Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
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Rolling admissions still open! 〰️
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HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE: A Design Journey Around Travel and Place
Here, There & Elsewhere is a masters thesis project about the experiences of travel and place. Leila Santiago was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the largest and most complex cities in the world. There she trained as an architect and urbanist, studying the built environment and the complexities of the urban space. In the midst all of that, Leila also learned that the urban space "is a place for playing."
"ACCESS LTD." Launches at Wanted Design NYCxDESIGN 2016!
As part of NYCxDesign, the students of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts present ACCESS LTD, a set of roving checkpoints that investigates the way access is granted and denied by design—based on where we’re from, what we look like, how we speak, and what we own. Embracing the international theme at the Wanted Design show, the students explore the way our national, cultural, and personal identities determine our opportunities—both locally and globally. Despite global common ground and interdependence, our differences continue to influence what rights and privileges we enjoy. Using the language and tropes of border control, the work invite guests visiting the Wanted Design exhibition to examine the role of design in granting or limiting an individual’s access to place, people, and prosperity.
Parallel Times: Product Designs From the Future
Graduating students of SVA’s MFA in Products of Design present PARALLEL TIMES, an exhibition of artifacts developed through the varied lenses of extrapolated futures.
Guided by Sinclair Smith in the Product Futuring class, and employing the endangered vernacular of the newspaper, students constructed advertisements for a product accessory representing a utopian or dystopian future—envisioning a world to reach for or avoid. They then used the insights gleaned from these future accessories to refract backwards in time, designing critical products for the here-and-now within Raymond Loewy’s “most advanced, yet acceptable” framework.
Desk Dolly Shots: A Candid Look at End-of-Semester Student Desks!
At the close of April, the department sees pretty much its most spectacular frenzy of "making"—but also its most spectacular desk messes. (What looks like clutter is actually a kind of controlled chaos—featuring the latest in cutting edge prototypes.)
We thought it would be fun to document the surfaces of each of the students' studio desks, and asked first-year student Oscar Pipson to take on the assignment. Find below the fruits of his labor—two versions—and do keep in mind that there was NO STAGING of what Oscar filmed. (It would have been tempting to arrange the objects on the desks in a more orderly fashion, but far less authentic.) So here's what a few weeks before the final push of grad school at Products of Design looks like!
Orator: A Karaoke Platform for Public Speaking
Fear of public speaking is often cited as the most common phobia, outranking even the fear of death. As Jerry Seinfeld famously quipped, “That means that the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy!” At the same time, the ability to express oneself clearly and confidently in group settings is highly valued and admired. To confront this dilemma, designer Julia Lindpaintner created an application called Orator: karaoke for public speaking. Conceived as a way to make the art of oration accessible and entertaining, Orator gives people the opportunity to improve their own speaking by imitating great rhetoricians of the past and present.
Reimagining the Business Model Canvas
In the past few years, Alexander Osterwalder’s (and co-authors’) Business Model Canvas has become a ubiquitous tool among product designers, entrepreneurs, and business strategists of all stripes. As part of a class at SVA’s Products of Design called “Business Structures”—a course about business itself as a language and a design medium—we experimented with reimagining the canvas.
MASTERS THESIS: Enough is the New More: Reframing Scarcity to Feel Like Abundance, by Steve Hamilton
Steve Hamilton’s master’s thesis, Enough is the New More: Reframing Scarcity to Feel Like Abundance, began with a manifesto of dialectics, eschewing our persistently growth-based metric for success, rejecting the last several centuries of western economic culture that led to the consumerization of happiness in the United States, and offering a more humane and sustainable alternative. His early research centered around a plethora of “wicked problems”—including those pertaining to vastly embedded systemic structures such as energy, materials, transportation, and the design of our cities—and culminated in a set of radical artifacts that speculate on an alternative future.
MASTERS THESIS: Gowanus Outdoors Club: A Field Guide to Soliphilia, by Julia Plevin
Design strategist and storyteller Julia Plevin did not realize how much of an effect the environment had on her wellbeing before she moved to New York City to attend the Products of Design program and found herself yearning for nature. After a harsh New York City winter left her depressed and out of whack, she realized that she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). And she realized she was not alone. According to the National Institute of Health, 6% of the U.S. population suffers from seasonal affective disorder and 14% of the U.S. population suffers from winter blues. These numbers are even larger if you consider many Americans live in places like California or Florida that do not have long, cold winters.
MASTERS THESIS: "Disclosional": Creating Conversation Around, In, and Outside HIV, by Heath Wagoner
Heath Wagoner’s master’s thesis, Disclosional: Creating Conversation Around, In, and Outside HIV, centers around HIV and the role of conversation. Acknowledging that oftentimes “a conversation is simply not enough,” Heath argues that in the case of HIV, it is imperative. Disclosional is aimed at making communicating about HIV status easier, and to remove its stigma. Heath’s thesis work began with him volunteering at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center (LESHRC) in New York, and ended with a participatory and immersive exhibition and an educational app.