Tyrone Drake, associate professor at ArtCenter College of Design, will co-lead the NEA funded initiative to help build trust between Long Beach police and residents (Photo – ©ArtCenter).
While the main campus of the ArtCenter College of Design sits atop a high hill in Pasadena, the ivory tower myth hardly applies, the latest demur to that canard is the planned partnership between the Art Center and City of Long Beach Police Department.
By Garrett Rowlan
The aim of the partnership is to aide the Department to facilitate communication between it and the community, with goals and transparency and accountability. The project is appropriately named “Building Bridges.”
Fueled by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to the tune of thirty thousand dollars, the baby steps of the project will be a workshop, a meet and greet in May. The mixer is designed to build a smaller bridge between the department and the participants from ArtCenter. This is the first step in defining what issue the students and the Department want to tackle, a honing-in of purpose.
Jennifer May, director of the College’s Designmatters dept., will help co-lead the project (Photo – ©ArtCenter).
Another step will occur between September and December. A 14-week studio class, taught by Tyrone Drake, Design Faculty Member, will bring together 12 t o 16 students from many disciplines. Out of this synergy, and the inevitable and welcome “blue sky thinking” of the students, all sorts of possible innovations are envisioned: apps, signage, video for various media-insertion projects, and the amorphous “social media,” all designed to foster communication.
This fusion of technology and social issues between Long Beach and ArtCenter goes back to 2015 when, at a conference, former Vice President of Designmatters, Mariana Amatullo, made the connections that eventually led to the Innovative Technology team of ArtCenter to work with the City of Long Beach to draw attention to the problem of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in that city. It is a project that is still in the process of data analyzation and updates. Jennifer May, Director of Designmatters, fully expects this current project to have the same extended half-life.
The project is in its initial stages now, but is expected to gain traction as the year progresses.
Garrett Rowlan’s first novel, “To Die, To Sleep” is newly published and available on Amazon.
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