On March 1st, we had the pleasure of visiting the Cal State Long Beach campus to watch over 130 students on 27 teams across three campuses compete in the first California State University Creative Jam LIVE. The student teams at Cal State LA, Cal Poly Pomona, and Cal State Long Beach participated in one of the largest Creative Jams LIVE events.
Creative Jam LIVE is a design challenge that allows students to demonstrate and celebrate creativity using Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe works with faculty at campuses to organize the event, write the design challenge, and recruit speakers and judges. Anthony Acock, assistant professor in graphic design at Cal Poly Pomona; Sam Anvari, assistant professor in graphic design at Cal State Long Beach; and Zachary Vernon, assistant professor in graphic design at Cal State LA worked collaboratively leading up to the event to recruit students and make sure the events went smoothly on their respective campuses.
The theme of this challenge was immigration, and the event opened with a
talk by Dr. Alvaro Huerta, assistant professor in urban and region
planning and ethnic & women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona, who
encouraged students to consider how the immigration discussion is framed
in the media. Then the students got to work to develop a prototype
mobile application that would support and assist immigrant users. They
had just two hours to design their app before presentations and judging
began. The students were so impressive with the creative, visually
appealing solutions they presented after such a short time. The top 12
teams from Friday advanced to the final round on Saturday. The winning
student team was from Cal Poly Pomona, with the second and third place
teams from Cal State Long Beach.
This event was a chance to pilot a multi-campus Creative Jam. When the
California State University system became part of the Adobe Creative
Campus program in Fall 2018, Michael Berman considered what could make
the CSU experience with Creative Cloud unique. With the size of the CSU
and number of campuses, the idea was born to organize a multi-campus
event to expand the opportunity. We hope to help facilitate a CSU-wide
Creative Jam in the near future. If you’re interested in being involved
in a future Creative Jam, you can email us at innovate@calstate.edu.
