News and blog posts from our students and faculty

Austin Center for Design was featured in Day In The Lab in interactions magazine, the popular journal send to members of ACM’s SIGCHI. The feature describes AC4D’s space and students, and is in both the printed and online version of the magazine. You can read it online here.

Austin Center for Design alumni Christina Tran recently presented at SXSWedu on the topic of Designing for Peer Learning. Her talk covered stories that illustrate many of HourSchool’s core beliefs. Christina has a great retrospective up, with audio and slides of the talk, here.

Check out this great article about Austin Center for Design’s student work, in CultureMap:

Jon Kolko, creative director of MyEdu (the visual resume-building and jobs platform for college students) and founder of the Austin Center for Design, sees interactive, digital design — that’s apps, online schedulers, content managers, websites, you name it — as the way to solve some of the “gnarly” social problems in our world, from the challenges of elderly care to the hoops same-sex couples jump through to start a family.

Read the whole article here.

Congratulations to Bethany Stolle for winning first place in the IxDA Student Design Competition. Among other great prizes, Bethany won a 6 month mentorship with the Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) team at Intel Labs!

You can watch her winning talk here.  Congratulations, Bethany!

We’re pleased to announce that AC4D has a new home!

We’ve secured two great buildings in East Austin, located at 1309 Chestnut Avenue, Austin, Texas. Our facilities house classroom space, as well as our alumni-run businesses. We’ve also got room to host speakers and hold events, and so we’re excited about bringing new creative thought leadership to Austin. In 2013, we’ll offer various design for impact bootcamps, group discussions, and speaking events. If you want to remain up to date on our various events and activities, please join our once-a-month mailing list.

Please enjoy the pictures below, and come visit us!

AC4D Director Jon Kolko’s new article Now Hiring: The Most Liberal Art is featured in the Huffington Post:

Employers are demanding a workforce that can engage with complicated, ill-formed problems. Executives want individual contributors that can embrace volatility and unpredictability, while crafting narratives of the future. Brands are realizing success when they try to empathize with — rather than understand — their customers. This — not the production of beautiful things — is what designers do best, and it is the value they bring to organizations. Producing stunning creative output it only a tiny part of what it means to be a designer, yet aesthetics continue to be the only part that we herald as valuable. But it’s these other skills — empathizing, systems thinking, storytelling — that describe a successful career in design.

Read the whole article here.

Austin Center for Design’s 2012 Conference, Design Extravaganza, featured long form talks from Alan Cooper, Genevieve Bell, and other thought leaders. You can now view the videos from this event online here. If you missed the coverage of this great event, Core 77 posted a recap here.

We’re excited to add Chris Risdon to the faculty of Austin Center for Design. Chris, a lead experience designer at Adaptive Path, has fifteen years of experience in information architecture, interaction design, and graphic communication.

Chris has spoken at numerous conferences including SXSW, The IA Summit and WebVisions. He’s also a regular at Adaptive Path’s own UX Intensive and UX Week events. Chris holds an MFA in design from the Savannah College of Art & Design and spends any extra time as an educator, teaching Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshops and as an adjunct professor at Austin Community College, teaching interface design.

Welcome, Chris!

Congratulations to AC4D student Bethany Stolle, who was one of five winners in the Interaction Design Association’s 2013 Student Design Challenge! Bethany, along with the other winners, will travel to Toronto in January to compete in the final design round in front of an international audience.

Bethany’s winning entry is below; congratulations, Bethany!

Congratulations to AC4D alumni Girls Guild for some awesome recent press! They were featured in Tribeza’s November magazine (see page 106), and recently won Best Apprenticeship Program in The Austin Chronicle:

Think of it as Girls Rock Camp for the art set. Bombastic bursts of apprenticeships and workshops put girls into direct contact with women who are making their way in the world as artists and artisans. It’s a great way to build a skill set or spend a Saturday afternoon learning to do something new.

Be sure to catch them on the East Austin Studio Tour, too.