As an architect, industrial designer and filmmaker, I have only one reason to work: to give people something interesting to think about! And if design is really an educative medium, that is, the transfer of insight from the mind of the designer to the mind of a user of a product or the occupant of a building, then film certainly is the most powerful of the design media, since the transfer is direct!

Steve Diskin

Steve Diskin was awarded a BA, magna cum laude, in Visual Studies in 1970, as well as a Masters in Architecture at Harvard University in 1974. He joined Kenzo Tange + URTEC in Tokyo, where he participated in many international architectural projects. His career expanded with the design of his HELIX clock (now in the permanent collection of the National Design Museum at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York and published in a new book called The Look of the Century), which uses the rotational and linear characteristics of the spiral for a dramatic departure in time-telling. This led to the establishment of his industrial design and manufacturing company, Tik-Tek Engineering, in Los Angeles. He was invited into the Kovacs Design Group in New York in 1982, and his lamp series “Parallels” was later produced by Kovacs Lighting. Diskin designed a futuristic chandelier for the entry of the Norfolk Airport Hilton Hotel, and during March-May 1986 he showed his work in a group show entitled “Sidecar: The Process of Design in Contemporary Lighting”, at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum.


Steve Diskin was Executive Vice President of MEGA/ERG, a small, select team of designers of office furniture and accessories. He has directed the efforts of the group in the design and prototyping of more than 25 projects, large and small, in the area of office furniture and accessory devices. In 1988 he authored the “Microsystem” modular furniture and space enclosure system. Mr. Diskin was featured in the New York Times in 1983, in the Los Angeles Times in 1985, and again with MEGA/ERG in 1988. Steve Diskin is a licensed architect, as well as industrial designer and consultant. In addition to his professional work, Steve Diskin presently is senior instructor in Advanced Product Design and Environmental Design at Art Center College in Pasadena, CA, where he was voted “Great Teacher” in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996. His work at Art Center has been the subject of articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Business Journal, Progressive Architecture and Popular Science. He has previously been on the faculty of Harvard University as a teaching fellow in Visual Studies and has lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Istanbul Technical University, The Institute for Industrial Design in Oslo, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Steve Diskin is the co-author of Los Angeles at 25 MPH, a photographic excursion through LA’s rich residential architecture, and author and illustrator of What a Totally Crazy Orchestra, a manuscript for a book about musical instruments for children. His multi-media digital videos “Africa on My Mind”, “Four Friends: How Designers Think They Work” and “For Forty Years I Have Tried to Understand the Moon” won critical acclaim at the Industrial Designers Society Conferences in Detroit, 1994, Santa Fe, 1995, and Orlando, 1996. He has just completed a new video about Japan called "Tokyo Eyes".

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