On April 30, 2010, the D-Crit program culminates in an annual public conference, conceived and organized by graduating students, in which they present papers based on their theses, alongside professional design critics and thinkers. Students’ topics range from the design of personal memorial objects to the use of smell as a communicative tool in design and architecture and from design and visual language in the films of Jean-Luc Godard to the applications and implications of car sharing.

The conference will be a fast-paced day-long event, moderated by author and NPR’s “Studio 360″ host Kurt Andersen. Keynote speaker John Thackara will speak to different facets of contemporary critical practice, while the 15 graduating students will each give very short presentations on their thesis topic

Kurt Andersen is the co-creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning “Studio 360,” WNYC and Public Radio International’s radio program about arts and culture. His most recent book is Reset (Random House, 2009). He is the author of the best-selling novels Heyday (Random House, 2007), winner of the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, andTurn of the Century (Random House, 1999). He has also created network television programs, and written screenplays and stage plays. As an editor, he co-founded Spy, Inside.com and Very Short List, and served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine and editorial director for Colors. He has been a columnist for New York and The New Yorker, as well asTime’s architecture and design critic, and is a contributing editor toVanity Fair. He sits on the boards of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Pratt Institute, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, served last year as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design and holds an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

John Thackara studied philosophy, and trained as a journalist, before working for ten years as a book and magazine editor. John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. He was programme director in 2007 of Designs of the time (Dott 07) a new biennial in North East England. In 2008 he was commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, the most important French design biennial. John is a an Associate of The Young Foundation, UK; senior advisor on sustainability to the UK Design Council; and an advisor on sustainability indicators to Agence France Presse. His most recent book is In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press).

The conference is partly a débutante event for the students—to give them an opportunity to show their work to potential employers, collaborators and publishers—partly an exercise in conference organization, since students are charged with curating the conference themselves, and partly an event for a wider public interested in new developments in design discourse.

Student Thesis Topics:

Hala Abdul Malak, “Al-Kafiye: A Potent Symbol Uncovered”

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”

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Elio Caccavale will discuss the potential of speculative social narrative and design proposals to generate public debate about social, cultural and ethical issues surrounding life sciences. Caccavale’s research focuses on collaborations between design, life sciences and bioethics. His projects include Utility Pets, a series of speculative products investigating the ethical consequences transplanting animal organs into humans (2003), which was included in MoMA’s “Design and Elastic Mind” exhibtion. He teaches on the MA Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art an has contributed to research projects supported by Wellcome Trust, Art Council England and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

David Barringer will discuss new mediums of storytelling through his latest project in the works, a written novel that incorporates imaginary magazine covers and interiors, photographs, illustrated stories, a photo comic, and more.

Barringer is the author of novels American Home Life (So New Press, 2007) and Johnny Red (Word Riot Press, 2005) and has contributed to Émigré, I.D., Eye, Voice: AIGA Journal of Design, and the New York Times Book Review, among many others. He was the recipient of the 2008 Winterhouse Award for Design Writing & Criticism, and recently published the essay collection There’s Nothing Funny About Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Independent filmmaker Gary Hustwit discusses the creative process behind his films, and the power and shortcomings of documentary filmmaking as a critical tool.

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. He has produced six feature documentaries, including I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the award-winning film about the band Wilco; Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography, and Objectified, which examines our complex relationship to manufactured objects. Helvetica had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2007, and has since screened in over 200 cities worldwide. The documentary earned Hustwit a 2008 Independent Spirit “Truer Than Fiction” Award nomination. His second feature-length documentary about design, Objectified, documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential product designers and examines how the things they make impact our lives. Mr. Hustwit is currently working on his third feature-length design documentary.

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Brian Collins, chairman and chief creative officer of COLLINS, along with creative director John Fulbrook will take us through the creative process at the core of two unique design projects: a new interactive Microsoft store model and the strategy behind Al Gore’s Nobel Prize-winning Alliance for Climate Protection. COLLINS is a branding agency which creates communications programs, experiences and environments using storytelling as a key research and design tool.

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Casey Jones, Director of Design Excellence and the Arts for the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), will discuss his role in overseeing the design and development of new and renovated federal buildings as well as the artwork commissioned for them. Previously, Jones led jones|kroloff with Reed Kroloff (Director of Cranbrook Academy), an architect selection advisory firm whose clients included the Whitney Museum of Art, Yale University, Friends of the High Line and Brad Pitt’s Global Green USA.

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Deborah Marton, executive director of the Design Trust for Public Space, will provide an overview of several of the organization’s projects, the process that went into shaping them and their influence on public space in New York City.

Deborah Marton has spent her career focusing on the development of public space in New York City. After a fellowship with the Design Trust for Public Space, in 2002, she came on as executive director in 2004. The Design Trust brings together neighborhoods, public agencies, and design professionals to find innovative opportunities for change and make the city more beautiful, sustainable, functional, and available to all. Prior to her career at the Design Trust, Marton worked with the landscape architecture firm Field Operations and served as Program Manager of the New York City Parks Natural Resources Group. At Field Operations, Marton helped win an international design competition for the Fresh Kills Landfill Master Plan, for which she later served as Project Manager. Marton was also an Associate with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and has published numerous articles on urban landscape planning and design

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.

Zoë Ryan, Neville Bryan Curator of Design at The Art Institute of Chicago, talks about her role as the Institute’s first curator of design, focusing in particular on her most recent exhibition “Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design (2009).”

Ryan is a British writer and curator. Her recent exhibitions as curator at the Art Institute of Chicago include: “Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design” (2009) and “Graphic Thought Facility: Resourceful Design” (2008). Prior to working at the Art Institute, Zoë was Senior Curator at the Van Alen Institute (VAI) in New York where she organized numerous exhibitions including “The Good Life: New Public Spaces of Recreation” (2006). Zoë is regularly called upon as a lecturer, critic and juror and her writing on architecture and design has been published internationally. She is the author of numerous publications including the forthcoming title “Building with Water: Concepts, Typology, Design,” to be published in 2010 by Birkhäuser Verlag. Zoë is an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches an interdisciplinary design seminar.

The Spring 2010 Design Criticism MFA Lecture Series is open to the public. You are warmly invited to attend our lectures, to see our new department and to meet with speakers, faculty members and students over a drink. Space is limited; RSVP to dcrit@sva.edu as soon as possible.