SVA MFA Product Design Curriculum

Faculty: Sinclair Smith, Principal, SS&Co

Each year, Products of Design partners with the Museum of Modern Art Wholesale Division to design products for possible manufacture by MoMA. Through an iterative process that begins in the late fall and progresses through the spring, both years of students work intimately with MoMA to evolve concepts, produce three-dimensional prototypes, and pitch products to both the wholesale and retail divisions, as well as to curators. Product concepts that make it all the way to production result in royalty agreements exclusively with the students.

Faculty: Victoria Shen, Experimental Artist and Performer

The ubiquity of embedded computing has redefined the role of form in material culture, leading to the creation of artifacts that communicate well beyond their static physical presence to create ongoing dialogues with both people and each other. This course will explore the rich relationship among people, objects and information through a combination of physical and digital design methods. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on studio exercises, students will investigate all aspects of smart object design, including expressive behaviors (light, sound and movement), interaction systems, ergonomics, data networks and contexts of use. The course will culminate in a final project that considers all aspects of smart object design within the context of a larger theme.

Behavior change is difficult to achieve; behavioral science offers concepts and methodologies to help close this action-intention gap. In this course, students will explore the theory and practice of behavioral science and learn to apply these concepts to their own design work. The universal drivers of human behavior-—including principles such as default bias, anchoring, social norms, and emotion regulation—will help students learn to think like behavioral scientists themselves, and methods such as behavior mapping, behavior diagnosis, solution strategy, and experimentation will be discussed and practiced throughout the course. Together, we will apply these frameworks to a range of human challenges, including health, financial, and environmental behaviors.

Faculty: HK Dunston, Climate Researcher

Design practice will be dominated by issues of climate change. In preparation for a design career spent negotiating these new realities, this seminar will provide a detailed analysis of the current state—exploring how scientists, activists, and social theorists imagine climate change will affect human life. We will explore the kinds of destabilizations and reorderings that these changes will generate and the different prescriptions people have developed in response. Finally, we will explore the ways in which writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and others are imagining new, optimistic possibilities for the future, offering us ideas and methods we can use to act on our own positive future paths. This class will enable students to directly confront the difficult realities we face, while also gathering a set of tools that will help them to intervene in those realities to create new and more optimistic futures.

Faculty: Sinclair Smith, Principal, SS&Co

Design Performance will take an improvisational approach to organizing student work and presenting it to the community in an end-of-year exhibition. Products and ideas perform specific roles in our lives, and we perform specific roles in relation to them. A designer manipulates the roles and relationships between products and users. In this light, the designer can be seen as director in the highly malleable and controllable theater of the designed world. Drawing from a long history of storytelling and performance techniques, this course will explore new possibilities for communicating innovative design work. Students will be guided through an evaluation of their product and design ideas and develop the ideal forum for presenting those ideas.

Faculty: Toshi Mogi, Global Financial Services Lead, Frog Design

Taught at the acclaimed Frog Design Studios in Brooklyn, This course examines the critical aspects of successful organizations, including the development of strategy and business models, business plans and pitches, intellectual property and entrepreneurship. Through an exploration of fundamental business issues at the beginning of the 21st century, students develop either a business plan for a new organization or a new business model and strategic plan for an existing organization. The result is a formal “pitch” presentation given to guest professionals and classmates.

Faculty: Michael Chung, Founder, Cinematic Reality

Visual storytelling has become a critical tool in helping designers sketch, prototype, visualize and communicate their ideas. Increasingly, this storytelling takes place within the medium of video, which provides a powerful, immersive and easily disseminated means of articulating the products of design. From context to scenarios, from use to benefits, as product designers expand their purview into the realm of experience design, video has become a lingua franca of both design practice and design commerce. This course will cover the basic principles of visual communication using techniques in contemporary filmmaking. Working in teams on a tangible project, students will get hands-on experience in different stages of the storytelling process, including observation, ideation, script writing, storyboarding, shooting and editing.

Faculty: Anne Quito, Journalist and Design Critic

This course will examine the past 20 years of design history, focusing on some of the objects, personalities and forces that have come to define contemporary design practice and discourse. Over the past two decades, we have seen the emergence of design metaphor, design irony, critical design and design interactions. We have grappled with authorship, the design personality, the role of the media, the interdisciplinary expansion of design exhibitions and the emergence of social media. Additionally, the growing popularity of design-for-luxury and design art has provided a provocative dichotomy for humanitarian design and design for social change. DIY design, hacking, modding, rapid prototyping and an explosion of craft have accompanied a revolution in designers empowered by the Internet, and science and technology have become design drivers alongside design thinking, influencing business culture and policy making alike. What do we make of these developments, and what do they portend for the future?

Faculty: Rob Walker, Author

Point of view is a core building block of any successful design, and any successful design career. It’s about what you believe and why you believe it. While it’s easy to rationalize almost any design project as “good” from various sets of design criteria, the strongest designers take a proactive role in defining and articulating a clear point of view and carrying it through their work. If designers are going to be more than executors of others’ ideas or agents in the service of industry, they must enter the professional world with their own ideas, firmly grounded, passionate and with a personal stake.

Faculty: Sigi Moeslinger & Masamichi Udagawa, Partners, Antenna Design

Interaction design is not limited to the domain of digital media; it is at the heart of every artifact. Similarly, all artifacts can be construed as “interventions,” soliciting reactions whenever they are encountered. One aspect of designing an artifact

is to encourage an intended activity and mediate the relationships between its multiple audiences, making the interaction a key factor of the design. In this course, students will design an intervention into a public space, providing an object/environment/service—either entirely physical or enhanced with electronics; stand-alone, or connected—intended to encourage curiosity, investigation, thought, interaction, socialization and positive change.