136 W 21st St, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
* required
Just over 50 years ago, at the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., Dorothy Jackson interviewed five Black designers about “the frustrations and opportunities in a field where ‘flesh-colored’ means pink” for PRINT. The article was perhaps the first in the mainstream trade press to directly address the impacts of racism in […]
Katya Mezhibovskaya visits the apartments of young New Yorkers to find cultural meaning in their possessions and domestic arrangements.
Robinson Crusoe sets up his new home in a cave on a desert island and finds that by means of a chair and table, some shelves and hooks his situation looks a lot brighter.
Crew journalist Mike Neal arrives at his home for the next two weeks—the Mars Desert Research Station Habitat in the Utah desert—and confronts the architecture of desolation he finds there.
The experience we have of a place is a combination of what we see, read, and hear about it. From social media to virtual reality, today we have even more ways of traveling the world, both physically and imaginatively. As digital technologies become more advanced, the depiction of space becomes more immersive and new forms […]
Urban design critic Karrie Jacobs sacrifices her New York home to launch a magazine in San Francisco that was all about other people’s homes, gets homesick, has an epiphany during a Spider-Man movie, and finally comes home.
“Design thinking” emerged in the workplace as a management practice, intended to codify and package designers’ way of thinking and doing into a step-by-step approach. The term tapped into executive, mid-management, and entrepreneurial anxieties about perpetually being innovative. But as companies adopt the fun and fast approach to innovation, a new myth about design is […]
What do small businesses in New York City communicate via their designed storefronts? What narrative are they telling and howdo storefronts affect a neighborhood’s identity? What types of storefronts clarify or confuse the city’s social, cultural, and economic complexion? Who has agency within their social and production networks, and in what ways does design allow […]
Michele Washington illustrates the ways in which the Afro has been used as a significant graphic element in the black vernacular narrative.
Lila Allen, Class of 2016, wrote her thesis on the design of children’s spaces. Her research was adapted for publication in the 4th issue of Kinder: A Journal Dedicated To Child Design, Past, Present, and Future. Consider the choice between two cribs: One is a Vetro, a fully recyclable, limited-edition acrylic pen by Nursery Works […]
Ever wonder about the people in the architectural renderings that hang in the windows of real estate offices or on the scaffolding around construction sites? You know, those happy people doing yoga, riding bikes, and pushing strollers? In the architecture world, these people are called “scalies” due to their function as markers of scale and […]
What objects are designed to negotiate the boundaries of chronically ill collective care groups? How are patients assembling digital infrastructures and what can interface designers repair? What does “real world” data make real? In this podcast Karisa Senavitis explores why and how pharmaceutical companies provide obtuse documents in medical packaging.
Katya Mezhibovskaya considers the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, The Hours, as a study of interiors and interiorities.
Meg Farmer finds human traces of Donald Judd all but erased in the renovation (and museumification) of his house at 101 Spring Street, New York.
R/GA Executive Creative Director David Womack weighs up survival versus comfort as he assembles a home-away-from-home in his backpack.
Bryn Smith reflects on the paradox of a now-fashionable hue that we also use to commemorate the first Great War.
This podcast investigates the distinctive aesthetics of window decals used in many nail salons and dry cleaners in New York City. Through interviews with passersby, customers, and store owners as well as archival research, this story tracks the discovery of the decal’s ultimate of inspiration: the artist Patrick Nagel. Nagel, who worked in the 1970s […]
“Cars have never been more competent than they are today … and never less useful,” wrote the critic Stephen Bayley in his 2012 book Cars. More competent, less useful. The method I used to measure what would seem like a paradoxical statement is the concept of “proper function” and “system function” by theorist Beth Preston. […]
Alum Frederico Duarte’s first major exhibition as curator, “Como se pronuncia design em português: Brasil Hoje,” opens September 23rd, 2017 at the Museu do Design e do Moda in Lisbon. Frederico began researching Brazilian contemporary design as a student at SVA Design Research in 2009 and this show is the largest manifestation of his research […]
While we have completely embraced digitization in our daily lives, we are still in the process of grasping and understanding its impacts in other professional fields. The digitization of museums has transformed curation from an academic, intellectual, and cultural practice into a social process based on the visitors’ personal experience of the museum. Today, the […]
Zachary Sachs conjures a (fateful) day in the life of his childhood home on Rockwood Street, Dallas.
Writer and designer Veronique Vienne tells “Studio 360’s” Kurt Andersen about the sleek cylinder of color that is as indispensable as a Swiss army knife.
Metropolis magazine associate editor Avinash Rajagopal on the most comforting shade of pastel blue known to mankind.
A primer on micro-apartments and compact living in New York City.
Sleeping on a tatami mattress, which could be endlessly repositioned, allowed Justin Zhuang to turn his childhood bedroom into a space of possibilities.
“As technology continues to impact the way we travel, we can expect any number of the following to become commonplace, and we will have an even more personalized experience of a foreign place with the swipe of a finger: geolocation, better connectivity possibilities, wireless energy, personalization, frame-of-mind recommendations, and Augmented Reality.”
—Jenni Young
“Megaprojects have provided especially lucrative investment opportunities. Characterized by the revamping of large swaths of land and the creation of new neighborhoods comprising some blend of residential, commercial, and perhaps cultural spaces, these projects represent a new chapter in the evolution of city building, and an interesting cross-pollination of the two fiercely opposing viewpoints of twentieth century city planning—those of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.”
—Alex Klimoski
“The real value of the experience is actually what is not being pointed out by the sign. According to philosopher Vincent Descombes, ‘The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life.’ The feeling of ‘home’ is accomplished by the colors, words, materials, objects, and distinctive design gestures that comprise the storefront. Its unique design captures the character of the neighborhood, which would feel alien if placed in a different part of the city.”
—Derek Edward Love
As a father with kids who like stuff and me also liking stuff, I have a lot of stuff. In my childrens’ rooms is an embarrassing amount of stuffed animals, a tumult of toys, a menagerie of tiny chairs and knee-high desks. Much of this stuff is, let’s face, it aesthetically worthless. Most of it is plastic, which means this aesthetic worthlessness will be around for millennia. Design for children, too often, has been conflated with bright colors, bold shapes, and shoddy construction. But in a new book Design for Children, author Kimberlie Birks showcases more than 450 designs for children from some of the century’s greatest visual minds from Phillippe Starck to Piero Lissoni. We recently chatted with Birks about what her deep dive into children’s design taught her and asked her to pick her favorite designs from the book.
Do you find children’s design has more in common with its contemporary adult designs or with children’s design through time? That is, is a toy made in 1950 more similar to a desk made in 1950 or a toy made in 1980?
Children’s objects are often a signal of the times, reflecting both the evolution of the design industry and shifts in public perception. Fascinatingly, much of the design history of the twentieth century can be traced through developments in children’s furniture, as their smaller scale was ideal for designers seeking to test new materials and processes. From the wood and tubular steel constructions of the Bauhaus in the 1920s, to the plastic pioneers of the 1960s, the remarkable technical, material and aesthetic innovations made in design for children reflected—and often led—the wider design field. As such, children’s design can be often seen to have more in common with its contemporary adult designs than with children’s designs from other eras. Read more… (more…)
Our Director of Operations, Eric Schwartau, checked in with Paul Olmer (MA Design Research Class of 2017) at his design-build studio, Hewn Bros., in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Olmer founded Hewn Bros. with business partner Chris Tilden in 2011 and since then, they’ve racked up an impressive list of clients—Casper, AirBnB, and Quip to name a few. Before coming to SVA, Olmer worked in set design and construction for theater and received a B.A. in Fine Arts and Poetry from Bennington College in Vermont. Olmer was awarded the 2017 Susan Merritt Scholarship for his Applied Thesis at MA Design Research. (more…)
