Sam Carmichael
Born and raised in Vermont, Sam was exposed to design at an early age through his mother’s work as a book designer. He studied Post-colonial literature and writing at Brown University and then moved to Boston for its fertile live music scene and temperate climate.
In Boston, Sam found a job in Content Strategy with Vistaprint and worked closely with the in-house creative team there for two years, and then transferred to the Barcelona office. For the past three years he’s been working on the User Experience team in Spain, and for the last year he’s divided his time working for Albelli photo books in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
After more than five years in a business setting, Sam hopes to gain a foundation in the principles and skills that underpin the discipline of Interaction Design. He’s excited to embrace a future in which innovative, customer-focused design is not stifled by bureaucracy, but is instead seen as the cornerstone of all products, online and off.
Effy Zhang
Effy’s passion for art stems from her appreciation of technology and its changing role in our lives. Armed with the internet and her imagination Effy has overcome physical constraints and cultivated an intuition for connecting with the world through art and design. Much like the internet has no geographic boundaries, Effy is equally aware of art’s ability to connect people regardless of barriers to language and individual experience. It is this very intersection of art and technology that inspires Effy the most.
In her first job Effy created an iPad app for Cadillac for consumers to follow the automobile manufacturer’s newest developments. This was the beginning of Effy’s appreciation for interactive design. After stints with French and Chinese design firms in Beijing, Effy settled down as Head UI designer at THRE3D.com, a U.S. website specializing in 3D printing education and directory services. Effy is interested in the effect 3D printing will bear on product design. She sees design increasingly becoming a means for solving real-world problems.
An open-minded student of everything art related, Effy is constantly thinking about how people connect with and interact with her designs. She cherishes the opportunity to join the passionate and experienced community at SVA. Excited to pick up new design tools in class she knows that her most meaningful lessons will come from collaborating with her fellow students.
Hanna Yoon
Hanna is a multidisciplinary designer who wants to create pleasant user experience that can be sought in everyday lives of people in context of social trends by utilizing the most recent technologies.
She was born in California, and grew up in Seoul, Korea. Spending a year as an exchange student in Champagne, France, she was inspired by diversity of cultures and was motivated to work internationally. She loves making things, cultural abundance, and creativity.
She has learned various methods of user research and the importance of understanding users in business while majoring in business administration in Korea University. Upon graduation, to pursue her interest in content and product development, she studied product design at Samsung Art and Design Institute. She enjoyed both of the majors, and was intrigued to find out lots of interlinked parts and synergies that exist between design and business. She worked as a creative director at Ideabove, a music service developing startup in Korea, where she realized the importance of user experience in making a great service, brand, and company. She seeks to experiment more in interactive design and user experience in graduate program in SVA.
