We caught up with four students over email regarding their summers.

MFA Interaction Design: What steps did you take to get your internship?

Kristin Gräfe: (interned at the NYTimes.com web design group) I contacted Khoi Vinh and sent him my portfolio and resume which was followed by an interview with members from his team.

Katie Koch: (interned at Adaptive Path , Austin, Texas) I started by making a spreadsheet of all the places I was interested in, ranked by the work and location. Many companies had a specific person through which we should apply. I emailed [AP’s person] to share my work and aspirations. We had a great phone call to talk about who I am as a designer, and how my work and motivations might fit into the AP community.

Gene Lu: (interned at Bizsphere SVA, Shanghai) There were very few interaction design internships in Asia. I sent [Bizsphere] an email about my hope to acquire interaction design experience outside of the country, especially in Asia, with a few links to relevant projects in my portfolio. … [T]he next thing I knew, I was on a plane over to China.

Eric St. Onge: (interned at at Local Projects) At first, I interviewed with a few different interaction design firms around New York City. For Local Projects, I contacted Ian Curry and went to visit for an interview. We tried to figure out if there was a project they were working on that was a good match for my interests and skill set. Once we found one, I signed on and started working in early June.

MFAIXD: What responsibilities and projects did you undertake? Did your experience match your expectations?

KG: I worked on a smaller task as well as two bigger projects with different teams. It was exciting and impressive to see how a small, professional team of information architects, visual designers, and technologists work together to improve and extend the experience of the site.

KK: The internship was nothing like what I expected! I was delightfully surprised by many of the interactions I had … and found the day-to-day conversations with other practitioners to be some of the most enriching experiences. The two big projects I worked on were internal R&D projects.

GL: I helped the team in designing new interface components, which were integrated into their existing solution. Since deadlines were tight, there was a lot of paper prototyping and whiteboard sketching. My four months in China with Bizsphere definitely exceeded my expectations. I’m actually thinking about going back and working for them after graduation.

ESO: I worked primarily on one project: an audio tour of the World Trade Center site for the 9/11 Memorial to be developed as an iPhone app. I was given a project brief, and worked with Ian to design the interactions. Once the design had been approved by the client, I became the primary software developer for the application. Going into the internship, I had hoped to work on a project that would be released to the public. Fortunately, we finished and submitted it to the App Store just last week (right on time!) so it should be available for download very soon.

MFAIXD: What were some of the challenges you faced?

KG: One of the challenges I faced was to maintain the identity of The New York Times brand not only through the user experience but also in the visual design.

KK: Even though I felt prepared after my first year of grad school, I got to my internship and realized how much I don’t know yet about the practice of interaction design. It took me a little extra time and effort to rebuild my confidence.

GL: The shift from designing for websites to interactive applications was challenging. Elements on the screen were no longer flat and one dimensional, but were popping, sliding, fading in and out. Another challenge were the tight deadlines. On some nights, we would be at the office working late on a set of features. My latest challenge is having to leave Shanghai. This place is just too awesome!

ESO: The biggest challenge for me was a shift in focus to content. Previously, I’ve worked on software applications that were mostly utilitarian; they were about connecting people in a certain way or helping people to solve a specific problem. For this project, the main focus was the story, and helping people understand the events of 9/11. I had to think about ways to make the technology disappear so that the story really stood out.

MFAIXD: What was the most valuable lesson you learned on the job?

KK: Don’t be afraid to put your ideas out there, even if you aren’t sure they’ll be right; you will learn more from being wrong and changing your course than you would from keeping your mouth shut.

GL: Never bite off more than you can chew; always start small and then scale outwards.

ESO: The most valuable lesson I learned was a reinforcement of something that I heard a lot over the past two semesters: The value of communication. In working with graphic designers, interaction designers, content developers, film editors, software engineers, and clients, I saw first-hand just how important it is that everyone involved understands how a design functions and how it works well for users.

More about the students.

We welcome employers to engage MFA Interaction Design students in internships for fall, spring, or summer. Find out more.

Print has repurposed program co-founder Steven Heller’s conversation with Liz Danzico (June, 2009) as a series of interviews with top designers. To receive the publication, sign up for The Daily Heller, redesigned with a new look and features. From breaking news and opinionated commentary to new exhibitions and beautiful posters, The Daily Heller provides a bite-sized dose of daily inspiration from one of the pre-eminent design critics and historians working today.

The four-quadrant persona matrix is used at HUGE during the research stage to validate personas with analytics. The example here shows a breakdown of user personas visiting the HUGE website, with Sarah “The Scanner” and David “The Tracker” dominating the majority of visitors, and Steph “The Aggregator” and Jason “The Browser” following.

Summer is winding down, and our thanks go to the remarkable Gene Liebel, Partner and Executive Director of Research and User Experience at HUGE, for closing out our Summer Lecture Series this year.

Gene used examples from HUGE’s impressive body of work, which includes IKEA, JetBlue, CNN, and About.com to discuss data-driven interaction design and how to use analytics. From eye-tracking for websites, merits of Google Analytics, to the power of simplicity, the lecture was a sweeping review to how user driven data analytics can help design firms today. Turnout for the event was our most popular yet, with the 60-some people in the audience extending a lively Q&A session well after the lecture wrapped up.

We look forward to advance thought-provoking conversations for our fall programing. Stay tuned for a schedule of guest lecturers who inspire and delight to begin our new season in our visiting lecturers and the Dot Dot Dot series.

Last month, I was fortunate to find a slot in Zach Lieberman’s Summer session at SVA’s MIxD department. Zach Lieberman is one of the creators of OpenFrameworks, an open source framework for programming all kinds of astounding interactive compositions. Zach’s own projects are, in a word, magical, and by naming his course “Leaving the Screen,” Zach set the bar extremely high.

His take on OpenFrameworks and how it complements Processing:

With a few adjustments to the vocabulary and setup of projects, it was possible to easily translate coding concepts between the two frameworks. One very nice dovetail is that while Processing is great for publishing to the web or outputting PDFs, OpenFrameworks generates Mac or Windows native applications and can be published to iPhone or iPad apps without much tweaking.

You can find all the code from the course here, and download the source code for all of the examples. And if you haven’t checked out PRINT Magazine’s new site Imprint, hurry off and do so right away!

A sample from Week 4: Brightness is used to control the z-translation of circles forming the image matrix.

This year, more than 30 students attended, and at we were able to catch up with three of them—Ferdinand Salis, Jeff Giesea, and Luisa Pereira Hors—to get their thoughts on how the immersion went.

MFA Interaction Design: All three of you have disparate backgrounds, outside the field of interaction design. Given that, what attracted you to a summer program like this?

Luisa Pereira Hors: I studied systems engineering, but I have always been interested in design. At some point I realized that the result would have been much more useful (and enjoyable) if we had spent more time researching our potential market, understanding user needs, and conducting early testing with them. So I decided to learn more about interaction design.

Jeff Giesea: As an entrepreneur interested in media and technology, I took the courses to reboot before launching a new venture. My goals were to gain skills to develop mobile and iPad-type products and business models, meet talented designers, and broaden my horizon to some new areas of interest and opportunity.

Summer Intensive students Mariel Reiter, Stacey Sarris, and Allison Zell brainstorm on the whiteboard. Photo courtesy of Ferdinand Salis.

MFAIXD: How did the courses help clarify your understanding of interaction design?

JG: When you think about it, it’s a field that very much defines our era. By humanizing and structuring our interactions with technology, interaction designers are dramatically shaping the world.

LPH: I have read a lot about the subject, and applied some of what I’ve learned in projects I’ve worked on, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to design something from scratch, following IxD methodologies.

MFAIXD: If you could only pass along one thing you learned, what would it be?

JG: Draw it, show it, build it, put it on paper or posterboard… now! In business I was trained to think from the top down—to start with a market opportunity and develop a plan. The product came at the end. Interaction design has taught me to think more inductively—to start with a user need and iteratively build a solution. To understand and empathize with the user.

Ferdinand Salis: Passion.

Related

• Flickr pool of the Summer Intensive
• More about Shawn Allen
• More about Carla Diana
• More about Nicholas Felton
• More about Zachary Lieberman

They’ve won countless awards for their graphic work, but now it’s time to dive behind what makes America’s most venerated general interest newspaper stand a world apart. Graphics director Steve Duenes and his team of 30-some journalists at The New York Times turn around images at a breakneck daily, if not an hourly, pace, sorting and sifting through reportage to provide the clearest visualization of data possible.

How the information is manifested – through diagrams, charts, or interactive media – is up to them, though we’ve grown to trust their authority on all stories, from the sensitive (9/11) to the scientific (a perfect triple axel at the Olympics). In Gestalten.tv’s latest podcast, we speak with Duenes and graphics editor Archie Tse on location in their New York headquarters to learn a few tricks of the trade.

Related

• Talk to the Newsroom: Graphics Director Steve Duenes
• Student projects from the Information Visualization course

To kick off the launch, Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic of the International Herald Tribune asked—“What do you consider to be the most important challenge for designers to tackle today?”—eliciting responses from students to design professionals to architects to nondesigners. This week, John Maeda explores, “If you had to choose between a pencil, a knife, or a hammer as the only tool you could ever own, which would you choose and why?” to the excitement of responders far and wide. At a week’s end, hosts select a response as the “Final Word,” a capstone designed to give end to the conversation. Unfortunately, all good conversations must come to an end. But at least now, they’re archived.

We caught up with Jason Santa Maria, faculty and student mentor, about his role in the partnership and how the Glass House campus influenced the site design.

MFA Interaction Design: You were the mentor on the Glass House Conversations site which launched last week with Alice Rawsthorn from the International Herald Tribune and this week John Maeda from RISD. What was your role as mentor?

Jason Santa Maria: It was my job to help keep the vision for the site intact throughout the creative process and to help the students develop their concepts.

MFAIXD: The concept is interesting: an invited host poses a provocation for anyone to answer, but in a limited timeframe. Tell me about what’s behind the concept of one-question-per week.

JSM: The narrow scope of one question a week is what’s powerful about the site. Visitors know that they can participate in a conversation and not get overwhelmed by tons of other things on the site. Plus, one question that runs for a specific amount of time makes it more of an event to participate in; the time and scope are limited, which help keep the conversation focused.

MFAIXD: Can you talk about the design direction? How much influence did you have versus the students’ own influence?

JSM: The design direction was entirely the students. They were inspired by many of the physical structures when we visited the Glass House campus and how those structures related to Phillips Johnson’s ideals of “reveal” and the notion of procession through a space in time. I was there to help guide the students, but the conceptual and visual direction were created by them.

Related Press

• The Glass House Conversations site launch press release
• Architizer, “Glass House Conversations”
• Dwell Magazine, “Glass House Conversations”
• Media Bistro, “Philip Johnson’s Glass House Launches Online Hub for Design Conversation”
• Metropolis Magazine, “The Salon Lives On”
• Otto, “Glass House Conversations”

In addition to evening courses, the Summer Intensive program includes once-per-week daytime lectures and studio tours.

Last week, students toured HUGE under the guidance of VP of User Experience Michal Pasternak, and yesterday, they visited the WORKSHOP’s collaborative work space in DUMBO. A socially responsible design studio, the WORKSHOP team shares their panoramic suite with other talents including Jason Santa Maria (founder, Mighty) and Jerri Chou (co-founder, All Day Buffet, The Feast, TBD, and Lovely Day). Suite neighbors web designer and developer Erica Heinz and iPhone app designer Larry Legend also dropped by to add to the conversation of what they do and how they do it. The afternoon concluded with Q&As, waffles, and a lingering, longing look out of the windows onto the Manhattan bridge.

Next week, we conclude the “DUMBO” tours with a stop at frog design in Manhattan to learn more about the prodigious global innovation firm. We’re also excited to welcome Masashi Kawamura to kick off our first lecture of the Summer Intensive this Friday. See the events page to RSVP for all summer events, and Flickr pool for Summer Intensive photos and more.

glasshouseconversations.org homepage

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Philip Johnson Glass House, and the School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design have launched glasshouseconversations.org, a website that extends the signature Glass House Conversations program, an invitational held at the Glass House during 2008 and 2009 with cultural, business and educational leaders sponsored by Oldcastle Building Envelope.

The goal of the new site is to reach an international audience of people with design-related interests and provide them with an on-going forum and new community for insightful conversations. 

The site has been in development since last fall through an inventive partnership between the MFA Interaction Design Department at SVA and the Philip Johnson Glass House. Its goal is to adapt the intimate Glass House Conversations series to an expanded digital forum, and build on the legacy of architect Philip Johnson’s home in New Canaan, Connecticut, a place that architectural historian Vincent Scully called the “longest running salon in America.” It was at the Glass House that Philip Johnson and longtime partner David Whitney brought together people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert. A.M. Stern, for discussions that shaped the cultural dialogue of the 20th century. This project engages a new, online audience and expands the conversation into the 21st century.

“The challenge was two-fold: first, how to engage a broader audience in the design leadership conversations that occurred at the Glass House and became a branded program; and then how to stay true to what Philip Johnson and David Whitney did best— always staying on the cutting edge of innovation,” said Christy MacLear, Executive Director for the Philip Johnson Glass House.  “SVA was the perfect partner to envision how a meaningful dialogue could occur in a digital forum, examples of which were limited to date. The students’ work is truly groundbreaking.”

Each week on glasshouseconversations.org, a host puts forth a provocation in the form of a question or a debate topic, and members of the public worldwide have up to five days respond. Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic for the International Herald Tribune, hosts the question for the week of July 19, and upcoming conversations will be hosted by leaders in cultural fields, including John Maeda, Ralph Caplan, and John Lilly.

Six students from SVA—Clint Beharry, Derek Chan, Kristin Graefe, Katie Koch, Russ Maschmeyer, and Eric St. Onge—developed the site from the fall of 2009 through the spring of 2010 in the course Continuing the Conversation. “Glass House Conversations was a dynamic opportunity for our students to extend the learning from the classroom, and work in a creative collaboration with clients who care deeply both about design and the community at large,” said Liz Danzico, chair, MFA Interaction Design Department at SVA, who directed the project with Jason Santa Maria, mentor, and Dorothy Dunn, former Director of Visitor Experience for the Glass House. In the MFA Interaction Design Department, students work both individually and collaboratively to learn the concepts and methods of interaction design, starting with an understanding of people and the environments that drive their needs, goals and experiences. Course materials consider these social constructs and human experiences as the basis for approaching problems across media.

SVA will continue to be involved through the site’s launch as two students from the MFA Design Criticism Department—Emily Leibin and Molly Heintz—have been named fellows at the Glass House to help shape content for the site, inviting moderators and designing questions to inspire on-line exchange and use.  Initial audience use has been targeted to the 120 leaders involved in the 2008 and 2009 Conversations and will expand to include the 100 participants of Modern Views, a project for which contemporary artists, architects, and designers created and donated works of art and written statements, capturing their thoughts and inspirations about the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Farnsworth House (1945–51), the Philip Johnson Glass House (1949), and the architects who created them.

About SVA Programs

MFA Interaction Design
MFA Design Criticism

About Philip Johnson Projects

Philip Johnson Glass House
Philip Johnson Modern Views project
The National Trust for Historic Preservation

Alex Wright interviews Nick Carr, author of the much-discussed Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (July/August 2008), alongside a review of Carr’s new book The Shallows. In the brief Q&A, Carr touches on how designers may benefit from a better understanding of neuroplasticity, on the future of print, and the merits of “unplugging.”

On the “oral” electronic text:

Communication in true oral cultures is always embodied in a whole person—it comes through direct, face-to-face contact—whereas conversation today is increasingly disembodied, mediated by machines and networks. One thing that shift suggests is that we’re moving away from thinking of ourselves as members of local, physical neighborhoods and toward a sense of ourselves as participating in abstract communities, groups of disembodied avatars. – Nick Carr

On whether books are destined to “go digital”:

So while we tend to focus today on whether the Web will kill the newspaper or the e-book will kill the book, I think the most profound changes are taking place at a deeper level. Our reliance on computers and the Net is training us to take in information in a certain way—fast, distracted, in small bits—and that training will, in time, alter our general reading and thinking habits. – Nick Carr

Read the interview