Andy Mangold

I am in the middle of orientating a slew of new students at MICA this week, and therefor am completely exhausted. As part of tomorrow night’s DIY fair (an evening activity during the orientation program), I will be doing live, green screened photo-manipulations of new students. I know, it isn’t really DIY at all, but I still think it’s going to work out pretty nicely. I have set up a Tumblr to showcase the results of these live photo-manipulations, with the students’ permission, of course. You can check out all the action tonight at 9:30pm EST at photoboothofwonder.tumblr.com.

I have my friends and coworkers at MICA‘s Student Activities Office to thank for this awesome find. Been working hard there all week to get ready for new student orientation, which will be consuming all of my time next week.

I wish I could develop a self-brand with this much character, I just don’t quite know what my unique character is yet.

I have conducted the first few rounds of interviews and photo shoots for my “Heirloom” project that I am getting pretty excited about. I figured I would post some shots from today’s work in hopes of enticing more of you to participate! THIS COULD BE YOU!

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For the CDP project I am fortunate enough to be a part of this semester, we are tackling injury prevention in the home and must speak to a multi-lingual and otherwise diverse audience. I have been developing some IKEA style diagrams to address specific instances of injury that can occur in the home, and I thought I might post my modest progress thus-far.

I have adopted this gray, genderless, raceless, and more or less ageless character into all of my diagrams and affectionately dubbed him “Nubbins” (inspired by his doughy construction and a particular episode of This American Life).

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I have begun experimenting with Flash and Actionscript 3, somewhat against my will, in my GD300 class this semester. This is my first real experience with the new program and the third iteration of Actionscript, so I have a lot of learning to do. I will be posting my progress here, thus providing some very, very silly, interactive things for you to play with.

This is also my first shot at embedding flash on my site here, so let me know if anything is wonky or if I should be doing something differently.

I am creating a poster for MICA‘s screening of Gary Hustwit’s latest documentary, Objectified. In order to do this, I tracked pretty much every object I touched throughout the course of a day and then proceeded to illustrate each one. I wanted to allude to Build‘s poster for the film, but take the basic idea a bit further and put a concept behind it. I will post the final and printed version in my portfolio.

P.S. That image above is massive, just re-sized on this page. Download it or view it in it’s own window to see some more detail.

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I will be making a poster for MICA‘s screening of Gary Hustwitt’s new film, “Objectified“, and I was inspired by this quote from Mr. Hustwitt…

On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?

… so I decided that for my poster I would track all of the objects I use in a single day. This is pretty much everything I touch or use, excluding food, architecture, and mother earth. I know the evening is young, but here is the list I have compiled:

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This semester I am going to have the unbelievable privilege of working with Mike Weikert and Ryan Clifford, along with a small handful of other undergrad and grad students, at the Center for Design Practice. We are working on an exciting project I will not explain just yet, but Mike & Ryan have said it will be okay to blog about the work we do, so I hope to document the project fairly thoroughly on here.

Now that school has started back up again, my work will be for ME and I will therefore actually be able to post it. Hopefully things will get a lot more lively around here in the weeks and months to come!

I was fortunate enough to attend Cameron Sinclair’s lecture at MICA tonight, something I have been looking forward to for a very long time. His lecture did just what I thought it was going to do for me: he was amazingly inspiring while simultaneously overwhelming me.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with him, he got fed up with the world of Architecture with a capital A catering to the designer crowd and not the common man, or as he calls it “the other 98%”. So, one day after seeing the refugee situation in Kosovo in the late 90′s on the news, he just straight up called the United Nations and asked to speak with whomever was in charge of refugees. Long story short, they actually patched him through to whomever is in fact “in charge of refugees” and he talked his way, quite accidentally, into presenting housing solutions to the UN, who had not spoken with an Architect with an implementable plan in some time. This really kicked Sinclair’s drive to put architects and designers in situations where they could be a part of real change in real time into high gear, and he co-founded Architecture for Humanity, an open source community of designers and architects that give a damn. He throws all of the preconceived notions about what it means to be a designer to the wind and focuses almost entirely on how to use one’s skills to be a positive force in the world. The program has grown immensely over the last decade, but don’t take it from me, check out what they’re up to: www.architectureforhumanity.org

I am immesely impressed and inspired by the man. He is a big “If you are not part of the solution you are a part of the problem” kind of guy, and I am going to be trying very hard in the future to be an integral part of the solution, instead of just polluting the world with classy boardgames and my own personal philosophies set in Clarendon.