose of literary, artistic and post modern influences. PhD, Anthropology, City University of New York; BFA, Drama and Anthropology, NYU.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi's research explores ways to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He is the former director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and Computing Culture Group. MFA, Art, UC San Diego; BFA, Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. edgyproduct.org

Sean Donahue is principal of Research-Centered Design, a Los Angeles-based design practice that explores how design can be utilized to make significant contributions to society. MFA, Media Design, Art Center College of Design; BA, Graphic Design, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.researchcentereddesign.com

Thesis Advisors

Elise Co is a media artist and founding partner of Aeolab, a design and technology consulting firm in Los Angeles. Co holds an M.S. in media arts and sciences and a B.S. in architecture from MIT. Previously, she taught courses in interaction design and physical computing at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown internationally, including at MoMA, SIGGRAPH and IMRF Tokyo. aeolab.com

Garnet Hertz is a contemporary artist and Fulbright Scholar whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is an Artist in Residence in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at UC Irvine. He has shown his work internationally, including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture series on electronic art and design. conceptlab.com

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, media historian and novelist. He is the author of The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; and The Imaginary Twentieth Century, a science-fiction database novel and exhibition which ran at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Klein is a professor at CalArts, has taught as adjunct faculty at Art Center since 1982 and is now also a thesis advisor for the Media Design Program. imaginarytwentiethcentury.com

Jennifer Krasinski writes on the subject of art, film, and video for numerous publications such as Frieze, Modern Painters, Art In America, Spike Art Quarterly, Bidoun, East of Borneo and N+1 Film Review. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as Punk Planet, Joyland, Frozen Tears, and MYTHM. She is also the author of Prop Tragedies (Wrath of Dynasty Press, 2010). In addition to being a thesis advisor in the Media Design program, she is an adjunct faculty member Graduate Fine Art department. She is a graduate of Vassar College, The Courtauld Institute of Art, and Art Center College of Design.

Lisa Krohn is the creative director and lead designer at Krohn Design, a brand and design practice whose clients have included Herman Miller, Walt Disney Imagineering and the San Diego Children’s Museum. Krohn studied art and art history at Brown University, trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and worked with renowned designer Mario Bellini. A winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, Krohn’s work can be found in the collections of SFMOMA, MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. krohndesign.com

Mike Milley is remorseless in his affinity for high-profile corporate design groups, having worked on advanced design teams at Nike and Philips. He's currently Global Lead of Socio-Cultural Research at Samsung Design, where he manages the Design Research and Strategy team. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. www.linkedin.com/pub/mike-milley

Writing Advisors

Shannon Herbert recently completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at The University of Chicago. Her dissertation describes a new genre of contemporary fiction, which she calls curatorial novels, which resemble detective fiction but abandon the detective, staging a drama where information never attains the status of knowledge. The genre thus registers the tensions of a broader epistemological landscape: an excess of data but no stable ground of objectivity, a longing for certainty without the means of attaining it. She also teaches literature and writing courses at Santa Monica College.

Thea Petchler is Art Center’s Director of Writing. She teaches courses on postwar U.S. history, creative nonfiction and visual studies and her research focuses on the democratization and professionalization of creativity in American business and education. Petchler has served as a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy and as a program officer at the Center for Arts and Culture in Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

Molly Wright Steenson is a design strategist and architectural historian who researches how technology and interactivity fit into our cities, buildings and everyday lives. Molly was a resident professor and director of the Connected Communities group at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in architecture at Princeton University, where her dissertation focuses on computing and interactivity in architecture and urbanism in the 60s and 70s. She holds a Master’s of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) in architectural history from Yale University. At Art Center, she is a thesis advisor and teaches in the knowledge-sharing workshop. girlwonder.com

Adjunct Faculty

Rob Ball is a Los Angeles-based spatial experience designer and design educator. His interests in both collections-based exhibits and branded environments have given him expertise in a wide variety of 3 dimensional projects over 25 years. In the past few years he has also championed a new program of a real world, real project studio, abroad. Students move to a targeted city and evaluate it from the outside in / inside out. This “Fresh Eyes” approach allows them to delve into a variety of branding issues, acting not only as problem solvers but opportunity seekers for city governments and private foundations. Students have explored the potentials of Copenhagen and Berlin in 2005 and 2006. Rob is a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Environmental / Industrial Design as well as the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in Fine Arts / Art History.

Brad Bartlett earned his master’s degree in design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1998, and holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from North Carolina State University. His work at Cranbrook, which explored the relationship between media and culture, was presented at MIT and Fabrica of Benetton in Italy. In 1999, Print magazine selected him as “New Visual Artist.” That same year he established a design studio whose clients have included UCLA Live, MOCA, Los Angeles Institute of Architecture and Design, Nevada Museum of Art, and the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. His work has been honored by ID Magazine, American Center for Design, Graphis, Communication Arts, Print Magazine, and How Magazine, among others. www.bradbartlettdesign.com

Geoff Kaplan of General Working Group has produced projects for range of academic and cultural institutions. His work is included in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art’s and MoMA’s permanent collections. He received his MFA from Cranbrook and teaches in the Graduate Program of Design at CCA and the TransMedia program in Brussels. Geoff is most recently writing, editing and designing “Power of the People: The Graphic Design of Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964-1974” which will be published by The University of Chicago Press this year. www.generalworkinggroup.com

Irene Kotlarz is founding director of PLATFORM International Animation Festival, an innovative multi-platform event which debuted in Portland, Oregon in June 2007, and former Director of the Cambridge, Bristol and Cardiff Animation Festivals in Britain. She trained as an art historian before specializing in film and animation theory. She developed a specialized animation history and theory program for the University College of the Creative Arts in England, before going on to teach at Royal College of Art, and the National Film and Television School. She has curated programs for festivals, film and lecture tours internationally and has written for publications including AWN, Screen, Undercut and Shots. As Executive Producer at London’s Speedy Films, Irene produced animated shorts and commercials. She has also produced and consulted for programs on animation for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and MTV. platformfestival.com

Christopher Morabito is a Los Angeles designer who enjoys writing bios of himself in the third person. After a ten year run making big websites for big companies, Chris now focuses on graphic design and typography for creative and cultural clients. His work has been recognized by Communication Arts, the Webby's, and has appeared in New York Times Magazine. In 2009 he became the art director of Black Clock, a fancy literary journal edited by Steve Erickson. Chris sometimes laments the time and money he spent earning a B.A. in Philosophy (from UCLA) and an M.F.A. in Graphic Design (from CalArts), but at least hopes you'll be impressed by his academic prowess. He believes deeply that you're never fully dressed without a smile. www.senseandreference.com

Jennifer Rider is www.jenniferrider.com

Holly Willis is an Associate Director at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things and the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. The former editor of RES magazine, Willis has written extensively on experimental media practices for a variety of publications. She holds a Ph.D. in critical studies in cinema- television from USC. hollywillis.com

Visiting Provocateurs 2000-present

75B, Design Collective, Rotterdam
Mark Allen, Machine Project
Rebecca Allen, Visionary Artist
Stuart Bailey, Dexter Sinister and Dot Dot Dot Magazine
Dustin Beatty, Anthem Magazine
Julian Bleecker, Near Future Laboratory
Tim Blum, Blum & Poe
Lauren Bon, Artist/Activist
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, MOCA at the PDC
John Seely Brown, former Xerox PARC, Annenberg Center USC
Benjamin Bratton, Sociologist and Design Strategist
Kenyatta Cheese, unmediated.org
Matthew Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
Ben Conrad, Logan
Nikolai Cornell, George P. Johnson
Jordan Crandall, Visual Artist
Denise Gonzales Crisp, Designer, Writer
Zoe Crosher, Artist
Sharon Daniel, Digital Arts and New Media, UCSC
Jenna Didier, Materials + Applications
Sean Dockray, Telic
Paul Dourish, Department of Informatics, UC Irvine
David Erdman, servo
Marc Fornes, theverymany
Tracy Fullerton, Game Designer, USC
Jens Gehlhaar, Creative Director, Brand New School
Mieke Gerritzen, Visionary-in-Residence
Alexandra Grant, Artist
April Greiman, Made in Space
Justin Hall, unmediated.org
Marcus Hauer, Schoenerwissen/OfCD
Oliver Hess, Materials + Applications, TED Fellow
Perry Hoberman, Media Artist, NYC/LA/Singapore
Adriene Jenik, UCSD
Natalie Jerimijenko, UCSD
Michael Joyce, Author
Ned Kahn, MacArthur Genius
Geoff Kaplan, General Working Group
Somi Kim, Brand Integration Group, Ogilvy & Mather
Max Kisman, Holland Fonts
kozyndan, Los Angeles
George Legrady, UCSB
LIARS, musicians
Greg Lynn, Form
Willem Henri Lucas, WILLEM AUGUSTUS
Gaston Nogues, Ball-Nogues Studio
MachineHistories
Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
Lev Manovich, Visual Arts, UCSD
Tom Marble, Architect, Author
Geoff McFetridge, Champion Graphics
Jane McGonigal, Avantgame
Mark Stephen Meadows, pighed
Julia Meltzer, Los Angeles
Sally Menke, A.C.E.
Michael Meredith/MOS, Architect, Filmmaker
Mike Mills, director, Los Angeles
Keith Mitnick, Architect, Author
Lize Mogel, interdisciplinary artist and independent curator
Motion Theory
The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Michael Naimark, Media Artist
Eric Nakamura, Giant Robot
Adriana Parcero, Nokia
Anne Pascual, Schoenerwissen/OfCD
Celia Pearce, game designer + author
Fiona Raby, Dunne + Raby
Casey Reas, Processing.org
Kate Rich, Feral Trade
Alexis Rochas, I/O
Brian Roettinger, Hand Held Heart
Ian Sands, former Director of Envisioning for Microsoft Office Labs
Janet Sarbanes, Author
Dmitri Siegel, designer and writer
Stephanie Smith, Ecoshack
Jennifer Steinkamp, Artist
Bruce Sterling, Author
Eddo Stern, artist
Super Happy Bunny
Gail Swanlund, StripeLA
Koert van Mensvoort, MDP Visionaries-in- Residence
Linda Taalman / Alan Koch,Taalman Koch Architecture
Jason Tester, Institute for the Future
Alexei Tylevich, Logan
Martin Venezky, Appetite Engineers
Rick Vermeulen, Graphic Designer
Jonathan Wells, RES
Davey Whitcraft, WILLEM AUGUSTUS
Fiona Whitton, Telic

Kevin Wingate, Director
An artist and educator, Kevin Wingate cares about cultural fetishes, geometric abstractions and the physical limits of materials. He exhibits his paintings at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles. While exhibiting nationally, he has been a part of Pillow Lavås, a collaborative group that intersects lifestyle, culture and social interaction. In 2004, the group was part of the Class: C gallery for the Orange County Biennial of Art. MFA, Art, UC San Diego; MA, BFA, Art, Webster University.kevinwingate.com

Helen Cahng, Coordinator, Media Design Matters Track, Designmatters
Helen Cahng is an artist and curator interested in notions about collective memory. Often working collaboratively, her projects have been exhibited locally and internationally at Sea and Space Explorations, Telic Arts Exchange, Artillerie (Berlin), and Koh-I-noor (Copenhagen). MFA, Art, Otis College of Art and Design; BFA, Art, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

Casey Anderson, Digital Tech Coordinator
Casey Anderson is an artist working in a number of media, including composition, improvisation, electronic music, saxophone, text, and installations. In addition to the Grad Media Design Program, Casey also works with Machine Project. MFA, Music Composition, California Institute of the Arts; BM, Music Composition, Philosophy, University of Wisconsin caseythomasanderson.com

Once affiliated with the area's aerospace innovations—Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are our neighbors—it's a place where science fiction became science fact.

A dramatic setting conducive to inspiration and experimentation, this space is dedicated exclusively to Grad Media Design and contains student studios, classrooms, modular meeting spaces, a small kitchen, administrative offices, a faculty studio, dedicated research space and the Making Lab which includes an electronics workshop, lasercutter, photo studio, editing bays, plotters and printers.

The 50 ft. high ceilings make the Wind Tunnel Gallery a unique space for class critiques, thesis shows, art and design exhibitions, lecture series, multimedia performances, and other public events.

A stunning example of adaptive reuse, the South Campus was redesigned by architect Kevin Daly and opened in 2004. Among the first buildings in Pasadena to be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified, this award-winning structure also houses Art Center's Graduate Art program, Public Programs, and the Archetype Press, a one-of-a-kind letterpress printing facility. Our students also have access to the extensive resources available at the College's Hillside Campus, located just five miles away above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

For more than 80 years, we’ve achieved an international reputation for our rigorous, transdisciplinary curriculum, faculty of professionals, strong ties to industry and a commitment to socially responsible design. At Art Center, we prepare artists and designers to be make a positive impact in their chosen fields—as well as the world at large.

Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, Art Center College of Design has long been at the forefront of cultivating leaders in the fields of art and design. From its seminal role in the founding of the first advanced-design concept studio for the automotive industry in the 1950s, to being the first design school to receive the United Nations non-governmental organization (NGO) status, to its commitment to expanding the role of art and design in addressing key sustainability issues, Art Center has a history of anticipating societal changes and trends.

artcenter.edu

Birthplace of the internet, the Black Panthers and the Mars Rover. Home to John Cage, Steve Jobs, César Chávez and Charles and Ray Eames. California is where invention and radical change are a way of life. It is the first state with no majority race.

Los Angeles, more a region than a city, helps power the global circulation of goods and symbols, for it is both the main U.S. port of entry for Chinese manufacturing and also the major exporter of popular culture worldwide. 92 languages are spoken by the children in our schools. It is diffuse, layered, defiant, and maddeningly sunny.

Difficult to pin down, it is an experience whose impact is not easily defined. Here are a few who have tried:

Michael Maltzan, architect:
The city presented itself to me as a series of colliding events and interactions. Multiple cultures and landscapes emerged through the light of the overexposed horizon in flashes of contradiction: fertile and arid, dark and blinding, restrictive and generous — spaces ripe with inconsistency. Slowly, the city’s form revealed itself around me, incomplete and genuine. I knew at that first moment that Los Angeles condensed all of the challenges and all of the possibilities of the contemporary city and resembled the future of what was to come.

Los Angeles has been compared to a laboratory — an urban ground for experiments both prescribed and accidental. Laboratory is a perfect word. Enveloping, chaotic and mutable, Los Angeles is a nocturnal workshop where the constant experiments leave no time to tidy up and reset the data in order to start fresh in the morning.

Robert Gottlieb, Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI):
Los Angeles has also become the home of a new kind of labor movement, of a community-oriented environmentalism, and of a multi-ethnic coalition politics. It has been and continues to be a place where reformers, radicals, and visionaries help shape the future…

Norman Klein, cultural historian and author:
L.A. is the constantly shifting metropolis constructed entirely for mass consumption by fantastical and fevered minds with nary a glance at the rich complexity roiling beneath its shimmering skin. From gritty downtown cop dramas to technicolor Hollywood fantasies, it has been omnipresent in American celluloid, but rarely truly captured. It is, in short, the most filmed yet least understood megalopolis in modern American history.

Jean Baudrillard, cultural critic and author:
There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds… The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically.

John Lazar as Ronny (Z-Man) Barzell in Russ Meyers' Beyond the Valley of the Dolls:
This is my Happening and it freaks me out.

Year established: 2000

Degree offered: Master of Fine Arts

Students: 42–55
Core Faculty: 7
Adjunct Thesis Advisors: 10
Adjunct Faculty: 8

Guest lecturers per year: 26+

Total Units Required:

Media Design Matters Track, 2-year: 64
Media Design Matters Track, 3-year: 94

Media Design Projects Track, 2-year: 66
Media Design Projects Track, 3-year: 96

January Average High Temperature: 68º F
January Average Low Temperature: 48º F

For general inquiries and MDP Track questions:
Kevin Wingate, Director
+1 626 396-2469
kevin.wingate at artcenter.edu

For MDM Track and Designmatters questions:
Helen Cahng, Coordinator, MDM Track and Designmatters
+1 626 396-2310
helen.cahng at artcenter.edu

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