The Design Department at Cornish provides a small, personal studio environment, with a focus on demanding conceptual projects that support exploration and creative risk-taking. The curriculum is based on visual, technical, and conceptual investigations. These will lead to new approaches to communicate information, envision environments, and new forms for storytelling. Students will also learn to promote ideas and messages, explore graphics in motion, and discover new interactive experiences and visual forms for entertainment.

The department integrates professional engagement with community involvement into the curriculum. The faculty is composed of active working professionals in the Seattle community and the Department Advisory Committee provides ongoing advice about the programs. The wider professional community is involved through studio projects based on actual client projects in the students' junior and senior years. These activities include inviting guest designers to class critiques; lunchtime and evening guest speakers; field trips; extra-curricular group projects; internships; student exhibitions; student interest groups; and active links with professional associations such as the AIGA, IIDA, and ASID. The classroom studios mimic the professional environment. Every student works at a drafting table with a personal laptop connected to a range of digital peripherals. Senior students have a personal studio space for their final year.

By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: January 3, 2009
CONSUMERS love the large, bright color displays on smartphones, but not the power-hungry way the screens drain the batteries.

Now Pixtronix, Qualcomm and other companies are developing technologies intended to conserve battery life on handhelds as people spend ever more time not just talking and texting on them, but also browsing the Web and watching TV.

A new color display in a prototype from Pixtronix uses energy-efficient LED bulbs, creating the image with thousands of tiny shutters that slide open and closed like digital pocket doors.

New technology by Qualcomm takes advantage of natural light, reflecting the short, blue waves of daylight, for instance, and combining them in the same process that lets bluebirds glow with iridescent color in the sun.

Energy efficiency is widely sought by manufacturers of mobile devices, said Paul Semenza, a senior vice president at DisplaySearch, a market research company in Austin, Tex.

“Everybody is shooting for low-power color,” Mr. Semenza said.

The screen technology from Pixtronix, a display company in Andover, Mass., is called PerfectLight. The company, which has been developing the technology internally since 2005, publicly demonstrated its first prototypes in late October.

“We offer one-fourth the power consumption of a liquid crystal display,” said Mark Halfman, vice president for marketing at Pixtronix. PerfectLight prototypes have demonstrated use of fewer than 50 milliwatts for the backlighting of a smartphone display, in contrast to the 200 or so milliwatts required on a traditional LCD, he said.

LCD, the current screen technology, is inefficient because it loses much of its optical energy as light passes through polarizers, filters and crystals, Mr. Semenza said. The polarizers can cut the intensity of light in half, and the color filters reduce it even more. Because so much energy is blocked or filtered this way, the backlighting must be extremely bright to create glowing colors.

“You can end up with about a fifth of the optical energy that is put out by the backlight — or even less,” he said.

That optical loss doesn’t occur in PerfectLight because the liquid crystals, polarizers and color filters of LCDs are eliminated, Mr. Halfman said. Instead, the image is created with thousands of digitally controlled, microelectro-mechanical system, or MEMS, shutters that open and close over each pixel opening, allowing light from the red, green and blue LEDs to pass through.

“We have a single shutter for each pixel,” he said. A display in a cellphone might have 76,000 to 300,000 shutters for as many pixels.

He says Pixtronix expects to license the lighting technology to display manufacturers.

“Manufacturers will use our displays to gain a market differentiation in terms of power consumption” from standard LCD displays, he said.

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm, the wireless chip maker in San Diego, also uses microelectro-mechanical systems in its new display technology called mirasol. (The name is based on the underlying technologies — “mira” for mirrors used in the devices, and “sol” for the sun used for lighting.) Unlike PerfectLight, though, the light for the pixels is provided not by LEDs, but by a far less expensive source: ambient light. To form the image, tiny mirrorlike optical structures in the MEMS selectively reflect red, green or blue light.

The Qualcomm devices are fabricated not on silicon, as most MEMS are, but on glass, a far cheaper material, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research company in Norwalk, Conn.

He said that the color on the screen did not bleach in direct sunlight. “You take that display out in the sun and, by golly, it works fantastically,” he said.

James Cathey, vice president for business development at Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, said that the reflective display would require very little power. “Because we can harness the ambient light, our technology is low-power, as low as one milliwatt,” he said.

The Qualcomm displays may appear soon on beaches and ski slopes. Mirasol will be used in a waterproof MP3 player from Freestyle Audio of San Diego, said Lance Fried, founder and chairman. The player will cost $80 to $100, he said. Mirasol technology will also be used for the screen of an MP3 player integrated into a headphone to be sold by Skullcandy of Park City, Utah, said Tom Brady, director for marketing.

The E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., which developed low-power, black-and-white electronic displays for many e-book readers, is also working on a color screen that, like Qualcomm’s, takes advantage of ambient light. One prototype has a flexible color display on a stainless steel backing. “Our color displays will be sunlight-readable,” said Sriram K. Peruvemba, vice president for marketing, and will require very little power to do their job.

“Imagine,” he said, “if you are reading the newspaper on your laptop and stop to talk on the phone,” the newspaper shown on the laptop will consume power until you return. “With the technology we are building, though, you can lay down the display and talk” and not worry about draining the battery.

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

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Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, includes more than 4,000 works created after 1950, representing all media and genres: painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, video, film, and installation. MCASD is known for collecting works by promising emerging artists and under-recognized mid-career artists, as well as by major figures in contemporary art. Among the greatest strengths of the MCASD Collection are minimalism and Pop art of the 1960s and 70s, conceptual art from the 1960s to the present, installation art, Latin American art, and art from California and the San Diego/Tijuana region. Many works in the collection are the result of artists' residencies or works commissioned for MCASD exhibitions. The Museum continually seeks to enhance its strengths and to expand the representation of artistic trends in its Collection in response to new developments in art locally, nationally, and internationally. At the same time, MCASD preserves, presents, documents, and interprets its holdings for current and future audiences.

Monte Carlo In Casablanca

Monte Carlo in Casablanca at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego attracted glamourous guests, who arrived through a colorful Moroccan market and met Rick at the Blue Parrot Club, inspired by the classic Humphrey Bogart film Casablanca. They then dined at Rick’s Place, a ’40s-style nightclub and casino. The menu was Moroccan, with music and dancing following dinner. Gail and George Knox served as co-chairs, and a formidable group of supporters served on the honorary committee.
— Darlene G. Davies, photos by Bob Stefanko