October 16, 2004 Header

Bruce Sterling to teach design at Art Center Pasadena

My hero, Bruce Sterling (his blog) says in his latest Viridian Note:

The going is getting weird. The weird are turning pro.

I have been asked to take a year-long guest residency, teaching design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

This school is in the Los Angeles basin, the epicenter of Southern Californian car culture, the etymological origin of the term “smog,” and a metroplex that arm-wrestles Houston every year for the crown of the most polluted city in the USA. If there’s a heart to the Greenhouse beast, well, it can’t be far from Pasadena.

I’m taking the job. It’s time to become the change we want to see.

For the year 2005, the Viridian Pope-Emperor is becoming a design professor. I have a number of ambitious developments in mind for Viridian list, because, starting January, design will become my career. I’m leaving Texan and I’m becoming Californian. For a while, anyhow.

The Pope-Emperor asks your prayers.

My friend Chris and I used to dream of attending that school. He for transportation design, me for advertising or painting. The fact that Bruce Sterling is going to be living in Southern California makes the little hamster-in-the-wheel in my brain start running faster and faster and faster.

To a certain percentage of people, I suspect this is huge news. I know it is to me.

three comments so far...

I’ve never understood Sterling’s [lack of] design on his own blog. Or why he won’t thumbnail his photos.

Sterling’s a writer, not a designer himself. But he thinks about design. 🙂

He’s also stuck within Wired Lycos’ parameters — and I’m not sure they don’t have nice thumbnailing.

I (in my meanderings after with what to replace my current backache-inducing home-office chair) was a bit surprised to run across a 2000 article of Stirling’s discussing the importance of good office chairs and his quest to find the “State of the Art in Sitting”.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/chairs_pr.html
Interesting design discussion, indeed. Plus, what an attention-grabbing (to me) opening line: “The New Economy is fundamentally about sitting on your ass…” Inspires me to look this guy up more often.

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