Friday, October 9th, 4-7:30pm(@ hybrid lab) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Not Your Average Bean Bag!!!, learn to sew and make some not so average bean bags for our studio space. Workshop by Phumelele Mthimunye . . . . . . . […]
Biography: Monica Martinez is an artist, educator and entrepreneur whose creative work explores ideas about food production and economics. In 2011 she launched Don Bugito, the first startup food business in the country with a full menu based on edible insects, and placing her at the forefront of the sustainable foods movement. Monica is a […]
Presentation Synopsis: The summer of 2015 saw the United States and Europe preoccupied, yet again, with global migration, as American presidential candidates sought strong positions in party leadership campaigns and refugees fleeing war, poverty and oppressive regimes arrived on European shores. At the same time, Chinese stock market and currency fluctuations have sent analysts into […]
Visual Braille Type – Senses, Sound Experience When individuals lose their sight, they unconsciously develop their touch and hearing senses in order to replace the missed abilities. However, for one who has five sense completeness, how does audition and touch differ from vision? The “Visual Braille” is designed by combining two senses, sight and touch. All […]
A risograph lecture poster designed for anexact office.
Results from CCA Grad Design’s RAPID CRAFT #2 (AKA Skillshare Fridays) on February 20th, organized by Rafi Ajl. Titled: Making A Chair Really Fast, or an exercise in quick decision making and following an idea through to the end The program will provide each participant with three (3) 8′ foot 2″x4″ pieces of standard construction […]
MFA Design is an open site for the investigation of contemporary design practice. Built on a firm foundation of technical skills, pushing the limits of cutting-edge tools and technologies alongside traditional craft-based techniques, MFA Design students work to reimagine the methods, modes, and meanings of design in contemporary culture. Whether intended to be commercial, civically […]
Jon Sueda / Chair Sara Dean / Assistant Chair Christine Lasher / Program Manager
Negash Asegde Annika Bastacky Yuhan Chen Yiming Cui Lingyin Du Cynthia Escalante Mitch Greer Rebecca Hanson Jiahao He Linya Huang Jenn Jiang Xinheng Jiang Yuan Jiang Anqi LI Chengru Li Chang Liu Yaqin Liu Yang Liu Pei-Chi Lu Jinghan Luo Andrea Murchie Pushan Panda Dan Qian Zeng Qian Juan Pablo Rahal Kelly Rouser Xinyue Song […]
Rafi Ajl Mary Banas Cory Barr Matthew Boyko Mark Brest Van Kempen Sara Dean Donald Fortescue Guillermo Galindo Cristina Gaitan Christopher Hamamoto Eric Heiman Jonn Herschend David Kasprzak Mathew Kneebone Barry Katz Stuart Kendall The Letterform Archive Ana Llorente Brett MacFadden Marty Marfin Emily McVarish Scott Minneman Paul Montgomery Randy Nakamura James Pierce Calvin Rocchio […]
Amy Balkin Julia Born Emmet Byrne Julian Bleecker Keetra Dixon Dinamo typefoundry James Edmondson Experimental Jetset Frank Grießhammer Jason Groves Na Kim Mike Kuniavsky Maryam Omar /Turquoise Mountain Jenny Odell Jonathan Olivares Monica Martinez Tim Parsons Megan Prelinger Leon Ransmeier Valkyrie Savage Sarah Teasley Bruce Tharp Etienne Turpin Marco Walser Allan Wexler
The World, The Collective, The Secrets is a publication of the 2015 MFA in Design program at California College of the Arts. It is an archive that looks past individual inquiries in favor of a collective voice. It is a zeitgeist – a cumulation of topics addressing the current state of design. These topics include: the […]
The Graduate Program in Design is proud to present the 2015 MFA Thesis Exhibition: A Range of Indeterminate Results. The exhibition will feature individual and collaborative works of graphic, interaction, and industrial design from more than 40 degree candidates who have completed CCA’s prestigious transdisciplinary graduate curriculum. Curatorial StatementWe are shaped by the spaces and […]
Some days technology really wrecks me. I wake up and the first thing I do is reach for my phone to switch off my alarm. Without thinking, I make my way through text notifications, email, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the Weather app. I wake up, and I don’t look out through my window. When I […]
Lawrence’s work examines the role of competing mythologies in the formulation of ideas of place. Lawrence calls the friction between societal-level myths and personally held ideologies ‘myth tectonics’. It is in the space of these ‘myth tectonics’ that Lawrence creates graphic design to respond and contribute to understandings of place, myth, community, and politics. Lawrence […]
This thesis focuses on our relationship to the urban environments we inhabit as well as the people who we share them with. We are constantly navigating a sea of people, usually strangers, but we don’t realize the impact those people have on our perception of our surroundings, their impact on our wellbeing, and our own […]
Rules, habits and definitions arise from agreements that humans have made to construct a reality that we can all understand. These parameters create order within ourselves and our environment, allowing this world to function. However, I wonder whether an excess of automated behavior restricts our ability to experiment with new ways of making and delight […]
Cristina Gaitán’s thesis focuses on enabling a sense of ecological imagination in the urban population of San Francisco. She examines water systems as a typology of natural systems, seeking to make massive scales and systems legible at human scale. The body of work is a collection of discrete performative objects, deployed as interventions into public […]
Within the field of typography, letterforms typically embody either static or kinetic forms. However there is yet another category that escapes the purely static or purely kinetic. This is temporal typography. Unlike static typography, these forms are not bound by one iteration within a singular viewing experience. And similar to kinetic type, temporal typography carries […]
With California facing a severe drought, the way we consume and waste our water is becoming an increasingly important issue that must be addressed both individually and collectively. Yet, information regarding such environmental concerns tends to be presented in forms that are abstract, overwhelming, and easily dismissed as ‘someone else’s problem.’ The goal for […]
In narrative texts, there exists an intangible space between an author/creator’s written word, and how that written word is perceived in the mind of a reader/viewer. My thesis explores the role of the designer in activating this space. The use of words in the English language works because it possesses a set of groupings of […]
Hear Here is about the use of sound as an effective medium of communication to improve intimacy and longevity of long-distance relationships.Initial field research determined that the use of environmental sound as an alternative means of communicating, in real time, what is occurring in the respective lives of each person in a relationship enables a […]
My thesis project presents a constellation of work that surrounds the idea of presentness. What is it to be present in the world? How can an object be designed to facilitate and enhance presentness in the user? How can an experience be designed that occupies a space of becoming, a moment in time that an […]
The Instruments of Harmony are digital instruments, constrained by specific parameters and a specific intent. The parameters: (1)The instrument should be for two or more people to play together. (2)The instrument should be controlled by gesture only, without traditional digital music controls like knobs and buttons. (3)The instrument should play digital sounds. The intent: To […]
Biography: Marco Walser studied visual communications at the Zurich University of the Arts and spent a year in London with an internship at Graphic Thought Facility. In 1999 he founded the Büro Elektrosmog in Zurich, which he heads as creative director. The studio designs books for artists, architecture magazines, visual identities for museums, and posters for theaters. Walser […]
Project: Exercises in Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Featured Work: Lake Buckley Kelly Steben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IxDA conference, February 2015. The project was to create a quick-start guide for a driverless car.
Biography: Keetra Dean Dixon is a designer and artist who relocated from NYC to rural Alaska in April of 2014. She and her partner, JK Keller, test the claim “We can work from anywhere” by building a new studio practice with a remote home base. Dixon traded in her team leading role as an Experiential […]
Workshop Synopsis: This workshop asks participants to innovate using formally focused processes. It’s a peak into R&D from my perspective. There is blending of analogue and tech fabrication, intentional and accidental output, and embracing of the unexpected. I often integrate ideas of “theft,” exchange, transparency of process, and social authorship. The workshop evolves familiar methods […]
Lecture Synopsis: Bruce will be discussing the topic of discursive design—when designers use the product-form as a means to communicate substantive ideas in hopes of inspiring reflection and debate, allowing design to participate more broadly in culture. While this mode of design has historically been located outside of industry and commerce, it is now being […]
Lecture Synopsis: Why make the Internet of Things? There’s a lot of hype today around the Internet of Things, but there are few clear descriptions of what it is, why it’s valuable, and how to design for it. This talk will describe one approach for thinking about why we make the Internet of Things, and […]
Lecture Synopsis: TBD Catalog — the near future’s normal, ordinary everyday product catalog. It’s a glimpse at your future as hinted at through 166 products, advertisements and classifieds. It’s your future, only not the future you may have imagined. It is, though, the quite likely future if the titans of Silicon Valley and their earnest […]
Homing/Wandering Compass prototype, pointing at an unknown place of interest.
Processes, Recipes, Laws, Operations, Techniques, Titles, Teachings, Prescriptions, Modus operandi, Equations, Programs, Haiku, Philosophy, Paradoxes, Requests, Puzzles, Principles, Proposals for actions, Methods, Invitations to participate, Restrictions, Poetry, Proverbs, Pure concepts, Training, Coaching, Lessons, Constraints, Restrictions, Abstractions, Rituals, Mechanisms, Conditions, Protocols Instructions, Scores, Algorithms etc. explores using process-based systems, algorithms, and instructions to generate discursive images […]
Nazgol Ansarinia (2003) Edward Blake (2013) Maggie Fost (2004) Zach Gibson (2011) Matt Johnson & Chris Yamane (2014) Wioleta Kaminska (2014) Kristin Neidlinger (2010) Melissa Martin (2009) Heidi Meredith & Renee Walker (2011) Nazanin Oveisi (2011) Jennifer Sonderby (2002) Joel Stillman (2009) Rosanna Yau (2010)
Biography: Luna Maurer cofounded Moniker studio with Jonathan Puckey and Roel Wouters in 2012. Moniker works on commissioned designs as well as projects of an autonomous and experimental nature. The studio works across various media for a wide range of clients in the cultural and commercial sectors. Maurer, Puckey, and Wouters’s work explores the social […]
Workshop Synopsis: For the Luna Maurer workshop with the MFA Design program at CCA, students were split into four independent teams. Each team had to create one letter of the NATO phonetic alphabet while following a set of rules. Instructions for each turn and player: – Connect your line to a line of another color: […]
More than Messaging: Improving Digital Communication through Collaborative Storytelling and Comics See Video
And the Whole World Stops is a series of short films and a visual exploration of our daily environment that we often assume predictable and mundane. Through visualizing landscapes where awe and time reside together, my goal is to provide the viewer with opportunities to slow down and indulge in a brief moment of contemplation […]