Products of Design *LIVE!* at ICFF for NYCxDesign
Q: What do a cloud lamp, 3D-printed pug, MoMA De Stijl Tumbling Tower, and sleeping bag have in common?
A: All four were featured in the MFA Products of Design booth during this year’s NYCxDesign Festival.
Products of Design has been renowned for creating innovative exhibitions for New York’s NYCxDESIGN week, and this year was no different. For the 2024 Wanted Design show at the ICFF, we created a facsimile of the department inside a booth, calling the exhibition “Products of Design, Live!”
In this year’s immersive exhibition at ICFF, visitors were able to interact with graduate students and alumni from our MFA in Products of Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. Our students, past and present, reenacted their time at the program—sharing prototypes, drawings, apps, and thesis projects. The exhibition itself recreated a portion of the program’s studio space—fabricated by multi-talented alum Josh Corn and Natsuki Hayashi—with some magic tricks to help participants feel that they were actually in the department space, interacting with real students.
“We asked our alumni to come ‘re-enact their time at Products of Design’ and then to talk to visitors about what they were doing professionally after completing the program.”
The recreation also featured alum products such as Berk Ilhan’s mürror and Giancarlo Cipri’s Sliding Perpetual Calendar. Thesis books from years past—spanning topics from Hacking the Racial Binary to A Woman’s Place in the Great Outdoors—were stacked on a shelf, while the north classroom blackboard-that-isn’t-actually-a-blackboard and communal kitchen looked on from each side.
Over the course of three days, students, alum, and faculty chatted with attendees, encouraged some speculative thesis ideation (where visitors filled in a “Thesis MadLib,” imaging their fictionalized, “ideal” master’s thesis), and answered questions about why we teach every discipline of design. Visitors included David Rhodes, the president of SVA, and Chay Costello, MoMA’s Associate Director of Merchandising, who stopped by to say hi and see the student-designed MoMA products on display.
