Research Proposal for Sustainability [PDF]

Sustainability video introducing Foundation students to design strategies regarding material use. All Foundation students view and discuss this video with their Form and Space Faculty.

The following are current courses and curricula that address sustainability:

Architecture/Landscape/Interiors		Product Design
Integrated Learning		MFA Public Practice
Liberal Arts & Sciences

Architecture/Landscape/Interiors

2 new educational goals…
      Awareness of human use of and effects upon earth’s geology and climate
      Competency in design strategies for sustainable environments
…to be implemented throughout the following coursework:

ARLI252 Studio II (Landscape/Furniture): Design theory, process, and landscape technologies are applied to the problem of urban parks

ARLI353 Studio IV (Private/Interior Architecture): Design theory, process, building, and interior technologies are applied to the problem of a residential program sited within an existing building.

ARLI454 Studio V (Public/Urban Architecture): Design theory, process, and building technologies are applied to the problem of a building within an urban context

ARLI455 Studio VI (Building/Landscape): Design theory, process, building, and landscape technologies are applied to the problem of a building, or buildings, integrated with landscape

ARLI260 Landscape Technology and Ecology: The materiality, shaping, and construction of landscape are studied through natural processes, grading, site engineering, planting, and building

ARLI261 Interior Technology: Materials, methods, detailing, fabrication, and documentation of casework and other non-structural custom components of the interior environment as well as contract furniture and finishes are studied

ARLI350 Interior/Display/Exchange: Design theory, process, and interior technologies are applied to two problems: an exhibit design and retail space (restaurant, store, health facility, etc)

ARLI362 Lighting Technology: The basic design and technical requirements of lighting systems are introduced with an emphasis on commercial and entertainment applications

ARLI460 Detail Development: An interior space including all finishes, lighting, furniture, and integrated custom components is designed, detailed, and documented

ARLI462 Constructions: A comprehensive exhibit for the display of student work is collaboratively designed and constructed

Integrated Learning

ILMS100 Connections through Color and Design:   A second semester Integrated Learning studio course introducing Foundation students  to contextually-based problem solving using the fundamentals of color and design.  Students apply these fundamentals in solving problems that engage the larger community, trans-disciplinary practice, research and collaboration.  Classes are thematically based. 

The following are examples of themes in ILMS100:

Water In/Water Out:  Responds to issues of water usage in L.A., Field trips include Hyperion Water Treatment Plant and Long Beach Aquarium.

L.A. River System: Students respond to political, cultural and environmental issues resulting from the L.A. river's course through the heart of commercial, residential and industrial Los Angeles.

Environmental Impact of the Otis Campus: Students learn to analyze sustainability issues on the Otis campus.  Course includes a field trip to the National Resources Defense Council and a lecture from a sustainability professional.

Ballona Wetlands:  Students respond to flaura and faunas that inhabit the Ballona Wetlands, which is increasingly diminished by the surrounding urban development.

 

ILMS300 Integrated Learning Studio Elective
An upper-division interdisciplinary studio course offering unique core content that shifts from term to term. This studio affords students the opportunity to engage with professionals from various fields and expand their notion of problem solving beyond their major in a public site with realworld challenges.

The following are examples of courses in ILMS300:

ILMS300 The Right to the Street: Social objectives through semi-guerrilla tactics
The Right to the Street (a variation of Henri Lefebvre's 'right to the city'), is an Integrated Learning studio that examines through research, design, and action our rights to the production of the ouvre, or the city as a creative work. Students in this course collaborate with the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

ILMS300 Collaborating with Catastrophe: Disaster Design
Are we ready for the unexpected?  If the Big One or another catastrophe hits Los Angeles tomorrow, how can artists and designers help to mitigate the crisis and participate in the rebuilding of LA? Students in the course collaborate with the El Segundo Fire Department to consider a range of scenarios from preventative design, to survival design, to design for a post-catastrophic future.

ILMS300 Comic Heroes: from 2D to 3D
An exploration of comics and their 3-D counterparts. Outcome may be an intriguing marketing promotion or perhaps a “final product” that could range from a virtual world, to an action figure, a digital game, or even a user-created and edited website. Students in this course collaborate with Platium Studios and the Hero Initiative.

ILMS300 Environmental Studio: Reclaiming The Oil Fields
In this course, students conceptualize and propose art and design interventions in partnership with Baldwin Hills Conservancy that engage issues of sustainability, environmental stewardship and blue-sky project development for this historically significant LA landscape.

ILMS300 Neighborgapbridge
Changing the World, One Neighborhood at a Time. Can artists + designers collaborate and assume the role of ethnographers to investigate our Otis neighbors? Can they identify “gaps” in communication, interests and values and propose ”bridges” to connect them? Students in this course collaborate with the college's neighbors at Westchester Senior Center, the Westchester Loyola Village Branch Library and the Custom Hotel to investigate how art and design can serve as a platform to bring communities together.

ILMS300 Made for Kids
In this childhood learning and development studio, Otis students from all departments develop tools, toys, clothing and learning spaces for the students and faculty of Aces Elementary School in South Los Angeles.

ILMS300 Otis Goes Green: Global Green USA
This course provides art and design students with the knowledge and tools needed to make ecodesign an integral part of the design process. Students in this course will have an opportunity to help Otis become Green, discuss Green Design with top Green Designers and attend a Green Design Show. We believe it is at the design education level where we have the best opportunity to create a sustainable future. This course collaborates with Global Green USA.

 

ILML400 Integrated Learning Liberal Arts Elective
An upper-division interdisciplinary seminar course affords students a synergistic investigation of special themes. The integrative methodology promotes the ability to work collaboratively and synthesize diverse perspectives. Skills developed: advanced researching techniques, critical analysis, creative thinking, articulate expression, and information literacy.

The following are examples of courses in ILML400:

ILML 400 Walking Freedom’s Road: Examining the Civil Rights Struggle
The Civil Rights movement made far reaching strides during 1956–1968. Partnering with the Skirball Cultural Center, this course examines the events, figures, and issues central to the Civil Rights movement. Students discuss how this era reshaped America. The approach is multi-disciplinary, and students are expected to be actively engaged in classroom discussions.

ILML 400 Designing The Political
Can design stop a war? Can it topple political structures? Can design conquer social injustice? This course investigates the role of artists and designers as powerful agents of protest and progress. Emphasis will be placed on a historical contextualization of political graphics to learn more about the role of propaganda, the face of the enemy, and the power of the visual text to shape the perception of the “other” for better or worse. Students in this course collaborate with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.
 
ILML 400 The Otis Legacy Project
This course focuses on preserving and showcasing the rich oral, written, and visual history of Otis alumni. Students will research selected alumni, place their work in an art historical context, learn interviewing techniques, interview Otis alumni, and write biographies.  Students meet alumni who have shaped art and design history and lived their dreams.

ILML 400 Modern Mysticism and the Afterlife
This class explores the concept of the soul/spirit as viewed through modern mysticism, mystic individuals and social movements.  Students look into cross-cultural perspectives regarding death, life after death, and the eternal search by individuals and cultures for meaning within these concepts.  They also explores rites of intensification that allow people to bring death into the life cycle.  Students  read about and discuss various forms of analysis regarding these ideas and attend field trips designed to give students first-hand experience into these concepts so that they may formulate their own analytical perspective. Students also experiment with and attempt to use or perform some of these practices and concepts in class and hear from guest speakers such as ghost hunters and mediums.  Hollywood Forever Cemetery is the site partner and students will participate in their annual Dia de los Muertos Festival on October 24th and create a festival altar and research the function of the festival for the participants.
 
ILML 400 Festival
Through readings and presentations by community organizers, business and fundraising professionals, students learn what goes into building and promoting a successful community festival. They create a business plan, a marketing plan, and a fundraising/development plan that can be used by the college and the local community in creating an annual festival that celebrates this area of the city in a partnership between Otis College and local government agencies and businesses.
 
ILML 400 “Homeboy” Histories and Culture
This course collaborates with Homeboy Industries and explores personal experience narratives and how they are expressed in the visual arts by their narrators. In addition, this course focuses on identity and the way in which it is expressed: political, ethnic, and social identities serving as markers for social mobility and control.
 
ILML 400 Nurturing Identity and Community
A microcosm of our globalized society, Proyecto Jardin community garden is unlike other community gardens in its emphasis on health education, but also in the fact that its design and maintenance depend on collaboration among interested parties.  The presence of multiple constituents, all of whom represent voluntary and involuntary global mobility, reveals specific ways in which people identify as well as the ways they seek to address emerging issues associated with the globalized food economy.  In this course students will learn and employ ethnographic theories and methods to conduct interviews with garden patrons to discover their experiences in order to ascertain the specific and creative ways in which each person constructs an identity and to discern how the garden facilitates that performance.
 
ILML 400 LA Past Lives: A Virtual Architecture
This course will challenge students to reconstruct past physical and social nexuses of neighborhoods/communities in LA combining both architectural and design components with art, cinema and private histories of present and past community members. Drawing from the photography archives at the Richard Riordan Central Library in Los Angeles, students will generate an online archival display of LA’s past communities as part of this course.
 
ILML 400 Movies That Matter
As artists and designers, students need to understand that movies can inspire and educate as well as entertain. In this class students will gain a historical perspective to understand the past and present in order to visualize the future. Through compelling and entertaining stories, the selected films depict social, political, cultural and gender, racial and ethnic issues. This course collaborates with Film Aid International.
 

Liberal Arts & Sciences

Sustainability is a multidimensional value system that aims “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future,” acting with thoughtful and conscious concern to the interdependence of social, cultural, physical and natural systems and environments. Sustainable practices are adaptable, resilient, socially responsible, integrated and balanced, and are very much about identity and citizenship in the community and the world as a complex whole, requiring cultural awareness and sensitivity, all guiding principles of a liberal education.

ENGL 104 Critical Analysis and Semiotics: 
Students explore issues of sustainability, questioning how what one does affects the future. In addition, students are challenged to answer how and why the notion of "sustainability" in its various applications has become incorporated into current popular culture. Students discuss sustainable practices by artists and designers in conjunction with the annual TED conference where participants speak on topics including global pandemics, global warming, urban redevelopment of landfills, urban planning to allow for less reliance on cars and oil, and sustainable practices in textile design as well as other industries.

ENGL 106 Composition and Critical Thought: Students read essays that address the broader meaning of sustainability ranging from the environment to personal life styles, including the ethics of sustainable practices in relationship to the environment. Students watch an Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore and McDonough’s The Next Industrial Revolution.

ENGL 202 Speech: Students read Tipping Point by Macolm Gladwell and watch an Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore to look at contemporary rhetoric concerning the environment and how it is presented in the media.

AHCS 220 Contemporary Art Survey: Students discuss the Earth Art movement as it deals with the artist framing nature and so brakes the frame of the artist and the cube. Students engage in the discourse arising over the work produced with its ephemeral impermanence and situation in sustainability issues.

SSCI 130 Cultural Studies: This course explores sustainability as a means of configuring human activity and its institutions so that society, its members, and its economies are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in a manner that  preserves the natural world, in addition to planning and acting to maintain these ideals in the long term. In addition, students explore sustainability as defined in Cultural Anthropology and Folkloristics where the primary concern would be with sustaining the viability of a living cultural group and that group’s customs and traditions.  Sometimes this may take the form of revitalization or revival, or a reshaping of culture to form its traditions into modern relevant expressions. Students are exposed to the Folk Art/Craft movement, which incorporates both sustainability in recycling of objects as well as expressions of a group's customs and/or culture.

ENGL 400 Reel Docs/Movies That Matter: Both of these film courses deal with the importantance that students understand that art can inspire and educate as well as entertain.  These films and documentaries watched in class provide stduents with social awareness and responsibility, and contemporary issues, among which is the environment and sustainability.

MATH 336 Symbolic Logic: Students discuss how statistical data is manipulated for use in the media, discrepancies existing from what the statistics actually are, especially in regards to political issues such as the environment and sustainability.

Product Design

IPRD485 Methods and Materials: (as taught by Topher Paterno): Designed to introduce students to the subject of Environmentally Conscious Design for durable goods. This is achieved through Life Cycle Analysis, material choice, and material characteristics exploration.

MFA Public Practice

PUBP620 Case Studies: 

      Fall 2007- Took part in Transitory Publico, which was designed as a series of discussions, workshops, and performances with interventionist art groups, militant research and activist collectives, artists, and educators from throughout Latin America and Los Angeles. 
      Spring 2008- Focused on the New Orleans Plessy Park project with Rick Lowe, Jessica Cusick, and Sam Durant. 
      Fall 2008 is currently working on the San Joaquin Valley Initiative with Kim Abeles and Claude Willey.

AHCS580 History of Public Strategies in Art: Overview of New Genre Public Art methods and practices with an emphasis on identification of themes such as globalism, ethics, and community-based initiatives. (offered in conjunction with LAS)

LIBS654/655/656 Public Realm Seminar: Theory perspectives on working in public, art/anthropology, urbanism, civic policy, etc. (dependent on faculty interest and relation to students’ critical repertoire)

PUBP790 Field Internship: Opportunity for student to work with one of any number of artists involved in social issues through art practices