Halloween Night with our ‘Glowing’ Year One Product Designers

A few snapshots from Halloween night at SVA’s MFA Products of Design program: Year 1 turned Becky Stern’s Making Studio class into a glowing, buzzing, overachieving costume lab. In Making Studio, students are challenged to expand their knowledge of code and prototyping to create interactive artifacts—so naturally, Halloween turned into a full-on light show.

Each student was tasked with creating a Halloween costume that combined explorative craft with LED animation and Arduino skills learned in the course. The result? A parade of designers who couldn’t help but overdeliver—and their costumes, which quite literally stole the spotlight (pun fully intended).

Given just two weeks to design, build, and document their work, students produced a mix of playful, clever, and highly technical pieces. Highlights included Mallika’s flashing Minecraft candy basket, Manya’s Back to the Future–inspired Lux Capacitor, and the illuminated Powerpuff Girls trio brought to life by Batu, Jisu, and Yennie.

It was less a costume party and more a live demo of what happens when you give product designers some LEDs, a micro-controller, a deadline, and a license to create.