Think about the last time you took a rapid COVID-19 home test. Every brand has a different protocol, instructions can often be confusing, results can be unclear, and the amount of wasteful packaging is truly excessive. The Fifteen Home Kit —getting its name from the familiar waiting period interval—is an all-in-one solution with easy-to-follow steps that fits seamlessly in a purse or back pocket.

New York City has seen a tremendous increase in bike sharing—with 1.6 million New Yorkers regularly riding a Citi Bike. But while this increase in popularity has many benefits, it also means more accidents. Bicycle helmets can prevent serious head injuries by 85%, yet 88% of Citi Bike riders choose not to wear helmets. Halo is a helmet-renting service—a convenient and hassle-free way to access protective headgear in NYC. 

The ORA cup and applicator is a self-care product duo for young teenagers to alleviate the intimidation of folding and inserting menstrual cups. On a mission to create eco-friendly, high-performance products, second-year students Nihaarika Arora, Cheryl Zhang, and Xinyue Wu designed ORA during the Product, Brand, and Experience course taught by Hlynur Atlasson.

Trace is an intuitive and thoughtful oral hygiene tool designed to elevate your overall dental wellness experience. Four minutes (the recommended brushing time) many not seem very long, and yet many of us still struggle to dedicate those minutes to our daily dental care routine. Why? Because of its high effort and low reward nature, dental care feels like a task. The current products in the market offerings don’t help either. The industry is hyper-focused on adding high-tech whitening and brightening innovations, rather than focusing on the user’s experience and healthy basics.

The latest product to come out of PoD’s partnership with MoMA is this set of Landscape Candle Holders—designed by Class of 2021 alum Zhenxuan Wang.

Margarita Zulueta's upcoming thesis, Accepting Fat, proposes fat acceptance through design offerings to combat anti-fat bias. Specifically, her project Flex—a speculative new fleet incorporated into Southwest Airlines—addresses discrimination in airplane systems through the lens of seating.

In an 11-week project, Margarita Zulueta, Zekun Yang, and Anne Keating set out to redesign in-home water filtration consumer products, of which Brita is the current market leader. Their solution? VODA—a reusable pitcher-agnostic system that pairs with a geo-specific custom water filtration mixture. VODA focuses on local, open-source accessibility to clean water, and aims to reduce plastic usage in our personal drinking water habits.

“With consistent long-duration spaceflight becoming more probable in humanity’s future,” offers first-year student Corey McClelland, “the opportunities for innovation in microgravity gastronomy are seemingly limitless.

Since 2014, MFA Products of Design has been thrilled to have an incredible partnership with the Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the students are challenged to design products for possible inclusion in MoMA’s Wholesale Catalog, and every year, products make it through all the way to the catalog and store shelves! We’ve done our best to document some of the highlights over the years, but here’s a roundup of some of the special moments. We are unbelievably grateful to MoMA for this relationship, and we can’t wait to see what the students will come up with next!

Hot on the heals of the recently-released Roller Coasters, the latest product to come out of MFA Products of Design’s ongoing partnership with MoMA are Class of 2019 Eugenia Ramos Alonso’s “Fenestra” Bookends. Check them out on the MoMA Store website!

Frubo is a fruit bowl with a modern aesthetic and a hidden agenda. Masquerading as a simple piece of home decor to store fruits and vegetables, Frubo creates a space for the user to store fruits that they want to consume immediately on the upper platter, and fruits that they would save for another day in the bottom portion of the container. Frubo is designed to live everywhere except the kitchen, with the intent of treating fruits the same way that we treat flowers: as pieces of beauty to be enjoyed at the height of their bloom.

One of the most anticipated products to come out of PoD’s partnership with MoMA is the set of Roller Coasters—ingenious drink coasters designed by Class of 2020 alum Hui Zheng. Check it out on the MoMA Store website!

Helen Chen’s thesis, Fruiting Bodies: Fungal Futures for Collaborative Survival, explores how new material ecologies and interspecies consciousness—the acknowledgment that we live in complex ecosystems involving both human and non-human life—can create a paradigm shift in current industrial modes of production and consumption. In order to address the urgency of landfill and chemical waste streams around the world, she began her thesis exploration with prototyping biomaterials ranging from bacterial cellulose to algae-based bioplastics and mycelium.

Having lived in two of the world’s busiest cities, Beijing and New York City, Sherry Wu developed an interest in the ever-quickening pace of contemporary life. But as the world has undergone a dramatic acceleration, there is also a counter-movement to embrace the concept of slow living. Sherry’s thesis, PACE: New Modalities for Slow Living in Accelerating Times, explores the tension between fast and slow modes of living. She identifies the balance between the two modes as a critical area of focus and views this balance based on the relationship between technology and culture.

CARA is a menstrual product and waste carrier designed for use in multi-day trips outdoors. Designed by recent grad Alexia Cohen as part of her thesis, DARE + DEFY: A Woman’s Place in the Great Outdoors, CARA—from the word carapace, meaning the shell of a turtle—features an expandable waste collection container at the center, with two separate dry enclosures at the top and bottom to keep unused menstrual products, toilet paper, and/or wipes clean and ready to use.

Glare is a longboard skateboard brand designed for the urban commuter. The core technology is the Uplight—a long-wavelength beam of light projected upward onto the rider which increases nighttime visibility and thereby reduces the risk of collision with cars. Designed by second-year students Qixuan Wang, Eugenia Ramos, Micah Lynn, and André Orta, the project brief was “to identify a subculture, design a product to suit a need or opportunity within that community, and then finally design a brand around that product.”

The historical mindset towards people with physical disabilities has been one of pity and exclusion. While the notion of pity and exclusion is looked down upon in liberal societies, an understanding of what constitutes the objectification of people with disabilities, as well as a greater effort towards inclusion, is still not widespread. The voices of people with limb loss and limb differences (LL/D) are not part of an extensive ongoing conversation about their rights, needs and wants. Through her thesis Upgrade, Adya aims to create the conditions that lead to more open conversations about and with people with LL/D and their acceptance in society, as well as easier access to products and services that improve their quality of life.

Design strategist and storyteller Roya Ramezani did not feel gender issues in the tech industry before she started working in Silicon Valley—where she found herself in a male-dominated environment in which women were not communicating their ideas. In contrast to the statistics, she joined a diverse team. After a month, however, she discovered something that changed everything: Even when they were equal number as men in the room, women weren’t contributing to the discussions equally. They were being quiet, and she thought of them as “not being present in the meeting room.” Roya’s thesis, entitled Exponent: Amplifying the Female Voices in Tech Discourse, attempts to address these issues using product design, service design design, and platform design.

“At first, it was hard for us to relate to our target audience," comments Souvik. "But we quickly realized that underneath the sometimes strange behavior of denimheads—whether that was soaking their jeans in the bathtub in lieu of washing it in the washing machine to avoid losing too much indigo dye in their jeans, or participating in denim world tours where jeans would be sent around the world to be worn by different denimheads for a month at a time—there was an underlying theme of commitment to sustainability and authenticity...values that we could very much relate to.”