I am proud to kick off the fifteen-year anniversary campaign of Designmatters at ArtCenter.
We are choosing to imbue this celebratory occasion with special meaning as the field of design education for social impact and innovation continues to mature. We have designed a storytelling campaign that we are calling “15 Years of Designmatters” (#DM15Yrs). The campaign takes on a dynamic approach that is about collective memory and will feature the perspectives, experiences and expertise of many in our community—our students, alumni, faculty, and partners—who have contributed to shaping the department’s fifteen-year history. Starting with this post, and for the next fourteen weeks of our spring semester, we invite you to follow the campaign’s testimonials through our blog and social media networks and stay tuned to participate in a handful of forthcoming events. We are intentionally clustering these activities over this bounded time period as “a unifying web of retrospection”* that aspires to provoke reflection as much as to incite forward movement.
#DM15yrs campaign designed by Vina Rostomyan
We know that an anniversary is a concept that implies a unique time designation where the past is consciously brought forward into the present. As such, anniversaries often cement and celebrate a set of shared meanings about the past, and in the process, they can help us become more reflexive about our actions in the present, and more confident about our aspirations for the future. In this regard, it is significant that #DM15Yrs happens in the context of another milestone—the eighty-fifth anniversary of ArtCenter’s founding and a rich legacy of excellence in art and design education.
I anticipate marking this Designmatters anniversary with the resolution to “be open to the new, the different, and the true”**about all that design for social innovation has to offer. I invite you to join me in celebrating our collective accomplishments as we also capture the promise of the learning that lies ahead!
Mariana Amatullo, PhD
CoFounder and Vice President, Designmatters
ArtCenter College of Design
January 2016
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* David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 1985.
**Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 1976.
Help us celebrate 15 Years of Designmatters by using the hashtag #DM15Yrs
Catch up on the entire campaign at designmattersatartcenter.org/category/dm15
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