Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
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"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.
VIDEO: Giorgia Lupi Lecture at Products of Design
Giorgia Lupi is an information designer. Her work in information visualization frequently crosses the divide between digital and print, exploring visual models and metaphors to represent rich data-driven stories. Her work challenges the impersonality that data might communicate, through engaging visual narratives able to connect numbers to what they stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.
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.
Photos From Our 2016 Design:Match Job Fair!
Last Friday, the MFA Products of Design department held its third annual Design:Match Job Fair event, where global and local firms and organizations met with students, shared work, and discussed employment, funding, and entrepreneurship! Here's a list of the attendees: 10xBETA, Aruliden, Arup Foresight, The Barbarian Group, Big Spaceship, BREAKFAST, Collins, Common Cents Labs, ECCO, ESI Design, Etsy, Fahrenheit 212, Fjord, frog, Google Creative Lab, Google Research, Huge, IBM Design, IDEO, IDEO.org, Interbrand, ION Design, Johnson & Johnson, Kickstarter, Lippincott, littlebits, Local Projects, Luminary Labs, Method, Normative, Pensa, PepsiCo Design & Innovation, RED ANTLER, R/GA, Sid Lee, Sunny Bates, SYPartners, UNICEF Innovation, ustwo, Veterans Affairs, ?What If!, Yeh Ideology.
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.
MoMA Partnered Project #2 Kickoff: Rare & Well Done
MoMA is back for a second season! Gabrielle Zola (Business Development Manager, MoMA Retail), and Chay Costello (Associate Director of Merchandising at MoMA) came to the MFA Products of Design department last week to kick off the second partnered project with the Museum of Modern Art—this time around the topic of food. Students can't wait to...well, dig in to the project, and we are grateful that MoMA is has chosen to partner with the departmen. This time, students who will be creating products for MoMA's wholesale catalog!
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.