The SVA MFA in Design Criticism is an innovative two-year program that trains students to research, analyze and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications. Students are taught by some of the best design writers and thinkers of our time, including “Studio 360” host and author Kurt Andersen, MoMA’s senior design and architecture curator Paola Antonelli, former editor of I.D. magazine Ralph Caplan, Metropolis contributing editor Karrie Jacobs and author and essayist Akiko Busch.

SVA’s MFA in Design Criticism—the only one of its kind in the United States—seeks to cultivate design criticism as a discipline and contribute to public discourse with new writing and thinking that is imaginative, historically informed and socially accountable. At D-Crit we define design broadly and study graphic, interactive and product design, as well as fashion, urban planning and networked systems. We look closely at objects, images, designed spaces and environments, and at the social and political contexts in which they operate. We seek to understand the forces that shape contemporary design and controversies that challenge it.

The course of study couples a theoretical framework with significant opportunities for practical experience. We emphasize the importance of design history, cultural theory and research methods as foundational knowledge for criticism, and offer the opportunity to experiment within a wide variety of writing genres and styles. The D-Crit program is unique in its approach to design criticism, however, in its embrace of multiple media. While writing is at the core of everything we do, we also study podcasting, filmmaking, event organization and exhibition curation, and students produce tangible documents of their critical practice, in the form of podcasts, books, blogs, documentaries, course syllabi, conferences, audio guides, dinner parties, bookclubs, iPad apps and exhibitions.

In providing the tools for researching, analyzing, evaluating and chronicling all aspects of design, the program prepares students for careers as design critics, journalists, editors, researchers, event and exhibition curators, educators and design managers.

The D-Crit department has its own floor in an SVA building in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, well within walking distance of some of the world’s best design collections, libraries and archives, and also very close to many of New York’s design studios and publishing houses. Classes meet in the department; weekly field trips and site visits take place at various locations. Students are designated their own desk space within an open plan workspace whose layout is modeled after a design studio.