Agency for Civic Engagement

Red Chair Productions: The Nutcracker 2023

Under the direction of Professor Cate Roman, Graphic Design 3 (Junior level Studio course) students competed to create branding and collateral for Red Chair Productions 2023 productions of The Nutcracker. The winning student’s work by Daniella Pidal was used to promote the show. Design elements included: branding, key art, print posters and audition cards, social media campaign, style guide, and website redesign.  This work won a GDUSA Design Award and is published in print and online: gdusa.com

Mapping Burbank

Professors Echo Theohar, Cate Roman, and Jeanine Centuori worked with their students in Applied Computer Science and Media Studies and Architecture to created an experiential project about Burbank. Augmented Reality was designed to be housed within a built kiosk at the entry to campus. This ongoing project has many students involved in its design, implantation, and future engagement with a public audience.

Designing for Social Impact:  Architecture Studio Collaboration with Alexandria House 

Professor Paulette Singley directed her architecture students with the unique opportunity to collaborate with Alexandria House, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing housing and support services for women and children in need. Through an immersive and hands-on experience, students worked alongside industry partners and real stakeholders to address the spatial and social challenges faced by Alexandria House and work together to imagine a projective future asset.

CG Animated PSAs, College Autism Spectrum and LA Food Bank

Professor Judith Kriger led the Intro to 3D Animation students to create CG animated PSAs for College Autism Spectrum and LA Food Bank. AVFX students met with the clients, pitched and refined their animatics and then produced finished, CG-animated PSAs entirely from scratch. The project included animating a rigged character and using a professional cloud-based render farm. The selected still is from College Autism Spectrum’s PSA co-directed by Isabella Willet and Guillermo Velazquez Aguiar.

Walk Watts

Walk Watts an interactive self-guided tour of the community of Watts in South Los Angeles, was completed during the summer 2017 ACE Institute. It was a collaboration between graphic designer Cate Roman and architect Jeanine Centuori. The team included Woodbury graphic design student Briana Pong, and architecture student Alex Kim. This tour highlights overlooked stories and events that have shaped this remarkable community. There are three components to this project: temporary environmental graphics, a z-fold pocket map, and a downloadable app titled HOLLA (Hear Our Local Legacy App).

Mobile Units Project

National Health Foundation (NHF) and Woodbury University’s Agency for Civic Engagement Center (ACE) collaborated to create the Mobile Units Project for Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles.  These mobile units will serve to provide amenities for the students at the High School.  The designs were generated in collaboration with students of the Health Academy, an afterschool program dedicated to promoting healthy lifestyles among high school students.  Ideas for the structures were derived from core values of this student organization including awareness and promotion of healthy eating habits and lifestyles.

Cabin Project

The Shadow Hills Riding Club is the project site and nonprofit client.  This therapeutic riding program uses horses as tools for physical therapy, emotional growth, and learning for individuals with mental, physical, and/or emotional disabilities, and to carry on other charitable activities associated with this purpose.  The site plan locates an ADA accessible wooden deck spine that traverses the site and creates a “street” that is flanked by eight sleeping cabins to accommodate teachers-in-training who will teach therapeutic horsemanship to clients.

The Bowtie Project

The ACE architecture studio, in collaboration with California State Parks and Clockshop, has built several structures on the grounds of the Bowtie Project, a 19-acre site adjacent to the L.A. River slated to become a permanent state park in Los Angeles. Clockshop manages cultural programming that is open to the public during the lengthy planning process required to implement this public infrastructure. These projects by Woodbury students are used during campout events, film presentations, poetry readings and other cultural events open to the public.

HYPE Project

Graphic Design junior students created and developed a comprehensive, coordinated design system to promote HYPE Los Angeles. The mission of Helping Young People Excel – Los Angeles (HYPE) is to provide talented low-income students located in Los Angeles with the guidance and resources to qualify for admission to elite college-prep independent high schools. Students designed the logotype and applications, informational brochures, media kit and inserts, student recruitment packets, website design, and promotional items.

The Lath Project

ACE embarked on a multi-semester design/build project with Taking the Reins, a social service organization dedicated to enriching the lives of at-risk teenage girls through horseback riding and urban gardening. Pavilion structures were designed and built including an outdoor kitchen, eating areas, a seed bank and a store for selling produce. These structures accommodate “seed to skillet” educational programming in which the girls learn to make soil, nurture seedlings, grow vegetables, harvest crops, cook organic foods and enjoy healthy eating.

The Outdoor Classroom 

Architecture students designed and built a classroom on the campus of the John Muir Middle School in Burbank. This design gave form to leftover space and created a functional classroom under the canopy of trees. Plastic wood was used in nonconventional ways to create textures and patterns.

Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative

Civic Engagement: Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative is a hands-on, site-specific course in the Urban Studies Program that immerses students in an ongoing community revitalization project in the Byzantine-Latino Quarter (BLQ) of Los Angeles. Dr. Emily Bills and her students partner with Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), an organization founded in 1994 as a “city partner” to expedite public improvement projects. This class emphasizes LANI’s mission to facilitate community-driven projects by empowering neighborhood business owners and residents to organize and oversee the improvement projects themselves.

Watts Project

Students engaged in a comprehensive urban design studio that focused on streetscape, place-making and community engagement along the Wilmington Corridor in Watts. The primary goal of this project was to explore the potential of low-technology, high-impact design intervention in both public and private space as a means of place-making and activating a commercial corridor. Each group of students worked with local businesses and local youth to engage the community and create modular street furniture that met the needs and uses identified by the businesses and design teams.

WORKSPACE CULTURE

Woodbury’s Interior Architecture MIA & INDS students observed the Los Angeles headquarters of Rios Clementi Hales Studios and created a film on workspace culture, exploring how the multi-disciplinary design firm creates singular, integrated and comprehensive solutions for a variety of design challenges. The video illustrates the phenomenological effect of interior spaces, how users employ architectural agency, and how a workspace contributes to the users’ health and psychological well-being.

Constructed Nature, Megan Kendrick

The exhibition, titled “Constructed Nature,” shared stories of how specific communities and institutions in Burbank have manipulated nature in order to maintain political independence and create cultural community. The class, taught by Dr. Megan Kendrick, has benefited from a partnership with museum educators from the Autry Classroom Curators, a new educational program at the Autry National Center, as well as a number of other professionals who have contributed invaluable insights and skills into the many facets of historical research and exhibit design.

WU Radio

WU Radio is Woodbury University’s first radio station. An internet-only station, WU Radio harnesses the vast potential of streaming audio through our website and through digital streaming services, accessed 24/7 online and through Streema. WU Radio enables Woodbury students to get hands-on experience with radio broadcasting, and all members of the Woodbury community are eligible to volunteer as content providers, including students, alumni, faculty and staff. The station strives to foster dialogue, tolerance, and respect for others through a celebration of diverse music and cultures. The station broadcasts podcasts, audio interviews, DJ music sets, live call-in shows, and sound experiments.

Call and Response: Poet to Artist

Call and Response: Poet to Artist is a collaboration between students in the MFA Creative Writing program at Mount Saint Mary’s University and students in the BFA Graphic Design program at Woodbury University. Poets in a long-form poetry/virtual reality course at MSMU produced experimental poetry and the graphic designers at WU selected excerpts from these poems to create visual expressions of the text. The results utilize expressive typography, materiality, and abstraction with the intention of bringing more attention to the nature of poetry by reaching a larger audience.

Community Luncheon for Service Learning Project

November, 2018: Social Psychology students host a catered reception in the Nan Rae Gallery on campus with invited community partners to showcase their service learning activities from the Fall 2018 term. Each student worked with a community organization during the semester and created a visual project to illustrate the intersection of psychology and civic engagement. Featured organizations included the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank, Guided Autobiography Workshops, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, American Comfort Hospice, Park Champions Program, and others.