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Eventually Everything: The 2012 D-Crit Conference

EmiIy Weiner — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:14:54 +0000

The 2012 D-Crit Conference, featuring graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, and moderated by Change Observer co-editor Julie Lasky, will take place on May 2, 2012 at the Visual Arts Theatre in New York City. This year’s conference is comprised of four themed panels, each introduced by keynote speakers, including media historian Stuart Ewen; Pentagram partner Michael Bierut; 2×4 founding partner Michael Rock; cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp; and Interboro partner Daniel D’Oca. Join us for a richly programmed afternoon of provocation, insight, and inspiration.

D-Crit Now Accepting Applications for Fall 2012

EmiIy Weiner — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:15:15 +0000

D-Crit is accepting applications for Fall 2012 on a rolling basis, as space allows. The MFA in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts is a pioneering two-year graduate program that trains students to research, analyze, and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications. Study with some of the best design writers and thinkers of our time, including MoMA’s senior curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli, former editor of I.D. Magazine Ralph Caplan, Metropolis contributing editor Karrie Jacobs, and Change Observer editor Julie Lasky. Learn how to curate an exhibition, produce a radio segment, launch a blog, edit a publication, host a lecture series, and stage a major conference. Understand the forces shaping contemporary design and immerse yourself in the controversies that challenge it; find your personal voice, hone your writing skills, and develop your critical stance. Join D-Crit alumni working as editors, curators, researchers, managers, educators, and bloggers. Apply today and make a stand.

We are currently accepting applications for Fall 2012 on a rolling basis, as space allows. We require three letters of recommendation and a college or university transcript, plus two key essays: one 750-word piece critiquing a design object, event or concept which you write specifically for this application, and another writing sample (1,000 to 2,000 words) which you’ve already written and which demonstrates both your critical eye and your facility with language. Please note that full instructions can be found on our Web site’s Apply page.

If you have questions about your application or would like to tour the department and speak to us directly, please arrange a telephone or in-person appointment at dcrit@sva.edu or 212-592-2228. For more info about the program, download the D-Crit section of the new SVA Graduate Catalog, or fill out SVA’s online form to have a catalog sent to you via mail.

Missed the 2011 D-Crit Open House? Watch the video.

Design Writing and Research Summer Intensive

EmiIy Weiner — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:03:20 +0000

D-Crit is pleased to announce a design writing intensive aimed at those who would like to refine their skills as thinkers, researchers and storytellers. For practicing designers, this is a chance to examine the profession and its impact through projects, articles and blog posts. For journalists and writers, this program offers methods and insights for understanding and writing compellingly about images, objects and spaces. Visit the Summer Intensive website for details!

D-Crit in the Media

EmiIy Weiner — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:46:09 +0000

Rick Poynor gets critical about the design critic’s education; Vera Sacchetti tells why, oftentimes, social design as we know it is not good enough; Aileen Kwun explains how D-Crit lived up to her expectations; Steve Heller insists that Google will never replace hands-on involvement (hence his “No Google” research class)… Read on in recent articles about the SVA Design Criticism MFA program, its graduates and its publications:

Time Out NewYork: One-minute lecture: “How to Capture the Culture Zeitgeist” by Carolyn Stanley

Design Bureau: Dialogue: SVA’s D-Crit by Sarah Handelman

BaseNow: Interview with Alice Twemlow (part one and two) by Geoff Cook

étapes: international: Design Criticism Courses by Rick Poynor

Ready Made: Taking Notes: The 2011 D-Crit Conference at SVA by Lily Kane

Visual Arts Journal: Making the Write Decision by Angela Riechers

Core 77: SVA D-Crit Preview Q&As with Avinash Rajagopal, Vera Sacchetti and Molly Heintz

New York Times blog: Our Weekend Reading (and Watching and Listening): Vera Sacchetti, “Design Crusades”

Grafik: Critical Mass featuring Aileen Kwun, Alice Twemlow and others.

Huffington Post: At the High Line: A Different Kind of Book Club Begins by Paul Needham

The Atlantic: Why Google Will Never Beat Old Fashioned Research by Steven Heller

Disegno: Steve Jobs’ wardrobe (In D-Crit Chapbook Dress) by Barbara Eldredge

D-Crit Chapbook Launch: Dress

EmiIy Weiner — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:50:44 +0000

D-Crit is thrilled to announce the launch of its second Chapbook, Dress.

Untangling the sartorial signifiers and unique style of public figures from various corners of the pop culture circuit—including Julian Schnabel, Dora the Explorer, Steve Jobs and Muammar al-Gadaffi—Dress assembles eleven essays by writers from the School of Visual Arts’ pioneering Design Criticism MFA program, with illustrations by Peter Arkle. Alan Rapp considers Metallica frontman James Hetfield’s bogus descent from metal maverick to Armani-toting sellout; Stephanie Jönsson judges Pope Benedict XVI’s wardrobe more aesthetic than ascetic; and Angela Riechers recalls the moment when Karl Lagerfeld lost the Fan—and the fat. Whether art directed by stylists or left to their own devices, each subject gives ample evidence that even if clothes don’t make the man, they certainly have an impact on the way we perceive the man.

Comprising the second installment in D-Crit’s chapbook series, Dress includes essays that were generated in Criticism Lab, a course taught by Andrea Codrington Lippke, a writer specializing in visual culture and a regular contributor to The New York Times, among other publications. Lippke edited Dress with D-Crit ’11 graduate Aileen Kwun, a pop culture and design critic who received the Winterhouse Writing Award last fall for her analytical essay on the architectural nature of Lady Gaga’s fashion sensibility. Dress was designed by Walker Design and Matthew Rezac in Minneapolis. On November 16, the publication was officially launched with a series of readings and a party at the appropriately stylish Bumble and Bumble headquarters in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. View photos of the event on our Flickr pool.

Copies are available for purchase on Lulu.com ($10), or for free download.

Download the Dress press release for details.

At Water’s Edge, the first in the Chapbook series series, gathered essays written in author Akiko Busch’s “Reading Design” class about aspects of the New York waterfront. Find details and a link for free download on the Chapbook page.

Recent press:

Dexigner

Shax Riegler’s “Dish: 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates”

bryn_smith — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:44:27 +0000

“Warning: this book may induce dish mania,” begins D-Crit instructor and House Beautiful editor Shax Riegler’s globe-trotting, century-hopping celebration of the art of the dinner plate. Published by Artisan Press, Dish: 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates, is full of useful tips for collecting, repairing, and storing dishes – as well as a lively history of dishes from the 15th century to the present. From a look inside George and Martha Washington’s pantry, to an appendix of the 100 most popular patterns, “dish mania” is indeed hard to avoid.

Photographs in the book are by Robert Bean. The book is available through Amazon or where books are sold.

Published: D-Crit student Julia van den Hout launches CLOG

EmiIy Weiner — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:00:25 +0000

CLOG is a new publication with a unique focus: each issue explores from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now. Co-founded by D-Crit student Julia van den Hout, the first issue is a critical examination of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), by over 40 diverse contributors. To get the conversation started, Storefront for Art and Architecture, hosted CLOG and Bjarke Ingels in a “Collective Interrogation” on October 7, 2011. View images from the event here.CLOG is currently accepting submissions for its second issue, CLOG:APPLE. Deadline for entry is November 1: submissions@clog-online.com.

Superscript: New Design Communications Consultancy by 2011 D-Crit Grads

EmiIy Weiner — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:00:39 +0000

From D-Crit instructor Alexandra Lange’s 8.10.11 Design Observer post: Four enterprising 2011 graduates of D-Crit have started a design communications consultancy called Superscript, and have decided to launch in a both public and critical way: with the Architecture and Design Book Club (ADBC). It meets next Thursday, August 18 at 6:30 p.m. on the High Line, where they’ve asked me to guest host the first edition on William H. Whyte’s classic 1980 text The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Future texts and locations, including some fiction, TBA.
Now that Phase 2 is open, the High Line hardly seems, in geography or reputation, like a small urban space, but as I hope we’ll discuss next Thursday, I think it is the biggest small space a designer could imagine. All the insights in Whyte’s book: the importance of sittable space, people’s preference for standing in (pedestrian) traffic, the uses of art and food as conversation starters (the original definition of triangulation), are on prominent display along the High Line. Since we’ll be right there, I hope we can identify some of the failures as well as the successes of the park’s design from a social point of view.

The book is well worth buying, but if you don’t feel like it, xeroxes of a few key chapters will be distributed at the club meeting. Snippets of the videos from Whyte’s multi-year research project are also available on Vimeo.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the inspirations for the club, critic Christopher Hawthorne’s yearlong Reading L.A. project for the Los Angeles Times. It is the kind of idea that is perfect for the blog form, and so obvious as to make you smack your head. Here’s his up-to-date take on Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, which makes a good pair with Alissa Walker’s account of the L.A. Urban Rangers’ Bonaventure Adventure. Let’s hope the new New York Times critic, about whom the New York Observer writes this week, will have some as-good ideas about how to draw more people into reading about, looking at and commenting on the city.

D-Crit grad Vera Sacchetti Wins 2011 Design History Society Postgraduate Prize

EmiIy Weiner — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:12:11 +0000

We are proud to announce that class of 2011 D-Crit graduate Vera Sacchetti has won the Design History Society postgraduate prize for D-Crit graduate thesis paper “Design Crusade,”which she presented at SVA in April. This prestigious honor awards a bursary from the Design History Society, as well as a place at the DHS conference 2011 (on Design Activism and Social Change), held in Barcelona September 7–10. Watch a video of Vera presenting her thesis at the 2011 D-Crit conference here. Congrats Vera!

Chappell Ellison in GOOD (and on NPR): Can Designers Save the World Without Creating More Stuff?

EmiIy Weiner — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:34:09 +0000

D-Crit graduate Chappell Ellison (class of 2010), was interviewed on yesterday’s Colin McEnroe Show, “The Check-Out Lane Experience.” Last month she authored a related article for GOOD magazine on about the designer’s role as problem-solvers, and users of what’s at hand (rather than what’s additionally produced) to reach a solution.As Ellison explains:

For designers, it is important to look at the problems and resources at hand without getting lost in fantasies of global healing powers. It is this sort of humility that Ralph Caplan emphasizes: “…I have claimed that design solves problems. It often does. But when we call designers problem solvers, the connotations are very grand…It helps to remember that, to a person hungry for scrambled eggs, a short-order cook is a problem solver.”

Read the full article here.