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| January 2011 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| 2 Visionaries |
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| In last year’s LA, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, two foreigners—the English Peter Saville (seated, right) and the Greek Ares Rosakis (standing, left) were included in a feature called Visionaries.
Both are designers with an eye on the future. Saville Saville has designed album covers and ad campaigns. Now he's taken on cities. Working as creative director for the city of Manchester in England, he rebranded the city as the Original Modern City, harking back to Manchester's role as the world's first industrial center while seeking to reinvent it as a center for culture and media. He launched the Manchester International Festival in 2007, a celebration of original commissioned artworks. Now Saville is setting his sights on LA, seeking to reinvent it with an emphasis on the arts and culture. Last summer, the City Council signed a proclamation to promote connections between Los Angeles and Manchester. Rosakis Chair of the engineering department at Caltech in Pasadena, Rosakis has plans to tame the beast of information and harness it for effective use. Through the Information Science and Technology Initiative, Caltech has created the framework to make the exploding mass of information accessible to researchers in science and humanities to foster cross-pollination of ideas to benefit all of us. Because of the initiative, the electric company can better track energy use, the fire department can pinpoint the epicenter of an earthquake so response can be targeted. That's Rosakis' strength--solving global problems by applying technical expertise. His department's new home at the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology has glass walls and an open concept that encourages openness and sharing and dry boards and markers everywhere to capture ideas. |
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