Friday Fives: Salvador Orara

Every Friday we give #highfives to a different designer from our extended family of PNCA students, faculty, alumni, and guest lecturers. 🙌🙌🙌 We ask them five questions.

Salvador Orara is a Creative Technologist and Educator, and has taught at Art Center College of Design and Woodbury University before coming to PNCA where he teaches various classes in interactive media, VR/AR, and design. He has produced work for The Map Office, The Rare Studio, and Jaguar Land Rover. He is currently President of AIGA Portland. His newest class at PNCA is Fundamentals of Interactive Media, starting in Spring, '19.

Follow the series @pncadesign.

Q: What do you do to get "unstuck?"

A: Honestly, these days I either clean the house or work on the yard. There is something about everyday tasks that allows the imagination to steam up; and you get a clean house out of it too.

Q: How do you want to shape design?

A: I want to shape design into a practice of generating new questions for tomorrow. Design that critiques the status quo, and in doing so facilitates debate and inspiration fueled by new forms and functions. Design as generating knowledge.

Q: What feels vital to the future of design, to you?

A: Understanding today’s design paradigms and methodologies, so that we can break them and invent new ones.

Q: What music (or podcasts) are you listening to, or what are you reading right now?

A: I’m always returning to the work of Steve Reich, and listening to his compositions, “Sextet” and “Music for 18 Musicians.” I also flip through “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell.

Q: If you could get a critique from one artist (living or dead) who would it be?

A: Charles and Ray Eames.

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See more of Sal's work at salvadororara.com.

Follow along with our #fridayfives on instagram @pncadesign.