Blog
News
-
Behind the Festival
David Bellona, making the packaging for the SVA IxD Festival and Exhibition takeaways: test tubes.
As second-year students—soon to be graduates—prep for the Thesis Show this weekend, a glimpse into some of the last-minute details:
David Bellona‘s process book arrived and designs are finished:
Just finished designs for Canary: an iPhone app that tracks your digital content production and subsequent CO2 emissions. First flight is May 12, 2012.
Cooper Smith finished the final flow:
The final wireframe flow for my thesis.
Erin Moore is going over last-minute details:
Yesterday I went through my key screens with Charles [thesis advisor] making sure that my ideas and concepts were being communicated through actionable steps on the screens. Here is a peek inside the day’s activities. I have identified 4 pillars of experience that each part of the experience is focused around: Independence, Confidence/Competence, Generosity, and Sharing. Green post-its indicate where these pillars are manifested in the screens. These have helped me clarify actions, identify holes, and communicate the concept more clearly.
Catherine Young got a practice run:
When doing poetry readings just as myself, there was a bit of conversation with the audience when I talk about the process of writing, but during the reading of the actual poem, it was just myself and the text. I felt this while reading the Frost poem to the TEDx crowd—the entire hall was dead silent in contrast to all the other times I was up there. (That was quite fun, actually.) But doing a talk that involved not just a Keynote presentation but an actual creative activity was another world altogether—it’s difficult to assess if everyone was enjoying the activity, although what was great about having a particularly open audience such as this one was that they weren’t afraid of trying new things.
And Allison Shaw with a call for action:
If anyone wants to help me stamp and write URLs next week, get in touch.
Come see how the story ends at the IN/VISION Festival, Saturday, May 12. Hurry, as only a few seats are left.
-
Vision for sustainable NYC
Imagine how embedded sensors, personal digital technologies, and live data can be used to promote the goals of PlaNYC; Bloomberg’s bold vision for a sustainable New York.
That was the challenge of the first-year batch, featured in Core77 this week. The article submitted by Tom Harman and Tash Wong, students from the batch, showcases the result and the reflections on Design in Public Spaces course that assigned the challenge.
The course was taught by Jill Nussbaum, faculty and Executive Director of Product and Interaction Design at The Barbarian Group in collaboration with PlaNYC.
PlaNYC is an aspirational vision that touches the lives of every New Yorker. The ideas we presented begin to scratch the surface of incorporating digital technologies into city initiatives. Through this project, we learned to navigate the scale of the city’s ambition, combine it with our own observations, and craft a compelling narrative to explain our ideas. As designers, our takeaway is the realization that we have the potential to seriously impact the long-term development of our cities.
Read the article on Core77.
-
On the Last Day
Courses ended this week for first- and second-year students.
“We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators.”
That’s Barbara deWilde in “Can You Teach Someone to Be an Entrepreneur?”, a response to the class carefully crafted and led by Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo. “Internet School,” or the course, challenged students to use the power of the network to complete assignments, and if tacit responses around the studio were any indication, life lessons.
Barbara confirms:
The lessons from Internet school are life lessons. If I can sum them up I would say they are: 1. The Internet and the emergence of networks have disrupted and will continue to disrupt structures that are hierarchical. 2. Learn technologies and use them to build. We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators. 3. Know yourself, have an opinion and share it. You’ll find others like you. Networks aren’t lonely, they’re empowering. 4. There is very little reason to work for others. If you have the skills that make you hirable, you have the skills to create something for yourself, and in turn, for others. 5. Don’t spend all your time refining, get your ideas out there and see if people like them.
The lessons from guests, the lessons from failing in public, and reminders of what learning is for in the first place gave way to a wonderful things. We suspect this is only the beginning.
-
Data Narratives: The Art and Craft of Information Visualization, a new two-week summer program
The MFA in Interaction Design department at SVA expands its summer offering of specialized programs in interaction design with the first program of its kind in data visualization, “Data Narratives: The Art and Craft of Information Visualization.” Running from June 18th through the 29th, the intensive two-week program teaches students hands-on methods for telling stories with complex data. From Liz Danzico, chairperson, “The amount of data we create and consume in everyday life is increasing at a staggering rate. Over the past few years, we’ve seen companies and organizations of all sizes create–and make public–data for people to use. But only good visualizations tell a story.”
With a series of courses that address narrative discovery, graphic interpretation, and programmatic approaches to storytelling and display, students will learn methods for making data clear, accessing APIs and other data sources, and how to make data interactive. Geared for the practicing designer or person with experience in information design, Data Narratives will move quickly as students tackle a real-world project of their choosing using New York City data. Student participants should have fluency in basic programming—familiarity with a scripting language (JavaScript, ActionScript, or Processing) will go a long way.
Registration is now open, and complete details are online.
For more information, contact Frank Bonomo, Program Director at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (212) 592-2704.
-
Faculty member Carla Diana speaks at TEDxEmory
Faculty member and Associate Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design, Carla Diana, was invited to speak at TEDxEmory this past weekend.
Carla’s talk was about expressive devices and an Internet of Things, a topic she also teaches at the Fundamentals of Interaction Design course at the department. Held at Emory University, TEDxEmory was an independently organized event in Atlanta, Georgia run entirely by student volunteers.
Carla will be teaching ‘Practice of Interaction Design’ for the summer intensive program starting July 9, this year.
-
MFA candidate Catherine Young invited to speak on happiness at TEDxNewHaven
Catherine Young, second-year student has been invited to be a Speaker at the inaugural TEDxNewHaven conference at the Yale University. The theme for the conference is “The Art and Science of Happiness” and Catherine will be giving four talks about the different parts of her thesis project which explores different facets of human perception.
TEDxNewHaven is designed to inspire people and make them happy. Over the course of the day, our speakers will explore “The Art and Science of Happiness” from different angles. Topics will be drawn from a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from positive psychology, entrepreneurship, education, politics, media, culture, technology and art. By combining the TED framework with the universally shared value of happiness, we hope to foster stronger connections between the residents of the greater New Haven area and the Yale community.
We are excited to listen to Catherine’s talks scheduled on April 28th from 10am to 6pm. For those unable to attend, the event will be live-streamed.
Follow Catherine’s thesis process blog.
Read more about the event.
-
Thinking Thesis: David Bellona’s Coal Button Launch
Dave Bellona introduces The Coal Button, designed to create awareness around the carbon footprint of something as small a click, tweet, or like:
In late 2011, there were 509,147 data centers worldwide, covering an area equivalent of 5,955 football fields. Our Facebook profiles, YouTube videos, and Gmail accounts are reliant on a computing phenomenon called “the cloud”. Made up of millions of servers, the cloud’s infrastructure is a multi-billion dollar industry, quickly growing to keep pace with our demand. In fact, Former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimates every two days we generate as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.
These millions of servers are housed in data centers: physical embodiments of the cloud. Some cost as much as $1 billion to build, reach upwards of 300,000 square feet, and consume enough energy to power 80,000 average U.S. homes. To power these facilities, the majority of IT companies rely on coal for between 50% – 80% of their energy needs. Consuming nearly 2% of all global electricity and growing at a rate of 12% a year, total CO2 emissions from the IT industry are equal to that of the airline industry.
Dave will present his work on The Coal Button at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Thesis Festival on May 12.
Read more about The Coal Button
Visit David’s Thesis Blog
-
Reporting on the 2012 Healthcare Experience Design Conference and unchoking design
On March 26th, I joined fellow second-year students Sera Koo and Michael Yap for a brief preview of designing for the challenges and opportunities of the real world while attending the second-annual Healthcare Experience Design Conference in Boston.
The atmosphere was electrified as designers, researchers, investors and business leaders offered their unique perspectives on everything from organic food to EHRs.
But there was something especially magical and expansive about the keynote delivered by Todd Park, the newly appointed U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Maybe it was his self-confessed Paula Abdul-esque energy or his inclination for words like “awesome,” but I think there was more.
Park’s statements seemed at first overstated—“we’re in a classically disruptive moment right now, from which more good will come than we can possibly imagine”—but his supporting evidence was substantial, and its implications for the future undeniable. He enthusiastically railed off dozens of real projects—iTriage, Healthline, Vitals.com, PatientsLikeMe, BlueButtonData.org, and the like—that are helping tens of millions of patients today, and that would not have been possible without the Health Data Initiative (HDI)—a government effort to release huge amounts of health data, make it accessible, and make it exciting to innovators.
It was ironic then, when he said, “We didn’t even do anything. We just made it available.” In part it was true, because the HDI did not build the projects themselves, they merely enabled the creativity to happen.
However, in an industry where regulation, multiple stakeholders, and wicked problems can make all but the most bold creative problem solver feel like Katniss in the Hunger Games, it is exactly this unchoking of creative potential that will allow for the revolution in medicine we are all hoping to create.
-
BBC Design Documentary Film Festival This Saturday
SVA hosts the BBC Design Documentary Film Festival this Saturday, March 24 from 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM.
Presented by MFA Design Department and curated by Steven Heller and Adam Harrison Levy, the day long festival features Levy’s documentary Selling the Sixties: How Madison Avenue Dreamed the Decade, which inspired the television series Mad Men. George Lois from Mad Men, will also be interviewed. The Festival also includes a Q&A session with Alan Yentob, the creative director at BBC.
-
Reporting on NYC design schools as catalysts for innovation and economic growth
Infographic from “Designing New York’s Future”
New York City’s design schools have become the critical catalysts for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth, according to a report released this month by the Center for an Urban Future. They’re graduating twice as many students in design and architecture than any other U.S. city and are providing a talent pipeline to the city’s creative industries. Further:
The genius of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to develop a new applied sciences campus in New York City is that it acknowledges the increasingly pivotal role of academic institutions as drivers of local economic growth. At a time when large corporations may not be the reliable job producers they were in the past and cities like New York badly need to generate new sources of job growth, universities are critical local anchors that employ thousands, spin out new businesses and train the workers needed by growing industries.
But it is not just scientific research institutions and engineering schools—like the one that Cornell and Technion are building on Roosevelt Island—that provide this kind of spark. In New York, design and architecture schools arguably have been as, or more, important to the city’s success in the innovation economy.
New York design universities such as Parsons The New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts have been critical catalysts for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth. Their graduates have produced dozens of start-up companies that set up locally—something that has eluded most of the city’s scientific research institutions. Graduates of the city’s design and architecture schools founded many of New York’s most visible and influential design firms, including Studio Daniel Liebeskind, Diller Scofidio Renfro, SHoP Architects, Smart Design, Ralph Applebaum Associates, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan International.
They also provide the talent pipeline for New York City’s creative industries—including the city’s fast-growing design and architecture sectors. Indeed, New York City graduates twice as many students in design and architecture than any other city in the U.S. And enrollment at New York’s design universities has been growing at a faster rate than other universities in the city.
Thus far, the “innovation economy” initiatives advanced by city and state officials have largely overlooked design universities. This is a missed opportunity in a city that is arguably more of a creative hub than a high- tech center. As this report demonstrates, New York’s design universities are already a key piece of the city’s innovation infrastructure.
The report goes on to indicate that New York City’s design schools are a key piece of the city’s innovation structure, and the designers a key piece of its economic future.
Congratulations to second-year students, Allison Shaw and Michael Yap, whose work is featured on the report’s cover. Read the full report.
-
Students win at the first GOOD Design Hackathon
GOOD hosted its first Design Hackathon in New York City last weekend, bringing together over 100 participants, including students from SVA, Yale, Parsons, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU’s ITP.
The participants were challenged to create a learning tool that promotes and supports all of the following goals: meaningful connections, efficient transportation, clever consumption, educational reform, cleaner environments, and smart economics. Five MFA Interaction Design students from both the first- and the second-years participated in the 24-hour hackathon to extend and recreate existing social media platforms.
The Comparators, a team comprised of first-years Tony Chu, Prachi Pundeer and Tom Harman and second-year Michael Yap won the Best in Show award for their concept, Purpose. Purpose brings together consumers, makers, and manufacturers to enable creative reuses for unwanted technology. Makers share creative reuse ideas to a broad community, while the community helps realize their ideas–consumers donate technology otherwise bound for the global waste-stream, and manufacturers practice corporate social responsibility by funding the packaging, shipping, and handling of the reused goods.
Purpose: Re-boxing to donate used technology for reuse
Watch the process video for Team Comparators. Find out more about Purpose.
Second-year Tina Ye joined Aliona Katz, Emily Wagenknecht, Eric Schreibner, and Yang Yang to form Team EveryStep, whose concept won the award for Most Innovative. EveryStep is a personal health service and app that empowers individuals to raise money for causes they believe in, every hour of the day. It combines pedometer/run-tracker data and the concept of micro-donations to motivate you to exercise. For every step you run or walk, your friends and loved ones (who are invested in your long-term health) pledge a tiny amount. This inspires you to stay active over time, while spreading awareness and helping nonprofits raise funds in a sustainable, low-cost way.
View the slide deck for EveryStep.
Continue reading about the hackathon, and other winners in GOOD’s official announcement.
-
Alumni Scholarship Award Winners: Carrie, Kristin, Catherine
The department is proud to announce that second-year MFA Interaction Design candidates, Carrie Stiens, Kristin Breivik, and Catherine Young have received Alumni Scholarship Awards from the School of Visual Arts Alumni Society. The scholarship is awarded annually, with the reward amounts ranging from $500 to $2,000, to undergraduate and graduate students to support their thesis or portfolio projects during their final year of study. The funding for this scholarship comes entirely from alumni who have established themselves as artists and designers since graduating from SVA.
SPOKED: Prototyping ride tracking methods
In the process of working on their thesis, Carrie, Kristin, and Catherine all needed to conduct large scale explorations, experiments and tests, for which they needed funding. The award they’ve received has allowed them to move forward with projects without compromising on the quantity and quality of their explorations.Carrie Stiens and Kristin Breivik’s award will help fund their thesis project, SPOKED:
“It aims to help bicyclists ride a little more than normal and better record their memory of a city. Catering to the community of people using bikes to get around, SPOKED will be both a mobile app for tracking rides and a website for comparing visualizations.”
SPOKED is currently in the making, and the process blog can be viewed here.
Rorsketch: a public interface concept for MoMA PS1
Catherine Young’s award will support her thesis, which explores wonder and human perception:
“The hypothesis is that we can use our senses as both bridge and catalyst between memory and creativity. I have five main projects, one for each sense—sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. I’ve been working in this area for more than a year and each are in different time points in terms of progress. For example, the sight project, Rorsketch, is closer to completion. The smell project has finished experimental and user testing stage.”
Follow Catherine’s thesis on her process blog, The Perceptionalist.
Congratulations to all SVA Alumni Scholarship Award recipients!
- Sana Rao
-
MEET- IXD 2012: Bringing Down Boundaries
The department hosted MEET-IXD 2012 on Friday, February 24, an event that brought a range of companies from start-ups to large brands together with talented students to engage in conversation over work, ideologies, and employment opportunities.
The afternoon began with a welcome from department chair and co-founder, Liz Danzico, followed by a keynote from Luke Woods, Product Design Manager at Facebook. He talked about the idea of sharing using technology, specifically Facebook to create conversations that one never expects to have. A thought that segued perfectly into the knowledge exchange session just afterwards..
The knowledge exchange that followed was structured as a series of group interactions between students and companies—few other guidelines. Companies and students had the opportunity to meet with different groups and with each switch, new permutations and combinations generated a new discussion and opened up unique connections.
For first-year students, it was an opportunity to discuss projects they have been working on and other ideas important to them:
The part I enjoyed most was being able to have an open conversation with the world’s leading design firms. Having insight into how these companies see the role of interaction design changing their business was immensely insightful.- Tom Harman
For second-years students, it was a great way to get critique from some of the best minds in interaction design:
The department creating pathways between potential employers and students is important: it creates community, extends the reach of our department and positions our students to compete for the best jobs prior to graduation. I think most importantly, it externalizes how we, as a department, think about IxD and gives us a chance to see what the evolving potential employer needs are in an designer (they learn, we learn). I also like the idea of employers as mentors—students bringing a project to a mentor mid-steam for feedback. The employer becomes invested in the work; students are invested in the employer by way of their generosity.- Michael Yap
The event ended with a reception where conversations continued on a more individual note and others beginning.
We hope that the event continues to create new connections and influence career decisions as our students go through the program and beyond.
Visit MEET-IXD for more about the event, who attended, and student projects.
-
Overlapping Worlds
I recently completed my first semester in the Interaction Design program, and in my second semester, joined Meetup as a part-time intern. From my very first day at Meetup, I felt my school and work worlds overlapping.
Every new hire receives the book “Bowling Alone”. My group partner, Guri Venstad, and I both took inspiration from this book for our final in Strategic Innovation in Product / Service Design. The book documents the decline in social capital in America. The example (and inspiration for the book title) is that although bowling has been on the rise since the 1980s, the actual number of bowling teams has decreased. There are fewer people sharing the sport together, which results in missing out on the community that can form around a team. Essentially, Meetup seeks to rebuild these relationships. I found myself thinking that my project with Guri which aimed as essentially an exchange of skills amongst neighbors to build a community, was just a different answer to the same question about connecting people to build social capital.
There was a full day of orientation at Meetup, and while a bit dizzying to take it all in, was nevertheless very useful. One of the early parts of the orientation was with CEO, Scott Heiferman. He didn’t lecture us, and he didn’t show us a Powerpoint explaining why Meetup was producing a better product than company “X”. Instead, it felt very much like he was trying to instill in us the ethos of the company. He talked about what he believed Meetup was, how our best ideas were yet to come, and he asked us genuine questions. I came away thinking that Meetup provides the tools for people to form communities. Individuals must see a value for themselves, before committing to a meetup. That’s the importance of groups - they provide a premise and a common interests for strangers to meet. Although people come for a specific interest, they end up staying for the relationships formed. Guri and I tackled similar problems in our project.
When Brendan McGovern, CFO, explained the Angel funding and the rounds of venture capital invested, I understood this from my Entrepreneurial Design class, which, coincidentally, is being taught by two great Venture Capitalists from Union Square Ventures - who funded Meetup’s last round of investing.
So there we go, I am working with Meetup to better improve user experience using basic interaction design skills such as wire-framing, mockups, and other visual design tools. I am also thinking about what I learned in my strategy class, and I am understanding and appreciating Meetup in a way I don’t think I could have before tackling a project based around the same goals. If I am appreciating and using my skills and knowledge from classes already, after only one semester, I can barely imagine how the next three will go.
-
Thinking Thesis: Michael Yap’s preliminary prototyping
Thesis—Prototype 1 from Michael Yap on Vimeo.
Michael Yap‘s paper prototype testing the hypothesis: “Encoding the physical world with data can create awareness, meaning, and behavior change.”
Last week, I created a paper prototype and conducted an eight-user test (from February 2–3) for thesis. I edited the video documentation this week and posted it on Wednesday.
The hypothesis: encoding the physical world with data can create awareness, meaning, and behavior change. The results: mixed but positive.
All users correlated their health behaviors to the changes in the tomato display: healthy behaviors had no affect on the display, unhealthy behaviors visibly ripened the tomato, creating awareness.
The display meant different things for users. For some, the display was a manifestation of the current health state of their bodies: if they exhibited unhealthy behaviors they expected the variable tomato to ripen; if they exhibited healthy behaviors, they expected the variable tomato to “un-ripen”. Others derived the intended meaning of the tomato: unhealthy behaviors accelerate the aging process, which is, of course, a uni-directional process. The results confirmed a suspicion that I previously held: some narrative (as complex as a video; as simple as a label) will need to accompany the final prototype in order to make the intended meaning of the display clear.
The tomato display was not effective in creating behavior change. No surprise, but worth establishing.
Read more of Michael’s latest thesis thinking.
About
Not all updates belong in the curriculum, and the Interaction Blog is where we talk about news and events around interaction design far and wide.
Categories
Recently
- Behind the Festival
- Vision for sustainable NYC
- On the Last Day
- Data Narratives: The Art and Craft of Information Visualization, a new two-week summer program
- Faculty member Carla Diana speaks at TEDxEmory
- MFA candidate Catherine Young invited to speak on happiness at TEDxNewHaven
- Thinking Thesis: David Bellona’s Coal Button Launch
Read more in the Archives.
