Department Blog

Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.

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What Is Design For Social Impact?
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What Is Design For Social Impact?

Design for social impact is the practice of interrogating systems—institutional, economic, social, political, interpersonal—in order to define opportunities for change that give voice to those who has been disenfranchised or marginalized by design. In essence, this field of study provides a methodology for examining domains of power through Socratic inquiry, structural and systems-based design thinking, and solutions-based design making.

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Announcing New Faculty for 2019-2020!
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Announcing New Faculty for 2019-2020!

We are thrilled to welcome four amazing new faculty to Products of Design for the 2019-2020 academic year: Shanti Mathew, Megan Ford, Alexandre Hennen, and Jonathan Meléndez-Davidson. Meet them all below, and see them on the quad!

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What Is Information Architecture?
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What Is Information Architecture?

Information architecture is important to design because it provides the structural underpinning that makes clarity possible. Without thinking about structure, designers can make missteps that lead to things that look good, but aren’t actually good.

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What Is Design, Now?
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What Is Design, Now?

"What Is Design, Now" is a series of no-nonsense primers defining and describing a breadth of contemporary design fundamentals. Written by faculty and friends of the MFA in Products of Design department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the series attempts to demystify and make more accessible the essential toolkit and vocabulary of current design pursuits. Check back often for new additions to the series.

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What Is Prototyping With Electronics?
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What Is Prototyping With Electronics?

It's not as difficult as it may seem to build functional prototypes of high-tech product designs, once you learn basic electronics and microcontroller prototyping. It’s like sketching, but with hardware. Every product designer should learn a bit of circuit design, wiring, soldering, and programming in order to better understand the increasingly connected devices in our lives.

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What is Graphic Design?
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What is Graphic Design?

Graphic design is an umbrella term for a number of interrelated disciplines that involve the application of text and image in compositions on paper and screen to communicate messages. Graphic design is also the armature for storytelling in its broadest form and for various outcomes from advertising to editorial, from packaging to data.

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