New York, March 24, 2010--School of Visual Arts (SVA)
presents Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference, conceived and organized
by graduating students of the MFA Design Criticism Department (D-Crit) at SVA.
Moderated by D-Crit faculty member, award-winning author and Studio 360 host
Kurt Andersen, the inaugural event will feature thesis presentations by all 15
graduating students alongside professional critics and thinkers including
design experts Peter Hall and John Thackara. The fast-paced, day-long forum will be held at the
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, on Friday, April 30 from 11am to 6:30pm.
"There's nothing as exciting as a startup on a
mission that matters, and D-Crit is exactly that," comments Kurt Andersen.
"The program embodies so many of the qualities that academia so often
doesn't: well-run, energetic, open-minded, collegial but not insular, serious
but not pretentious. And I've taught students who I know are about to become
significant contributors to the design conversation."
Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference will
showcase new contributions to the design discourse. Topics will range from the
design of personal memorial objects to the use of smell as a communicative tool
in design. Other areas of investigation include the applications and
implications of car sharing, design and visual language in the films of Jean-Luc Godard,
a rediscovery of suburban architect Elroy Webber, and the representation of
family in Wes Anderson's films. The participating students and projects are:
* Amelia Black, "Design Smells; Odorous Rhetoric for
Embodied Experience"
* John Cantwell, "Car Sharing: Applications and
Implications"
* Frederico Duarte, "Alvorada: How Social Change Is
Shaping Brazilian Design and Creating Brazil's Own Design Model"
* Chappell Ellison, "Design in the Dark: Finding
Meaning in the Multiplex"
* Laura Forde, "Objects to be Read, Words to be
Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard
1959-1967"
* Sarah Froelich, "Dansk Designs: Reinventing the
American Tabletop, 1954-1985"
* Katie Henderson, "Two Decades of Failure, Betrayal
& Disaster: The Production Design of Wes Anderson's Films as it Relates to
the Family Dynamic"
* Emily Leibin, "Hidden Nature: Elroy Webber's
Connecticut Valley Modern Homes"
* William Myers, "Bacteria Building for
Sustainability: The Convergence of Design and Biology in the 21st Century"
* Mike Neal, "Tabula Rubra: Critical Reflections on
the Design of Mars"
* Becky Quintal, "Import/Export: Delivering
Architecture in a Public-Friendly Format"
* Alan Rapp, "The Esoteric City: Urban Exploration
and the Reclamation of the Built Environment"
* Angela Riechers, "Designing Grief: Personal
Memorial Objects in the 21st Century"
* Jim Wegener, "Lived-In: User Experience in Architecture
and Design Criticism"
About the speakers
Kurt Andersenis the co-creator and host of the Peabody
Award-winning radio show "Studio 360," a WNYC and Public Radio
International art and culture program. His most recent book is Reset: How This
Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (Random House, 2009). He is the
author of the best-selling novels Heyday (Random House, 2007), winner of the
Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, and Turn of the Century (Random House,
1999). As an editor, he co-founded Spy, Inside.com and Very Short List, and
served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine. He has been a cultural
columnist for The New Yorker and Time, as well as Time's architecture and
design critic. He has also created television specials and pilots, and written
screenplays and stage plays. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.
Peter Hall is a design critic and senior lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin. Between 2001 and 2007, he was senior editor and fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute, where he co-edited with Jan Abrams the book, Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. He has been a contributing writer for Metropolis since 2000 and has written for Print, I.D. Magazine, The New York Times and The Guardian. He wrote and co-edited the books Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, Sagmeister: Made You Look and Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics. Since 2006 he has been vice president and co-organizer of DesignInquiry, a non-profit educational organization devoted to researching design issues at an annual gathering in Vinalhaven, ME.
John Thackara is a writer, speaker and event producer. He
is the author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) and of
a widely-read blog, doorsofperception.com. As director of Doors of Perception,
Thackara organizes festivals around the world, at a city-region scale, in which
communities imagine sustainable futures - and take practical steps to realize
them. Thackara studied philosophy, worked as a London bus driver, and was later
a book and magazine editor. He was Director of Research at the Royal College of
Art in London. From 1993 to 1999, he was founding Director of the Netherlands
Design Institute in Amsterdam. In 2007, he was program director of Designs of
the time (Dott) a new social innovation biennial in England. He was
commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, France, in 2008,
and at Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2009.John Thackara lives in France.
About SVA
The MFA in Design Criticism trains students to research,
analyze and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications. The
two-year, 64-credit curriculum emphasizes the skills and knowledge relevant to
those who wish to apply critical thinking about design through a range of media
including exhibitions, radio, online and print journalism, events and
publishing. Drawing on the broadest possible definition of design, the
curriculum addresses graphic, Web and product design as well as fashion, urban
planning and network systems. For more information about the graduate program, please
visit www.dcrit.sva.edu
School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is an
established leader and innovator in the education of artists. From its inception in 1947, the
faculty has been comprised of professionals working in the arts and art-related
fields. SVA provides an environment that nurtures creativity, inventiveness and
experimentation, enabling students to develop a strong sense of identity and a
clear direction of purpose.
Media Contact: For more information, please contact John
Wyszniewski at 212.592.2209 or jwyszniewski@sva.edu.
