Awards And Accolades News
CCA Architecture Faculty Member Katherine Wentworth Rinne Awarded 2012 Spiro Kostof Book Award
Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, by Allison Byers
The Society of Architectural Historians has awarded the 2012 Spiro Kostof Book Award to Katherine Wentworth Rinne, a member of CCA's Architecture faculty, for her book, [The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City](http://www.amazon.com/The-Waters-Rome-Aqueducts-Fountain
Read the rest >>>Andrew Georgopoulos on the Independent Hustle
Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, by Rachel Walther
"People have always told me no, and I've done it anyway."
There's nowhere that Andrew Georgopoulos (Individualized Major 2007) won't go to get his image. He's photographed a nude woman in the middle of Lombard Street and documented the day-to-day exploits of Snoop Dogg and other hip-hop legends. Recently he grabbed his first Hollywood studio experience working on a film with a serious budget and an international crew that would go on to be named best picture of 2011: a production you may have heard of, called The Artist.
"It's all about access," Georgopoulos explains, of how to get the story you want. "It's the defining factor that separates you from the next person." His introduction to hip-hop musicians and lifestyles started by answering an ad soliciting photojournalists for a neighborhood magazine in the East Bay. "My body of work grew, from the next artist to the next. I was always looking to get the next big name, and I was able to come to them with a background." Eventually he spent a full year capturing the life of Snoop Dogg. This was during his sophomore year at CCA, when he was 20 years old.
Georgopoulos's work can be in-your-face, but his technique never overshadows his subject. His most engaging photos of musicians are often candid shots of their more mundane, day-to-day moments, and his travel photography is as contemplative as it is exotic. His personal work, on the other hand, captures for posterity those larger-than-life moments you see out of the corner of your eye or in your more vivid dreams.
Read the rest >>>Animation Career Review Ranks CCA's Animation Program #6
Posted on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, by Clay Walsh
CCA's Animation Program landed the #6 spot in "The Best Animation Programs in the West: Our Top 20 in the Western U.S. Region", published by Animation Career Review, an online resource for people aspiring for careers in animation and related fields.
Read the rest >>>CCA Faculty and Recology Alum Barbara Holmes Stages New Work at SOMA Residencies
Posted on Wednesday, May 2, 2012, by Lindsey Westbrook
Furniture faculty member Barbara Holmes spent most of February installing a tour de force exhibition in an impressive new space in one of San Francisco's more down-and-out neighborhoods. Located at 1045 Mission Street between 6th and 7th Streets, it will be on view through Sunday, May 27, 2012. Since it's viewable only through the front windows, visitors are welcome to come take a look 24 hours a day. At night the piece is theatrically lit with interior spotlights.
1045 Mission Street is a 100-foot-long window-front space on the ground floor of SOMA Residencies. In 2011, the owners invited Recology's artist in residence (AIR) program to utilize it for off-site exhibits. Holmes is one of the first artists to install there, and she leaped on the opportunity to conceive her most ambitious piece to date -- one that would specifically take advantage of the entire available space and the nighttime illumination possibilities. The opportunity to create something so abstract, almost alive, on this big of a scale, was deeply interesting.
Also interesting were her interactions with people who live in the neighborhood and passed by while she was installing. The door was closed, but that didn't stop people from tapping on the window pretty much daily, wanting to ask about what she was doing and, occasionally, relate their life story. "It's a pretty tough neighborhood. Sometimes the interactions were funny, sometimes sad. A lot of the people who were passing by, seeing the piece, were not people who would ordinarily go to art galleries, so it was wonderful to reach them with an artwork."
Read the rest >>>Archinect: The 2012-13 Rome Prize Winners Are Announced
Posted on Tuesday, May 1, 2012, by Allison Byers
The American Academy in Rome recently announced the winners of the 116th annual Rome Prize Competition. Recipients of the 2012-2013 prizes are provided with a fellowship that includes a stipend, a study or studio, and room and board for a period of six months to two years in Rome, Italy.
Read the rest >>>Design Does a Body Good: DMBA Alum Adam Dole Uses Design Thinking to Reframe the Health Care System
Posted on Monday, April 30, 2012, by Allison Byers
If you want to make a major impact on solving the country’s health care crisis . . . you go to design school, right? OK, so it may not be the obvious choice (yet!), but for Adam Dole (MBA in Design Strategy 2010) it was the best choice. He now has his dream job as a business planning manager for the Mayo Clinic. He is based in Silicon Valley and serves as a member of a “new ventures” team, focusing on identifying and incubating future Mayo Clinic commercial products, services, and businesses.
Back in 2008, when Dole realized that an MBA was what he needed to take his career to the next level, he knew from extensive professional experience that something was missing from almost all of the programs he was researching. Determined not to go the traditional business-school route, he saw clearly how the hybrid curriculum of CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy program would be perfect for his purposes.
Ready for Anything
Dole leverages his CCA MBA training on a daily basis. He hit the ground running at the Mayo Clinic by being able to effectively identify and evaluate new opportunities using a hybrid approach: Creative thinking defines what is possible, and analytical thinking determines what is required to bring new ideas to fruition. “Our health care system is on the brink of bankrupting our country,” he says. “We are now raising the first generation of children who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. We can no longer rely on traditional thinking and existing models to solve these problems. Nor will they be solved by incremental improvements in operational efficiencies. Real solutions will require a systems-thinking approach.”
Dole graduated from Syracuse University in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He began his career as a research associate in the Human Factors department at NASA, studying astronauts’ biometric feedback under stressful conditions in preparation for long-duration spaceflights to Mars. From there he took a position at Jump Associates, a growth strategy consultancy in San Mateo, California, and then in 2007 he was hired to lead the research department at Method Inc., a San Francisco-based design and innovation consultancy.
In 2008, he had two distinct realizations that impacted his career trajectory dramatically. One was the disheartening reality that a human-centered design mindset is sorely lacking in the Fortune 500 realm. Company leaders consistently ask the wrong questions when it comes to thinking about how to grow their businesses or gain competitive advantages. “Today, established, long-standing business models are being challenged by nontraditional competitors that didn’t even exist three years ago,” Dole says. “As new competition begins to gain traction and market share, more established companies end up competing on price and increasing efficiencies, usually resulting in shrinking margins and diminished customer satisfaction. Competing on cost with razor-thin margins is not a sustainable solution when new companies in your field are taking a human-centered, design-thinking approach and reframing emerging opportunities to create new value for customers.
“My second realization was something that I could no longer ignore -- something that started keeping me up at night,” he continues. “I wanted to have a major impact on solving our country’s health care crisis.” Knowing that the typical four-to-six-month consulting engagement would not be sufficient to effect deep changes, Dole decided to explore graduate programs that would equip him with a unique skill set to exert a meaningful impact.
Choosing the Right Fit
The traditional curriculum espoused by many highly respected business schools wasn’t going to work for him, it was clear. “In recent decades, we have seen older business models struggle to remain relevant in a rapidly changing economic landscape,” says Dole, “and yet business school curricula are still largely unchanged. These programs appear to be more concerned with maintaining their long-standing brand reputation than with reinventing themselves to provide students with the most relevant skills necessary to create and lead change in an evolving and increasingly ambiguous business landscape. We need more change agents, not more B-school analysts who are great with Excel.
“When I discovered CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy program, I was impressed by its hybrid curriculum and approach -- how it deliberately combines principles from both design and business. The program is mindfully designed to provide students with the toolkit and the confidence to lead systemic change across any industry or economic climate.”
From the Classroom to the Boardroom
With insights gained through his work experience and new CCA degree, Dole was perfectly positioned for his current role at the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic is a world-renowned nonprofit health care institution -- a leader in medical care, research, and education. Dole describes his job role as an “entrepreneur in residence”; he is responsible for identifying and incubating future products, services, and businesses that leverage the Mayo Clinic’s unique ability to address unmet patient and consumer needs. The idea is to extend the Mayo Clinic’s reach beyond the walls of the hospital, with the hope of preventing hundreds of millions of people worldwide from ever needing to visit the Mayo Clinic (or any other medical facility).
One example of this is Mayo Clinic Healthy Living at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, which opened last August. It is part health and wellness service, part retail store. Dole and his colleagues designed this new space for the “live” testing of prototype health and wellness services aimed at a broad consumer market. It is run by a staff of Mayo Clinic “health navigators” and coaches trained in helping customers assess their current health status, define their wellness goals, and gain access to information and resources. Think of it as interactive “store” for health.
More recently, Dole has been focusing on defining a new mobile health business for the Mayo Clinic. He can’t say too much about it yet, but he is clearly excited about the new venture and believes it could have a major impact on how millions of people understand health and experience health care.
“The design process often involves an initial period where the answers are unknown and the opportunity spaces may be ambiguous at best,” says Dole. CCA’s Design Strategy MBA curriculum lends itself well to this. “Designers tend to be comfortable with this level of ambiguity, and approach ambiguous problems by collaborating in interdisciplinary teams in order to understand what questions we should even be asking in the first place. They get out into the world to spend time with their target audiences in order to develop a deep understanding of unmet needs before devising solutions.”
CCA as an Incubator
Dole approached the MBA in Design Strategy program as a two-year incubator for the exploration of new solutions. “Each semester I focused on a different aspect of the industry’s ecosystem,” he says. “I ended up designing numerous projects that, along with the supporting curriculum, helped me develop a unique point of view around creating new value propositions and customer experiences in health care.
“One of my favorite courses was Venture Studio (our thesis class) taught by the serial entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and the highly talented design strategist, Bill Wurz. I worked with my classmate, Paul Colando, on a venture project called be.Healthy, an integrated health and wellness service intended to address the growing epidemic of chronic disease in our country. We used positive social support and tight feedback loops to motivate people to establish and sustain healthy behaviors and habits.” This holistic targeting of mind, body, and nutrition was intended to make a healthy lifestyle seem fun, social, and sustainable.
Most importantly, Dole reports that the program taught him how to take an idea and turn it into a fundable and sustainable business. Because his job requires him to create new businesses within the arms of the Mayo Clinic, this kind of from-the-ground-up thinking has been invaluable.
Awards and Accolades
Already he has been widely recognized for his innovations in the field. In 2009 he won the InnoCentive Healthcare Ideation ChangeNow4Health Challenge, and in 2010 he was named a semifinalist by Launch.org, a global initiative between NASA, USAID, the State Department, and Nike to showcase and support innovative approaches to global challenges. Most recently, Dole was awarded a Front-Line scholarship to attend TEDmed, where he was surrounded by many of the world’s most creative minds across all industries, brought together to inspire, shape, and create the future of health and medicine.
“Being a change agent inside of a large company trying to disrupt the existing healthcare system requires me to approach challenges and roadblocks as opportunities. The opportunity to eradicate preventable chronic diseases through new products, services, and businesses is what keeps me up at night . . . and makes me excited to go to work every day. I am thrilled to be working in an industry that needs more people who believe in leading change and thinking differently to do it.”
Related Links:
Four Things Video Games Teach Us About Motivating People, by Adam Dole, on Fast Co.
Read the rest >>>CCA Illustration Alum Appears in Communication Arts
Posted on Thursday, April 26, 2012, by Chris Koehler
Congratulations to recent graduate Tony Huynh and Illustration instructor Owen Smith for their inclusion in Communication Arts Illustration Annual 53!
See also Owen Smith's website.
Read the rest >>>Fast Co:Need To Solve A Tough Business Problem? Look Beyond The MBAs
Posted on Thursday, April 26, 2012, by Allison Byers
his year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America.
Read the rest >>>CCA Furniture Department in NYC
Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2012, by Russell Baldon
New York, N.Y. (May 19, 2012) – Wilsonart has named Kaii Tu from the California College of The Arts as the winner of its 2012 “Wilsonart Challenges...” student design competition at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). Tu’s “Torrey Chair" features a fragmented geometry, rendered from multiple perspective points. Seemingly random angles of different colors of wood grain laminate are used to simultaneously sculpt and paint the form.
Read the rest >>>CCA Alum Niko Skourtis Awarded SOTA 2012 Catalyst Award
Posted on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, by Allison Byers
CCA alum (BFA Graphic Design,2010) Niko Skourtis has been awarded the 2012 Catalyst Award by the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) for his thesis project, Typograph.
Read the rest >>>