Blog

Student Apps Project Featured in GOOD Magazine

In her latest design column for GOOD Magazine, Alissa Walker shares the goods on an apps project students created for the Interaction Design Fundamentals class last semester. Initially inspired by the NYC BigApps competition, students developed different concepts using at least one source of data from the NYC.gov Data Mine.

Read the column for student concepts and insight from faculty Chris Fahey for the NYC BigApps project. Find out more about this assignment in our new projects page created by Katie Koch.

Clint Beharry created NY Loves U based on Richard Layard‘s Big Seven factors of happiness.

Nicholas Felton Designs Department Business Cards

Data visualizer and summer faculty Nicholas Felton recently designed department business cards for students and staff. Like his infamous Feltron Annual Reports where order, through maps and graphs, emerges from the disorder of daily life, Felton’s play and assembly on the department identity by The Heads of State reaffirms a sense of unity through the chaotic.

The business cards have already been with students to Interaction10, and will be sure to make more cameos at conferences, events, and presentations to propel students forward. We want to extend our gratitude to the designer, and will be honored if we could end up as “just another statistic” in his next Annual Report for “kind deeds performed.”

Student Project: Interaction Design Education

Sparked by a keynote speech by Kim Goodwin at Interaction 09 last year, students Derek Chan, Carmen Dukes, and Katie Koch recently embarked on a self-initiated project to bring a design education program to New York City schools starting in fall 2010.

In their latest stage of research and exploration, the team met with Katherine Schulten, editor of the Times Learning Network for some advice. Katherine recommended the team to begin their study in a K-12 classroom, and start by observing the teachers and how they engage students. She shared her own “secrets” of engagement including “hands-on” activities, as well as finding ways to make classroom materials relevant for students to connect on an emotional level.

To follow this project from development to implementation, visit the Interaction Design Education project blog. Find out more about the inspiration behind the initiative, and why it’s important for the design industry at Derek Chan’s blog.

New SVA Summer Intensive Program: Impact! Design for Social Change

The new SVA program Impact! Design for Social Change launches with the help of Interaction Design student Colleen Miller, who designed its website. Co-founded by Steven Heller, Co-chair of MFA Design as Author and Mark Randall of Worldstudio, the program is a six-week summer intensive that will “introduce participants to a growing field of design for social advocacy.”

Impact! invites professionals, educators and students in the disciplines of graphic design, product design, information design, interactive design, fashion design, photography, and illustration to participate. Applications are being accepted now until April 31.

For more information, visit the Impact! website.

Student Redux: Interaction 10

Through rain in Georgia and snow storm in Virginia (on the drive back), students have returned from three inspirational days of Interaction 10 to synthesize what they have learned from the industry’s best and brightest. Here’s what they remembered most about the conference and the city of Savannah:

What was your favorite session at the conference?

My favorite session was Ben Fullerton’s talk on Designing for Solitude. At the session Marc Rettig asked “We’re blazing into overconnectedness that was created by us. How do we protect the people who we affect with our design decisions? - Gene Lu

I loved Greg Vassalo’s talk, 10 Things I Learned About Being a Design Consultant While Living in the Hospital For a Year. The relationship he created between our family lives and our work drove home the value of empathy in interaction design. - Katie Koch

Jon Kolko enthusiastically and clearly explaining the pillars of IxD as they relate to social change, which brought together many of the concepts we have learned at SVA so far. - Colleen Miller

My favorite session was Richard Banks with his talk about how memories will be passed down through the generations and how that media will change over the course of time. - Evinn Quinn

Co-chairs of the conference Bill DeRouchey and Jennifer Bove introduce Interaction 10.

What was the most interesting idea you learned about at the conference?

Consumerism isn’t dead, but it needs to be so we can move on to a path that is innovative, sustainable, and profitable. (Nathan Shedroff) - Stephanie Aaron

That we should be designing our products to reflect human behavior, not mimic it. (Chris Fahey) - Derek Chan

Design something meaningful. - Angela Huang

Interaction design manifests itself in ways beyond websites. - John Finley

Thinking about designing objects not to be quickly turned over, or even just sustainably replaced, but to attempt to design for longevity — to make electronics that get better with time, not just more out-of-date. - Jeff Kirsch

Your work will change culture, so do work that is meaningful” (Jon Kolko) - Beatriz Vizcaino

What was the best thing you did in Savannah?

Arriving exhausted after 14 hours of driving and then heading to a ghost tour pub crawl with a hilarious tour guide was the best welcome to Savannah I could have hoped for. - Clint Beharry

Meeting a lot of amazing people who I plan on begging internships from in the near future. - Russ Maschmeyer

I had an amazing meal at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room. I think I’ve finally had authentic southern food! - Eric St. Onge

Interaction 10: Day One

Reporting live from rainy Savannah is one of thirteen MFA Interaction Design students attending the Interaction 10 conference. From a packed days of lectures to a rain-soaked walking tour of America’s first planned and designed city, Stephanie Aaron recaps the day’s highlights.

The historical Cotton Exchange building from the walking tour of Savannah

Nathan Shedroff kicked off the conference this morning with a challenge: innovate and create meaning. For him, meaning is the deepest connection one can make with the user, and all design is the process of evoking meaning. His key point for the future? Consumerism isn’t dead, but it needs to be so we can move on to a path that is innovative, sustainable, and profitable. Nathan left us with three key questions to ponder: What does a more sustainable world look like? What does a more meaningful world look like? What does a post-consumer world look like?

After Nathan’s talk I went to hear our own Liz Danzico speak on, and lead an experiment in improvisation. She also asked that we creating meaning in the products and services we design. Her talk, ranging from jazz to neuroscience, showed how frames can allow consumers to be co-creators.

Greg Vassallo launched the third talk of the day with a moving segment on lessons he learned while living in a hospital for a year and how he applied them to being a design consultant. His ten lessons include useful tips such as “lighten up,” “it’s okay to ask for help” and “treat the patient, not the illness,” which encourages all to step back and consider the big picture, to ask ourselves, “are we solving the right problem?”

The morning was capped with a rain-soaked walking tour of Savannah—America’s first planned and designed city. The city has not one center but 24 squares, each is a self contained unit consisting of all walks of society, from richest to poorest. The streets surrounding the squares have no traffic lights, and is a self regulated system. There are two overlapping grids, the back streets contain services such as electricity, telephone poles and sewage, etc. and the front streets are of homes, shops, and civic institutes.

Students will be covering the conference over the weekend. Check back for posts to come.

Physical Computing Final Projects

Final projects for Fundamentals of Physical Computing are up. Students have documented projects and labs through their blogs and video work. See the result of many whiteboard doodles, post-it notes wireframes, and brainstorm sessions.

What a wall looks like in the studio on a typical day.

Student Project featured in Magazine

Cover and page 53 of the Community Currency Magazine feature work by students Gene Lu, John Finley, and Colleen Miller.

The neighborhood currency project, which garnered much attention last semester, has been extensively featured in the Nov/Dec issue of the Community Currency Magazine. Gene Lu‘s local currency for Alphabet City made the cover of the magazine, and images of other student designs appear throughout the issue.

Download the PDF version of the magazine

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.

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.

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.

MORE STUDENT BLOGS

Continuing the Conversation: A Philip Johnson Glass House & MFA Interaction Design Partnership

The MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts is committed to providing students with unique and exciting opportunities beyond the walls of the studio. A recent partnership with the Philip Johnson Glass House will further this commitment to six of its inaugural students in an engagement that will challenge each student with a variety of opportunities.

This past week, the student team was invited to the Glass House in an “immersion trip” to better understand the historical significance of Philip Johnson and his vision for the Glass House. They were joined by faculty mentor, Jason Santa Maria, and department chair, Liz Danzico.

Four members of the student team approaching the Glass House on their tour. (From left to right: Eric St. Onge, Russ Maschmeyer, Derek Chan, Katie Koch)

The morning half of the visit consisted of a private tour of the 47-acre property where the Glass House is situated. With the autumn leaves falling and the sun just peeking through the otherwise overcast sky, the team was treated to a breathtaking demonstration of how the emotional experience of a natural landscape can curate a conversation.

Russ Maschmeyer taking a break in the Glass House.

During the afternoon, the team met with the Glass House staff to discuss the vision for the new project. Using the collection of valuable content captured from past conversations in the Glass House, the team knew they were beginning a very special undertaking. Check back frequently over the course of the next few months to see what the student team will be doing to “continue the conversation.” The team will be live-blogging the project’s progress.

All photos are taken by Jason Santa Maria. For more photos, see his Flickr page.

Students Design Neighborhood Currencies

Last month, students in Jason Santa Maria’s Communicating Design class were assigned the task of designing their own local currency. Inspired by Ithaca Hours and BerkShares, students pulled a neighborhood out of a hat, and were asked to research their neighborhood to determine what characteristics should be represented on its currency.

The color, shape, and texture of the resulting designs reflect the diversity of the various neighborhoods. Below, a few students talk about the thinking behind their designs. All of the students’ local currencies are currently on display in the department.

Stephanie Aaron: Upper East Side

My local currency is for the Upper East Side, which is home to more museums than any other neighborhood in New York City. The currency’s name is the “Mula,” which is an acronym for, “Museums: our Local Asset.” The currency comes in denominations of five, ten and twenty Mula, and each museum would put its art on a set of the three denominations, yielding upwards of thirty different designs. The design of the Mula is based on the golden section, and the colors used are the three primary and three secondary colors. The three typefaces on the Mula were all created by Hofler Frere-Jones, a New York City firm.

Kristin Graefe: Midtown

This local currency is designed for midtown Manhattan. The back of the notes features the map of midtown Manhattan while the front has one famous building in that part of Midtown on it. By putting all notes together the whole map of Manhattan is shown. Each of the banknotes has its own color and is issued in $100 (Empire State Building), $50 (Grand Central Station), $20 (New York Public Library), $10 (Museum of Modern Art), $5 (St. Patricks Cathedral).

Michael Katayama: Financial District

The Financial District is known for its day traders and office workers. But, I wanted to focus on the people who make the neighborhood their home. There is an increasing number of young couples buying their first homes and starting families.

For the design, I took photos of the neighborhood and found some interesting patterns and landmarks. I tried to find a balance between commerce and family life by using a muted natural color palette and choice of type. The geometric patterns represent the energy of the neighborhood.

Russell Maschmeyer: Little Italy

Little Italy has shrunk over the past 50 years from a rich, wide area of Italian-American heritage and family life to a three block row of tourist-trap restaurants. So my goal in designing a local currency for the all-but-gone neighborhood was to establish a link between using the currency and reversing the trend of encroachment from the surrounding neighborhoods. To create that link I not only designed bills that reflect periods in Italian design and typography, but also turned the bills themselves into a real map of Little Italy, which grows in size as the denomination grows with it. When visitors spend the higher denominations within the community, its directly suggested that they’re acting to tangibly re-grow the boundaries of the neighborhood to the size suggested on the denomination. It’s an economic and cultural battle cry of sorts.

Eric St. Onge: Chelsea

Rather than designing a currency for the large and diverse neighborhood of Chelsea, I decided to focus in and design a currency for one building in that neighborhood: Chelsea Market. Chelsea Market was built as a factory for Nabisco, but it now hosts offices, grocery stores, retail shops, and restaurants. The building’s architecture is inspired by its factory roots, so I thought it would be interesting to design a currency inspired by its former factory products. Each denomination in my currency adopts the form factor of a Nabisco cracker: Nilla Wafers, Fig Newtons, Oreo Cookies, Ritz Crackers, and Saltine Crackers. The geometric design from the face of the Oreo Cookie is used to tie all five of the designs together.

1 Hour Design Challenge: Winners Announced

Earlier in October, students participated in Core77’s 1 Hour Design Challenge: The Future of Digital Reading for Jason Santa Maria’s Communicating Design class. Based on Portigal Consulting’s Reading Ahead initiative, students had the opportunity to digitally interpret the act of reading through e-book devices, social mediums, and ecosystems. Winner for the challenge, Hot Studio, was announced today, with MFA Interaction Design students Stephanie Aaron, Kristin Graefe, and Eric St. Onge swooping the Notable with their PaperBack device. Congrats to all student participants!

The PaperBack by Stephanie Aaron, Kristin Grafe & Eric St. Onge

Gene Lu, Chiawei Liu

STAX “Bendable Book” by Richie Lau, Evinn Quinn, & Michael Katayama

The Reading by Clint Beharry, Katie Koch, & Colleen Miller

The Folding E-Book by Beatriz Vizcaino, Derek Chan, & Russell Maschmeyer

Carmen Dukes, John Finley, & Angela Huang

See all entries

Students