Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
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N-3+Me: Urban Resilience at Human Scale
Regena Paloma Reyes is a service designer, New York City resident, and urban enthusiast. Her thesis, N-3+Me: Urban Resilience at Human Scale, investigates factors that promote adaptability in city-dwellers during times of crisis. Urban communities seem more likely to suffer significant losses in unnatural catastrophes, from infrastructure failure to terror threats due to their high population density. The ensuing collection of research and product design examines how resilience can be at its greatest in urban environments, and how city spaces, diverse populations, and the expansive interpersonal networks that arise therein can be used to create cultures of preparedness at individual, interpersonal, and community scales.
PROSUMERISM: Crafting Alternate Consumption Experiences
In her thesis Prosumerism: Crafting Alternate Consumption Experiences, Sowmya Iyer explores whether products and services can ease the consumer’s guilt of excessive spending and materialism by providing them with options that best fit their values of sustainability. She also wanted to find out if these products/services could be adaptive to the consumer’s lifestyle and built for their convenience. As part of her research process, Sowmya spoke to researchers, innovators, educators, authors, and artists exploring ways to reduce the effects of modern consumerism on the environment.
FINDING THE WILD: A Visceral Approach to Sustainability
Jenna Witzleben’s Master’s thesis, Finding the Wild: A Visceral Approach to Sustainability, explores an alternative future trajectory—“rewilding”—and how physical and emotional reconnection with our natural environments can inspire lifestyles of environmental stewardship.