Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
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PLAYING WITH FIREBRANDS: Amplifying Student Voices in Public Education
Andrea Cameron’s master’s thesis, Playing with Firebrands, explores student agency in education. Inspired by the work of progressive educators and student-centered design, the motivation was to incorporate principles from progressive education into public education. The objective was to take the best practices in privatized education and make them accessible to public schools.
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.
WITH, DESPITE, BECAUSE: Living your Best Life with Chronic Pain
After five years of living with a back injury, Alexa Forney made a startling realization: her life with chronic pain was actually better than it had been before. Even more shockingly, her research made it clear that she was not alone.
DIGITAL NATIVES: Promoting Analog Behaviors in Children’s Cognitive Development
In her thesis Digital Natives, Gahee explores designing technologies for children. She uses as her point of departure the notion that young children today "lack analog activities," as they spend most of their time using tablets and cellphones. She argues that existing products in the market are designed to be addictive—creating passive behaviors in children.
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.
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.
ABSURD INTELLIGENCE: Explorations of the Unconscious
Xumeng Mou considers herself lucky to have been born a daydreamer. Growing up in an environment that valued so-called rationality and objectivity over fantasy and creativity placed her natural inclinations at odds with outside expectations. This inner conflict led her to explore the human mind and to examine whether daydreams should rightfully be considered “barriers to success.”
INVISIBLE TETHERS: How Time and Memory Shape Products and Places
Arjun Kalyanpur’s master’s thesis, Invisible Tethers, posits that people are connected to one another through time via shared experiences and history with objects and places. Initially driven by a personal fascination with time, it was not until a trip to California that his thesis began to take shape.
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.