Chee Pearlman is the director of Chee Company, an editorial and curatorial design consultancy in New York. In addition to serving as Program Director for The Art Center Design Conference, she also contributes to a number of publications, including Domus, Newsweek, Travel + Leisure and The New York Times. Pearlman founded and chaired the Chrysler Design Awards during its 10-year duration, and is the former Editor-in-Chief of I.D. Magazine, which won five National Magazine Awards under her direction.
Renowned news correspondent, author, and international journalist John Hockenberry returns for his third appearance as Master of Ceremonies for the Art Center Design Conference. Speakers
Just Announced!
Jamy Ian Swiss
Sleight-of-hand Artist
According to magic gurus Penn and Teller, Jamy Ian Swiss “makes one understand what a terrifying art form pure sleight of hand can be. He is James Bond with a deck of cards for a pistol.” He has performed throughout the United States for presenters ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the Smithsonian Institution. His television appearances include 48 Hours on CBS, the PBS documentary The Art of Magic, Comedy Central, and The Today Show on NBC. In a recent article on magic in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes, “Swiss is thought to have one of the most masterly sleight-of-hand techniques in the world today... like seeing Yo-Yo Ma practicing scales at Carnegie Hall.”
Featured Speakers include:
Irene Au
User Experience Designer, Google
As Director of User Experience at Google, Irene Au is responsible for design and user research for Google’s software products worldwide. Her mission is to champion the strategic value of design at every level of the company. Au is the former Vice President of User Experience and Design at Yahoo!, and was an interaction designer at Netscape. She holds an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.
Will Beall
LAPD homicide detective, author
Will Beall is a homicide detective in the 77th Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He began his career as a newspaper reporter, but when assigned to write about the murder of a college classmate, his investigations went beyond journalism to help crack the case. “After that I decided solving murders would be a lot more satisfying than reporting them,” he says. Beall worked as a beat cop and anti-gang investigator in South Central L.A., experiences that fueled his novel L.A. Rex, which is in development as a screenplay for Scott Rudin Productions.
Petra Blaisse
Interior and Landscape Designer
Blurring the distinction between architecture and landscape, Dutch designer Petra Blaisse challenges conventional notions of environments, and sees exterior and interior space as continuous. In 1991 Blaisse founded the Amsterdam-based firm Inside Outside, becoming internationally acclaimed for her designs of theater curtains, acoustic walls and cast floors. Of particular note are her designs for the embossed liquid-gold drapes for the Nederlands Dans Theater and the space-defining pleated walls for New York’s Prada store. The recently published Petra Blaisse/Inside Outside is the first major survey of her career.
Stuart Brown
Founder, National Institute for Play
Dr. Stuart Brown developed his interest in play, in part, through the study of mass murderers, concluding that “normal play behavior was virtually absent throughout the lives of highly violent, anti-social men.” Brown’s background in psychiatry, his study of the evolution of human and animal play, and his clinical research into the causes and prevention of violence have shown him that authentic play is a state of being that can be accessed and used by everyone, and that play is as important to humans as vitamins or sleep.
Tim Brown
IDEO President and CEO
Tim Brown is president and CEO of IDEO, an innovation and design firm founded in 1991 by David M. Kelley that has revolutionized the designer’s role in the client relationship. Now 550 strong and with offices in eight global cities, IDEO has raised the profile of design by fusing engineering, social science and business strategy into its innovation practice for hundreds of blue-chip clients, as well as government, education and social sector organizations. Brown’s leadership in design is widely sought in industry, academia and the nonprofit community. Under his direction IDEO has been ranked #15 in the Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.
Michael Curry
Puppet Master
One of the world’s leading production designers, Michael Curry is a master of puppetry and kinetic theatrical design. He made his mark with the magical, larger-than-life puppets and masks for The Lion King, and his dazzling characters appear in productions by Cirque du Soleil, the Metropolitan Opera, London’s Royal National Theatre, the L.A. Opera, Universal Pictures and Disney Theatrical Productions. His studio of designers, craftsmen and technicians in Scappoose, Oregon, has also created dynamic puppets for the Olympic ceremonies and the Superbowl. Curry has won multiple Emmys, Tonys and Drama Critics Circle Awards.
Elizabeth Diller
Visionary Architect
Elizabeth Diller and her firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, were praised as “New York’s brainiest architectural team” by the late critic Herbert Muschamp. Yet for much of their careers they didn’t build: their projects were more likely to be found in art galleries than in the urban environment. Lately this has changed with a flood of prestigious commissions: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the redesign of Lincoln Center, and the transformation of New York’s High Line—an abandoned elevated railroad—into a park. In addition, Diller’s firm continues to embrace performance, visual art, film and theater. “We have a whole division for money-losing projects and someone in charge of it,” she says.
Charles Elachi
Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Dr. Charles Elachi is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and vice president of the California Institute of Technology. As JPL director, Elachi has overseen many successful missions, including several Mars orbiters; the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity; the Cassini mission to Saturn; missions to study stars, galaxies and other celestial objects; and missions that have brought home samples from a comet tail and successfully collided with a comet to study its structure and composition. Respect for his contribution to planetary exploration is even reflected in the heavens by an asteroid named 4116 Elachi.
Robert Lang
Origami Virtuoso
For Dr. Robert Lang, a former physicist turned full-time paper folder, origami is a deep science, the source of computational algorithms that reveal practical applications and advanced theories of folding—not to mention extreme beauty. One of the world’s foremost origami masters, Lang is renowned for designs of great detail, complexity and realism; his work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Boston and Tokyo. He has contributed applications of origami to engineering problems ranging from air-bag design to expandable space telescopes. “It’s like math,” he says of his paper-folding handiwork. “It’s just out there waiting to be discovered.” Lang has also been profiled in The New Yorker.
David Macaulay
Author, The Way Things Work
From the mechanics of a can opener to the construction of a medieval cathedral, David Macaulay can explain anything. Since receiving his architecture degree from RISD, Macaulay has written and illustrated a series of indispensable books, including Cathedral, City, Pyramid, Mosque and The Way Things Work. Macaulay has won every prize in the publishing industry, has turned several books into successful PBS series, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Prize. Most recently, he has completed a five-year project to depict and explain all the systems of the human body.
John Maeda
President-elect, Rhode Island School of Design
World-renowned graphic designer, artist and computer scientist John Maeda advocates principles of simplicity in the digital age. He founded the SIMPLICITY Consortium at the MIT Media Lab, where he was Associate Director of Research and a professor of Media Arts and Sciences. Using programming to humanize technology, Maeda crosses boundaries between art and science to produce works that have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of MoMA, the Cooper-Hewitt and SFMoMA. He has authored several books on his theories of simplicity, which he claims were guided by the wisdom contained in a fortune cookie: “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
Michael Moschen
Visionary Kinetic Artist
One of the world’s visionary performing artists, Michael Moschen fuses the science, physics and mathematics of juggling into a mesmerizing form of theater. He has revolutionized this ancient circus art to such heights that he has been recognized with a MacArthur Prize, and has collaborated with artists ranging from Bill Irwin to David Bowie. Says The Village Voice: “Michael Moschen’s performance is exhilarating... he gamely makes you privy to the secrets of the universe.”
Aimee Mullins
Athlete and Artist
Aimee Mullins’ legs were amputated at the age of one, yet with the help of advanced artificial limbs, she has set world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes and the long jump at the Paralympics. Off the field, Mullins has a multifaceted career as an artist, actress, model and public speaker. She has collaborated with fashion designer Alexander McQueen and with art world maverick Matthew Barney. “I want to challenge people’s ideas of beauty and the myth that disabled people are less capable,” Mullins says. “I want to expose people to disability as something that they can’t pity or fear or closet, but something that they accept and maybe want to emulate.”
John Oliver,
correspondent, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
On his passport, John Oliver’s occupation is listed as “comedian,” and as he points out in his official bio, “passports never lie.” Born in the United Kingdom, Oliver worked as a stand-up comic in England, while also writing and staring in the BBC Radio 4 series The Department, a radio talk show, and Political Animal, a satire. Oliver is a regular correspondent on the Emmy Award-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He notes that during the course of his career, he has received “no awards worth mentioning,” but did receive a letter of complaint from Buckingham Palace, “which is clearly a lot better.”
Philip Rosedale
Creator, Second Life
Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, built his first computer in the 4th grade and dreamt of creating virtual worlds while still in high school. In 1999 Rosedale began the basic research behind Second Life, now a $30 million virtual world that is as large as New York—and growing. While Second Life may seem like a massive video game, Rosedale says he is creating a “new country.” He believes that people will come to prefer the more perfect and manageable virtual selves they can create in Second Life, and says that virtual worlds will one day exceed the scope of life on Earth.
Helen Hood Scheer
filmmaker
Helen Hood Scheer has produced documentaries for HBO and A&E Biography, garnering awards at festivals worldwide, as well as an Emmy Award and a Peabody. She co-produced Emmy-nominated Peter Jennings Reporting: I Have a Dream for ABC, and was archival producer for PBS’s American Experience: Two Days in October. Scheer makes her directorial debut with JUMP!, a documentary about the extreme sport and intense art form of champion jump roping
Paula Scher
Artist and Pentagram partner
For over three decades, Paula Scher has been at the forefront of the graphic design profession; she has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1991. Fiercely smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher’s early achievements included iconic record covers at Atlantic and CBS; the landmark identity system for The Public Theater which melded high and low into a new visual language for cultural institutions; and graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. that have become case studies for the revitalization of American brands. In 2002 she published a monograph, Make It Bigger, which also happens to be her professional motto.
George Smoot
Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist
Professor George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on a satellite that helped prove the universe originated with the Big Bang. His design of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) probe, launched into orbit around the sun in 1989, confirmed that particles formed after the Big Bang clumped together unevenly, forming the galaxies and stars. Wrinkles in Time, the popular-science book that Smoot co-authored, recounts the 20-year quest that led to his findings. He works in the former offices of Robert Oppenheimer at The University of California, Berkeley.
Nate Young
Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer, Art Center College of Design
Art Center alumnus Nate Young studied Transportation and Product Design at the College. He has worked for Prince Corporation and the automotive division of Johnson Controls, Inc., where he served as vice president of industrial design, then as group vice president for market planning/new product development and industrial design worldwide. Before returning to Art Center as Chief Academic Officer, Young established TWISThink, specializing in product, electronic and creative development.
