Anne Burdick is the Chair of Media Design Practices (MDP), a graduate program at Art Center College of Design focused on designing for the future of information and communication technologies. To address the global and social dimensions of this work, the MDP recently established two tracks. In the Field track, students work on social issues in a real-world context—the first cohort just returned from working at UNICEF’s Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda. In the Lab track, students work with emerging ideas from technology and science—they recently worked with a neuroscientist from the Biophotonics Lab at CalTech on a project inspired by new sensing technology from Intel Research.
Anne Burdick is the author of the influential essay, “Graduate Education: Preparing Designers for Jobs That Don’t Exist (Yet)” in Adobe Think Tank in 2007. A regular participant in the international dialogue regarding research and advanced degrees, Anne believes that it is the job of graduate education to push the field in new directions and to invent new practices. “[Burdick] says that the days of being defined by your mode of output—illustration, web design—will soon be over. ‘The consideration will be more whether you are a designer who works on issues of a macro scale, such as global warming, or a nano scale, such as molecular design. Education and skills will be about the context of your work—the body, domestic policy—particularly as the boundaries continue to disappear between a physical space, an information space, a gaming space, and so on.” The Future of Design Education, Print Magazine, April 2011.
In her own practice, Anne Burdick designs experimental text projects in diverse media, for which she has garnered recognition, from winning the prestigious Leipzig Award for book design to being nominated for a Webby Award for her work with interactive texts and electronic literature. With Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Pressner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, she is a co-author of the book Digital_Humanities, “…a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production” (MIT Press). Her writing and design can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine, and Electronic Book Review, among others, and her work is held in the permanent collections of both SFMOMA and MoMA.
Anne Burdick studied graphic design at Art Center College of Design and San Diego State University prior to receiving a BFA and MFA in graphic design at California Institute of the Arts.
Here she is featured on a Scratching the Surface podcast episode.