Nikolai Cornell and Shawn Randall
Art Center College of Design
Nyumbani Village Concept Cards
Biography: Shawn Randall has spent the past four years at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He graduated from Art Center as valedictorian earning his BFA in Graphic Design and is currently working towards his MFA in the Media Design Program. Shawn believes strongly in the power of design, and in extending the role of the designer beyond “image maker.”
Nikolai Cornell received his BA in Architecture from Virginia Tech in 1997 and worked for FACE Architecture in San Francisco before turning his attention to web. He worked at Razorfish, helping to design and implement highly innovative websites for a large variety of clients before leaving in 2001 to start his own studio. Nikolai is currently a graduate student in the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design.
Objective: The Nyumbani Village project is a multidisciplinary studio closely examining the complex needs of elders and children who will reside in a prototype Nyumbani ("home" in Swahili) Village in Kenya. The village is a prototype for a series of sustainable communities in Africa for elders and orphans left behind in the AIDS pandemic. The Kenya Village Studio documented herein is the first result of Art Center's involvement in a coalition of United Nations and Kenyan government agencies, local nongovernmental organizations, and private-sector contributors that, together, will help confront this enormous challenge. Art Center is honored to have provided early input toward this critical endeavor.
Our Contribution: The studio was composed of 13 students, both undergraduate and graduate levels, from seven different majors, four of which were responsible for the final print piece. Because of the complexity of the project and the diversity of work produced throughout the term, a flexible, easily updateable communication tool was necessary to document the work of the studio. The Nyumbani Village Concept Cards are that tool. The graphics group began working early on in the term on the village identity, signage ideation, and design of the final communication tool, while the other students explored possibilities for the village design. The physical form of a set of cards was decided upon late in the term (only two weeks before the final presentation of student work), after months of design research, identity studies, and signage explorations. The cards are divided into five sections based on the five areas of the project: Research, Identity Studies, Village Planning, Housing, and Sacred Spaces. Each card was numbered, and a Cover, Contents, Acknowledgements, Foreword, and Project Brief were added to complete the set. We used different paper stocks and a color-coding system to identify these different sections. The cards are two-sided, with one side dedicated to text-heavy descriptive content and the other side to larger images. To solve the problem of reproducing large, detailed plan drawings on a small card, we allowed some cards to work together to form larger images, while also working separately to highlight certain features of the larger pieces. We created a visual key on the cards to inform the viewer of this relationship. We produced approximately 50 sets of cards for distribution to afore-mentioned organizations for promotion of the project. We also created custom-designed laser-cut packages for the cards that were assembled by hand. A short DVD documentary piece produced by a participating film student was included to complete the kit. We are grateful for the opportunity we had to contribute to a project with global implications. We also hope that this Kenya Village Project will inspire others in design education and practice to become involved in work that can truly make a difference.
Tools used: Because of the seamlessness of Adobe products, we were able to divide the content for the final print piece among the four group members. After creating a template page in both Adobe® Illustrator® and Adobe InDesign®, team members were allowed to work in the application of their preference (either InDesign or Illustrator). The other students in the class provided us with scans of their work using Adobe Photoshop®, and many of the Environmental students also used Adobe Illustrator to annotate some of their scanned drawings. Once the content was collected and the pages were designed, a final document was created using InDesign for final output. The pages were then imported into Adobe Acrobat® for digital distribution and large group presentations. (Using the full-screen mode in Acrobat 6.0, the professor was able to project key pages of the book as a slide show for formal presentations of our work.)
