MFA in Interaction Design: Home

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  1. Video: Matt Mullenweg Fireside Chat

    Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and Wordpress, talks to Chair Liz Danzico about the universals he’s learned in starting WordPress:

    A universal I’ve found is that the more I’ve given away, the more I’ve gotten back. A couple of years into WordPress I started thinking, why is this thing working? It’s often more difficult to ascertain elements of why something is successful than why something fails. … What it came down to was the community (and that’s often a misused amorphous word). But in the WordPress community, it meant that there were dozens, then later hundreds of people making every single little piece of it go, and really passionate about the smallest parts of it.

    Watch the video for Mullenweg’s insights on design, entrepreneurship, and open source.

    Many thanks to Roland Lazarte for terrific video work he did in filming the talk. 

  2. Application Deadline: January 15

    As the application deadline grows closer, we look forward to meeting prospective students. Friday, January 15, is the deadline for submitting an application to the MFA Interaction Design program. The new MFA is an inventive two-year program that trains students to intimately understand how design can affect human behavior, and to think more holistically about the products and services they’re creating. The program explores the strategic role of interaction design in shaping everyday life, and intends to increase the relevancy of design to business and society so designers can make a difference.

    If you’re considering applying, there are two ways to do so:

    SENDING MATERIALS

    All required application materials (except the online application and application fee) must be received together in one package by the Office of Graduate Admissions at the following address:

    Office of Graduate Admissions
    School of Visual Arts
    209 East 23rd Street
    New York, NY 10010-3994

    DROPPING OFF MATERIALS

    Applicants are welcome to drop off applications in person to the main Admissions Office located 209 East 23rd Street on the first floor. The office will be closed for the holidays, reopening on January 4, Monday through Friday, 9AM–5PM. This option is highly recommended for individuals that may live in or find themselves in the New York area on or before the deadline.

    SVA main building at 209 East 23 Street, one of the original buildings on the campus.

    Find out more about the application requirements. If you have questions, or want to stop by for a tour or to talk, drop a line at interactiondesign at sva dot edu or 212.592.2703.

  3. The Tarot Trunk: A Student Project

    With the final week of the semester underway, students are busy perfecting final projects, pitches, and presentations. 

    From Rob Faludi’s class, Fundamentals of Physical Computing, Arduino-powered devices, soldering irons, and layers of wires dominate the studio landscape as students prepare for a second round of final presentations tomorrow. With their fortune-seeking device “Tarot Trunk,” Derek Chan, Russ Maschmeyer, and Eric St. Onge are appealing to the Twitterverse for the final step of their project. After all, interaction design is all about participation.

    The paper prototype of the Tarot Trunk interface.

    The team requests participation from Twitter users worldwide:

    1. Follow us! @TarotTweeter

    2. Once you see a tweet by @TarotTweeter asking for a fortune, hit the reply button and write a made-up fortune using any or all of the parameters listed.

    The fortunes you write may be as humorous, non-nonsensical, or serious as you’d like. Anything goes! As long as you hit the reply button, your tweet will be sourced as a possible fortune to be printed out for a “patron” interacting with our tarot card-reading device in the studio.

    Once final projects are complete, the team will document their experience working on this project as well as findings through user testing on this blog.

  4. Discovering the Glass House Conversations

    The Philip Johnson Glass House team has been working hard through the project’s discovery phase, gathering and synthesizing data that will help steer the direction of the project. We’re creating an online experience that will support the incubation of new ideas and dialogue around themes in design, architecture, social issues, humanism, and more.

    As part of the synthesis process of the project, the team has been listening to past conversations held at the Glass House, organizing ideas and quotes into categorical themes that could be later used as a means to unify design ideas. Another important piece of this process is learning about the past participants of the Glass House conversations. Over the next month, we’ll have the chance to interview some of the thought leaders involved in these conversations. The aim is to gain critical insight on their experiences while learning more about their role and contributions in their day-to-day discourse.

    This past week, the group responsible for leading the project’s discovery phase presented three conceptual approaches to the project. These themes were described at a high-level as metaphors for how the different elements of design on the future website could be unified.

    With the holidays approaching, we’re setting out to work through our best concept in more detail, while also organizing questions for the interviews we’ve set up this week. Look for our next blog post that will detail our experience conducting interviews.

  5. Finals in the Studio

    The holidays may be only two weeks away, but in the Interaction Design studio, that means only two weeks’ time to perfect final projects for all five courses of the semester. Wednesday saw presentations on collaborative physical computing work, and tonight, students are dressed to impress for Communicating Design final presentations.

    Below are photos from Wednesday’s presentations. For more final project photos, visit our flickr pool.

    Students, guest critics, and instructor Rob Faludi gather for Fundamentals of Physical Computing final projects.

    Zooming in on “MINDfull.”

    From left to right: Students Derek Chan, Eric St. Onge, and Russ Maschmeyer present their project “Tarot Trunk” while guest critic Nicholas Felton looks on.

    Amos Bloomberg critiquing the projects.

     

  6. Alex Wright on “Ready for a Web OS?”

    In the latest issue of Communications of the ACM Magazine, faculty member Alex Wright suggests “a new generation of browsers may finally herald the long-awaited convergence of the Web and operating system.” Below is an excerpt.

    Back in 1995, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen predicted that his fledgling Web browser would one day render Windows obsolete. Fifteen years later, Netscape is long gone, and the traditional desktop operating system (OS) remains firmly established on most personal computers. Meanwhile, Web browsers still look a lot like they did in the mid-1990s, running inside application windows. In hindsight, Andreessen may have spoken a bit too soon. But history may yet prove him right.

    The hegemony of the desktop OS is starting to fracture with the emergence of a new generation of browsers that may finally herald the long-awaited convergence of Web and OS. An enormous amount of Web OS development is currently under way, with the development of Web standards, such as HTML5, to add richer capabilities and features; new technologies like Microsoft’s Xax and Google’s Native Client that make browsers and their applications as capable and powerful as desktop applications; and architectural changes to browsers, making them process oriented, which increases their robustness and security.

    Read the full article

  7. NYC Big Apps

    Inspired by the NYC Big Apps competition, students recently designed NYC-related phone apps for Chris Fahey’s Interaction Design Fundamentals class. Using the NYC Data Mine and resources like Google maps, students drilled usefulness into statistics with the creation of apps such as “Book ‘em,” forgoing the mire of the NYPL website to locate the nearest local library, or “Million Tree,” allowing locals to adopt a tree and raise awareness for NYC’s urban forest movement.

    The New Green City app featured below by Gene Lu is an outtake of the author’s design statement from his blog, where he details more about the app, as well as visual documentations of other projects from the program.

    Locate yourself in the New Green City app by Gene Lu

    The Problem

    Gene Lu frames the problem this way on his site:

    In 2007, New York City set a goal to reduce its carbon emissions by 30% by 2030. Two years have passed, yet many New Yorkers do not know where the city stands with respect to this goal. Even though the city has released public data, users are faced with the difficulty of interpreting numerous data sets in an informative manner.

    Check your neighborhood’s sustainability level in the New Green City app by Gene Lu

    The Solution

    He explains the the solution as follows:

    New Green City is an iPhone app that monitors the level of sustainability of all 59 districts within the five boroughs of New York City. The main screen displays the user’s current and neighboring districts based on a red to green spectrum, green denoting sustainable. Sustainability levels are generated by pulling the following data sets from NYC’s data mine: tree census, recycling capture rate, bicycle parking, playgrounds, and public space.

    Users can also integrate other iPhone apps into New Green City, such as Every Trail (cycling app) and Nike+ (running app). Through these additional apps, users can increase the sustainability level of their district depending on frequency of usage. Users are also able to challenge friends in other districts to determine who’s more “green” based on the data pulled from the other apps installed. By establishing an app that allows for integration with other apps, a mobile app ecosystem is created, allowing users to transfer existing data from compatible apps already on their iPhone, along with injecting a social aspect into the process.

    From now through the end of the year, we’ll be posting more student work as we go toward the end of semester one of the inaugural class of the MFA Interaction Design program.