Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
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XENO: From the Foreign to the Familiar
Products of Design student, Adam Fujita, has spent the last year connecting the dots of his own experiences of xenophobia and bias—through the lens of his thesis design work using the experiences of others. His hypothesis was “to provide the undocumented community of New York City with tools—in the form of products and services—to foster greater tolerance in our communities, and to ultimately create a generation of highly successful people.” The work culminated in his thesis, XENO: From the Foreign to the Familiar.
RE-MIND: Re-evaluating ADD & ADHD in aQuick-Fix Society
Product and Experiential Designer Belen Tenorio’s thesis, Re-Mind, explores productivity, and re-evaluates Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Hyperactivity Disorder in the context of a quick-fix society that too eagerly medicates individuals.
SIDE STEP: A Momentary Escape From the Real World Through Art
Almost since birth, Louise-Anne van ‘t Riet has spent her spare time in museums and galleries. “When I’m surrounded by art, I have the feeling that my mind flies;” she proclaims, “that time is suspended and nothing else matters other than recharging my energy.” Lou is a designer whose work is very often influenced by art—it always inspires her and helps her to meditate and escape. But her thesis is not about creating art. Rather, Lou’s products and services are an attempt to make art accessible, enjoyable, and understandable to people who don’t appreciate art.
HEREAFTER: Remapping the Landscape of Death and the Way it is Remembered
Products of Design MFA graduate Panisa Khunprasert’s thesis, Hereafter, uses her role as a designer to create products and services that enable us to externalize grief in an empowering and beautiful way. The world of bereavement—in a contemporary society which does not talk about death or grief—is fertile ground for design.
HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: A Design Journey Around Travel and Place
Here, There & Elsewhere is a masters thesis project about the experiences of travel and place. Leila Santiago was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the largest and most complex cities in the world. There she trained as an architect and urbanist, studying the built environment and the complexities of the urban space. In the midst all of that, Leila also learned that the urban space "is a place for playing."
"ACCESS LTD." Launches at Wanted Design NYCxDESIGN 2016!
As part of NYCxDesign, the students of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts present ACCESS LTD, a set of roving checkpoints that investigates the way access is granted and denied by design—based on where we’re from, what we look like, how we speak, and what we own. Embracing the international theme at the Wanted Design show, the students explore the way our national, cultural, and personal identities determine our opportunities—both locally and globally. Despite global common ground and interdependence, our differences continue to influence what rights and privileges we enjoy. Using the language and tropes of border control, the work invite guests visiting the Wanted Design exhibition to examine the role of design in granting or limiting an individual’s access to place, people, and prosperity.
Parallel Times: Product Designs From the Future
Graduating students of SVA’s MFA in Products of Design present PARALLEL TIMES, an exhibition of artifacts developed through the varied lenses of extrapolated futures.
Guided by Sinclair Smith in the Product Futuring class, and employing the endangered vernacular of the newspaper, students constructed advertisements for a product accessory representing a utopian or dystopian future—envisioning a world to reach for or avoid. They then used the insights gleaned from these future accessories to refract backwards in time, designing critical products for the here-and-now within Raymond Loewy’s “most advanced, yet acceptable” framework.
VIDEO: Giorgia Lupi Lecture at Products of Design
Giorgia Lupi is an information designer. Her work in information visualization frequently crosses the divide between digital and print, exploring visual models and metaphors to represent rich data-driven stories. Her work challenges the impersonality that data might communicate, through engaging visual narratives able to connect numbers to what they stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.
Desk Dolly Shots: A Candid Look at End-of-Semester Student Desks!
At the close of April, the department sees pretty much its most spectacular frenzy of "making"—but also its most spectacular desk messes. (What looks like clutter is actually a kind of controlled chaos—featuring the latest in cutting edge prototypes.)
We thought it would be fun to document the surfaces of each of the students' studio desks, and asked first-year student Oscar Pipson to take on the assignment. Find below the fruits of his labor—two versions—and do keep in mind that there was NO STAGING of what Oscar filmed. (It would have been tempting to arrange the objects on the desks in a more orderly fashion, but far less authentic.) So here's what a few weeks before the final push of grad school at Products of Design looks like!