MFA in Interaction Design: Home

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  1. Carla Diana goes MAD

    Faculty Carla Diana starts her artist residency at the Museum of Arts and Design: Open Studios this month on “Design, Tinkering & Electronic Mischief:”

    “How does it feel to squeeze sound? Twist a tone? Lift a volume? During this residency, I plan to look at these questions as I embark on a journey of design, tinkering and electronic mischief. Using product design methods and popular electronic sensor prototyping systems, I’ll go through a series of hands-on experiments to create interactive, hand-held objects. The process will allow me to “sketch” in hardware and share discoveries made along the way.”

    Join Carla, also Senior Designer at Smart Design, as she makes interaction objects you can see, touch, and hear. Winter Fridays (through February) in the open studios at MAD. Head over to the blog for more.

  2. Applying for 2011

    Update: We’re happy to announce an extension on the application deadline for MFA Interaction Design to Friday, January 28. After the deadline, we will continue to accept applications after the deadline only on a case-by-case basis as space in the program allows.

    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 from December 23rd, reopening on January 3, Monday through Friday, 9AM–5PM. All materials must be dropped off by 5PM on Friday, January 14th. This option is highly recommended for individuals that may live in or find themselves in the New York area on or before the deadline.

    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. In Development: The Game Thesis

    As second-years wrap up the year with presentations in the Thesis Development course, Derek Chan shares the motivations for his chosen topic—game design—and why he feels it should be a part of the interaction design curriculum.

    From prototyping product designs, service design, strategy, and even physical computing, I believed from the start that the MFA Interaction Design program offered a necessary diversity of coursework that allow an interaction designer to explore his or her interests and find a calling. Despite this, I’ve also longed for a class that dealt with something I’ve always been passionate about—game design.

    Throughout my time in the program, I’ve wondered why game design has never been fully addressed. Like product or service design, game design is the application of our interaction design toolkit in another practice. Games are concerned with people, their behaviors, motivations, and engagement. This, combined with the interaction design community’s recent surge of interest in “gamification” and the psychology of how game mechanics can be applied to design solutions, have convinced me that game design should be a core component of our curriculum.

    As a student going through the program during its initial years, I feel the responsibility to share these thoughts with our department Chair, Liz Danzico, with the hope that this could lead to some curriculum tweaks in future years. But, with only one semester to go, I want to learn as much as I can while I’m still here. The following is how I unintentionally created my own class in game design, so to speak.

    During our thesis development process, Jennifer Bove asked us to refine our thesis ideas. I decided to go with my passion in games by devoting my thesis to one. Luckily, the faculty is talented in virtually every area of design. When it came time to choosing my thesis advisor, I knew I wanted to work with Chris Fahey, who was passionate about games and had previous experience as a game designer. Chris recommended articles, books, and other useful artifacts from respected game designers to help with my year-long journey. The process has been comparable to our other classes—we get lessons, reading material, and hands-on, practical experience creating deliverables and artifacts. Unlike most other interaction design projects I’ve worked on, however, I’ve also had ample opportunities to work in story development, an integral part of any video game, and ideally, any product or service.

    In the near future, I’ll be attending conferences such as Interaction 11, SXSW, and possibly the Game Developers Conference, with the intent of rounding out everything I’ve learned through my thesis explorations with some inspiration. The thesis development process has been incredibly rewarding. We chose our topics for different reasons—from problems we see that need fixing, to challenges to save the world, or just to work with what we’re passionate about. I’m thankful for having the options to explore how to challenge myself as a designer, and I’m equally thankful for following my passions and creating the education I want out of this program.

    –Derek Chan, Class of 2011

  4. Happy Holidays from MFA Interaction Design

    We asked 32 interaction design students which book inspired or influenced their interaction design pursuit. The result is the following booklist, comprising of landmark texts and playful reads that we hope will inspire and amuse.

    Happy holidays from all of us at MFA Interaction Design!

    The IxD Booklist

    View original card

  5. Project: Interaction Makes the Daily News

    At the completion of Project: Interaction‘s 10-week program last week, co-founders Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch were profiled by the Daily News on their accomplishments. Read the article on how they brought interaction design into high school, and their blog for a closer look at the journey.

    From the Daily News, Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch founded Project: Interaction a year ago.

    A heartfelt congratulations to both, and many thanks to those who have supported and contributed to the project along the way.

  6. Jason Santa Maria on The Big Web Show

    Jason Santa Maria joined Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin in the latest episode of The Big Web Show to discuss “mitigating the isolation of working in your underwear by reaching out to the community, avenues for creativity, struggling with the line between good enough and perfection, focus, why speaking and teaching are important, and why sometimes the distraction of working with other people is worth it.”

    Watch the Video

  7. Video: Steven Heller, “Nostalgia for the Future: Or Did Design Save the World?”

    Many thanks to Steven Heller, who gave a wonderful talk to a sold out audience last week. A taping of the lecture is available as part of the Paul Rand Lecture Series at MFA Designer as Author.

    In the past the future looked much brighter than it does today—and also more futuristic. Design played an essential role in speculating and defining “what’s next” through technologies and veneers. Our future was at once streamlined and primitive. There was a sense of wonder and wonderment that, curiously, does not exist today. The future is bland. This talk looks at the promise of the past through the fairs and expositions that sold optimism. It looks at the dystopias as well and how designers and design contributed to both.

    Watch the video

  8. Why You Should Work at a Startup While Going to Graduate School

    With most classes taking place in the evening, many Interaction Design students elect to freelance or work part-time while completing the MFA program. Second-year student Gene Lu shares his experience of applying what he learned in school to beyond the classroom walls, and how graduate students can benefit from working for a startup while in school:

    In the summer of 2009, I quit my full-time web designer position at a B2B company and began preparing myself for the inaugural class in MFA Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts. During that time, a friend asked if I would be interested in working part-time as an interaction designer in a startup company, DramaFever.com, which specialized in streaming Asian media online. With only a few freelance gigs paying my bills at the time, I decided to take the offer. The next thing I knew, like all startups, I was working with a handful of people out of an apartment in NYC.

    The MFA program kept me busy. We were learning a ton of new material from some of the best talent in the industry. Halfway through the first semester, things started to click. I realized what I was doing at school applied to my work at DramaFever. Take for example, John Zapolski’s infamous question at our second Strategic Innovation class, “What is your competitive advantage?” For DramaFever, it was the only company in the States that had the licenses to stream specific Asian titles, whereas its competitors were doing it illegally. John’s class taught me how to better analyze companies to determine their probability of success. Strategies such as differentiation through design and fulfilling unmet needs (a majority of DramaFever’s viewers are non-Asian) all rang true, which further convinced me that I made the right decision to work in the startup.

    DramaFever staff at the New York Comic Con, where they held a discussion panel on “Asian Entertainment Trends in American Pop Culture.”

    Throughout the first semester, I began creating more effective storyboards and workflows for new site features (Fundamentals in Interaction Design); improved visual aesthetics for a better user experience (Communicating Design); and even had a hand in coming up with new features based on feedback from viewers. By the end of the first semester, traffic on DramaFever.com leaped from 3,600 to 11,000 unique visitors per day. Of course, it’s important to note that in addition to design, other factors such as content acquisition and marketing pushed the needle on the traffic.

    By the time spring semester rolled around, I had incorporated data visualization to help users better understand their viewing habits on the site (Information Visualization); gained an understanding in decreasing bio-cost to create an improved viewing experience (Design of Systems); started to go through emails for qualitative feedback and data-gathering for persona creation (Research Methods); and paper prototyped a set of new features (Prototyping User Experiences).

    As of November 2010, DramaFever has acquired on average, 30,000 unique visitors per day, which means almost a million unique visitors per month with an average of a 16% bounce rate (16 of 100 people have only viewed the homepage and left the site).  Pretty darn good with respect to industry standards.

    Some of you may be still wondering why you should work at a startup when going to grad school. I’m sure you have heard of the (lack of) success rate that startups tend to have, but who cares. Due to the volatile nature of startups, they are usually open and/or flexible to new ideas. Being students in an innovative program such as the MFA Interaction Design program, startups offer the opportunity to apply and structure what we’ve learned, outside the classroom walls. And who knows, if the startup does well, you’ll at least be set with a job after graduation.

    –Gene Lu, Class of 2011

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