By Lara Warren

AT ART CENTER, WE BELIEVE THAT SUCCESSFUL DESIGN CAN BRING ABOUT POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE. IT CAN CHANGE LIVES. IT CAN MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. FOR ALL OF US.

By providing our students with an art and design education that promotes engagement with—and contributions to—the world around us, our students can truly change the world that we live in.

Created in 2006, the Designmatters Fellowship program gives Art Center students the unique opportunity to conduct social and humanitarian work on an international scale, serving as design ambassadors to nonprofit agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As they venture beyond the classroom and into the world, Designmatters Fellows encounter new social and cultural contexts in which to contribute their design skills, while demonstrating their empathy in addressing crucial world issues.

According to Designmatters Producer and Senior Associate Director Elisa Ruffino, Designmatters Fellowships are an exceptional opportunity for graduating students to engage in the real world as ambassadors of the College. Fellowships differ from typical design internships, because they are completely immersive experiences that allow Fellows to work at a nonprofit or NGO for a term.

New York-based alumna Stephanie Sigg ENVL ’98, who serves as the College’s liaison to the United Nations and as a volunteer mentor to the Designmatters Fellows, agrees. She meets regularly with the Fellows who receive internships in New York, offering feedback and advice.

“Exposing Art Center students to real projects, where their ability as designers and artists enables them to create social change while solving problems, is extremely gratifying,” she said. “It also gives each student a real purpose to grow, not just as artists but as activists.”

Funded solely through grants and donations, the highly competitive Fellowships are awarded on merit. Fellows receive up to six tuition-exempt academic credits, as well as airfare and living expenses for the 14-week duration of the Fellowship. The program offers up to three Fellowship awards per year. To date there have been eight Fellows, all outstanding final-term undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines.

Some Fellowships represent the beginnings of a longer-term partnership between the College and the organization. After taking part in the Fellowship program, many of the participating organizations—such as Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations Population Fund—in turn become further engaged with the College through Designmatters Sponsored Projects. Not only do these organizations learn more about Art Center through these Fellowships, said Ruffino, but they learn about the “power of design and the role designers can play in social change.”

Jonathan Jarvis MFA MDP ’09 was stationed at UNICEF’s New York headquarters last summer for his Fellowship. His involvement with the organization actually began the spring before his Fellowship with a UNICEF-sponsored Transdisciplinary Design Studio (TDS) at Art Center. Jarvis and his classmates were challenged to develop a system for youth journalists in the Philippines and the Caribbean, where sometimes the only media access people have is a mobile phone. Research from the project was compiled into a book published by Desigmatters, From Hi-Fi to Lo-Fi.

Art Center continued its involvement in the project by awarding Jarvis with a Designmatters Fellowship and sending him to UNICEF headquarters in New York for the summer term. He collaborated closely with the Innovation and Development team from the Youth Section of UNICEF’s Communication Division and mDialog to expand the applications developed in the TDS as part of the Youth Journalist Portal project.

Jarvis was part of a “small but potent” team of designers that developed global, open-source communication systems, particularly utilizing mobile phones. The interactive, online project, Our Stories, collects personal stories from youths and adults around the globe. Contributor stories are organized across a virtual map by location and as open API feed, the stories are accessible by a variety of different media around the world—even in those areas without Internet connections.

“My Fellowship was a time of significant personal growth in what was a pretty challenging environment,” Jarvis said. At UNICEF, he worked on a wide variety of additional projects, from creating an international emergency response system for UNICEF’s various branches to designing logos to managing a team of developers based in Cairo. “All of this while experiencing as much as possible during my first visit to New York!” Jarvis laughed.

Influenced by their Fellowship experience, many students decide to continue working for nonprofit organizations after graduation. Justin Cram GRPH ’08 spent last summer in New York as well, working in the communications department of Doctors Without Borders. He is still working for the organization as a consultant, and hopes to work full time for the organization in the future.

Cram’s primary project was to develop an online, interactive companion for the organization’s Refugee Camp project, a traveling exhibit where participants can experience the living conditions of a refugee camp. He took each panel from the physical exhibit and turned it into several visual slides, illustrating written information such as statistics or procedures through diagrams, photos and animations. In addition to the interactive guide, Cram worked on a poster campaign for HIV/AIDS awareness in Uganda. Translated into Uganda’s four main languages, the posters are being used at various medical and health clinics.

Cram said that perhaps the most rewarding project of his Fellowship was developing a visual campaign for Doctors Without Borders at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. The campaign that he designed included a T-shirt, postcards and protest posters for their affiliates and healthcare workers. “It was so great seeing photos of the event and the work I created,” he said. The New York Times published an article and photo of the event along with the Doctors Without Borders visual campaign. Cram said it was especially exciting seeing the scores of volunteers wearing the shirts and waving the posters with his design.

Cram said that the content of the projects was often eye-opening. As he conducted his research, Cram would frequently comb the organization’s image database, comprised of photos taken in the field and around the world. “The images were flooded with devastation and tragedy,” he said. “They were often powerful and horrific, and frankly, quite depressing. Often, it is easy to overlook all of the famine and catastrophes around the world. I’m glad I was able to learn more about what is really going on.”

Like her colleagues, Jana Frieling GRPH ’08 feels that her 2007 Fellowship with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) went far beyond the classroom walls.

“My experience at PAHO was something that school in its enclosed environment cannot teach,” said Frieling, who worked at the organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s a huge learning experience to work on a ‘real’ project versus a class project. That is especially true for working on an important cause within an organization as large as the PAHO.”

Frieling first worked with Designmatters during her fourth term at Art Center in 2006. She was part of a group of students asked to design a poster for the annual DPI/NGO conference at the United Nations in New York.

“It was the first time that I had ever worked for a nonprofit organization, and the message we had to communicate was so much more complex and important than in a typical student project,” she said. “What intrigued me most was the concept of turning design into a force for positive social change.”

Frieling’s budding interest in humanitarian-inspired design led her to work on a Designmatters project in the spring of 2007 for the PAHO. Over the course of that term, she developed a logo for the group’s “Faces, Voices and Places ” initiative, whose main goal is empowering the most vulnerable communities of the Americas. Frieling was in contact with PAHO throughout the term and that summer, PAHO and Designmatters asked her to continue her work on the initiative as a Designmatters Fellow on-site.

At PAHO, Frieling was charged with developing an identity system for the initiative based on the logo that she had created at Art Center. Frieling created various applications based on a design language that she developed. Her assignments included creating ideas for the design of a new Web site, various posters, a book, magazine spreads and banners. Frieling then created design guidelines for the new system, now used by the various branches of PAHO and their partners around the world. She also designed a brochure and a poster, a banner that is used at conferences and other events, and a newsletter.

Working at PAHO showed Frieling that a single person can really make a difference in the world. “Designers are naturally problem solvers—be it in creating physical solutions or in solving communication problems,” she said. “There are so many problems out there, and creative thinking can surely change things for the better. All it takes is an investment of time.”

Outer Circle, 2009