Ringing in the New Academic Year: 2024 Opening Reception
On Wednesday, as the sun began to set over Manhattan, the Products of Design Department on West 21st St glowed orange as evening rays streamed warmly through the windows. While students buzzed quietly over their work, wrapping up loose ends for the day, a buffet was laid out, and our classroom was converted from “studio” to “speaker” format in preparation for the night’s activities.
On this evening, we were thrilled to kick off the new academic year with a warm welcome to our returning class of 2025, all of our incredible faculty members, and the new class of 2026.
It’s rare in life that you have the opportunity to see into the future. So much of living is making blind leaps of faith and adapting to unexpected circumstances. But on this evening, the classes of 2025 and 2026 received just such an opportunity, as Department Chair Allan Chochinov and each member of the MFA PoD faculty shared a preview of the year ahead—an expansive and holistic curriculum, painstakingly crafted to produce designers armed to address the needs of a transforming world.
At PoD, students learn from professors who are also CEOs, senior designers at leading firms and tech companies, artists, climate researchers, writers, engineers, journalists, and entrepreneurs. We heard first-hand from each of them, including filmmaker Michael Chung, who teaches first-year Video Storytelling: he called in from Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was on set shooting a documentary film!
Allan tells us that “to design anything is to design everything”. The first year of PoD expands the definition of what it means to be a designer via rapid immersion in making, research, strategy, storytelling, and entrepreneurship. In the second year, students begin the thesis path: examining business structures, environmental stewardship, design metrics, strategy, and delight, the course of study then culminates in a year-long thesis project that combines previous learning and individual passion.
Below is the full list of PoD’s rigorous one-track, 2-year curriculum. You can read about each individual course here (it’s juicy).
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Making Studio
Design Research and Integration
Affirming Artifacts
UX Beyond Screens
3D Product Design
Entrepreneurship for Sustainability and Resilience
Drawing Design
Systems, Scale, and Consequence
Lecture Series | Studio Visits | Special Topics
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MoMA Partnership
Smart Objects
Behavioral Psychology for Designers
Imagining Climate Futures
Design Performance
Business Structures
Video Storytelling
Design Histories
Point of View
Interaction Intervention
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Thesis Directed Research
Thesis Studio
Advanced Seminar: Artificial Intelligence
Product, Brand, and Experience
Leadership and Strategic Management
Practicing Professional
Design for Public Policy
Community Design
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Thesis: Crafting the Thesis Narrative
Thesis: Service Entrepreneurship
Futuring & 3-Dimensional Product Design
Thesis: Business Modeling
Thesis: Design Delight
Thesis: Advanced Interaction Design Practices
Thesis: On-Stage Presentation
The evening presentations successfully set the stage for what lies ahead, leaving students and faculty excited to dig in and get to work. How we will get there is clear, but where we will end up is yet to be seen.
