Hasta La Ideas

The School of Visual Art’s Design Criticism department is at it again: they’re offering champagne, donuts and—most importantly—information about their esteemed MFA program to prospective students this Saturday, October 22. As in years past, they’ve lined up a stellar group of speakers, from current students and recent grads to faculty and guest speaker Massimo Vignelli.

You are invited to join the chair, faculty members, and students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism for an afternoon of presentations and informal discussion about this exciting two-year graduate program. Current students will talk about their experiences so far, such as what it’s like to produce a podcast for Kurt Andersen, to get behind-the-scenes access at the Brooklyn Navy Yards with architecture critic Karrie Jacobs, to lift up the hood and study the mechanics of industrial design history with Russell Flinchum, or to create their own blogs with New York Observer editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers. Faculty members Andrea Codrington Lippke, Steven Heller, and Karen Stein will share some highlights from their classes—Criticism Lab, Researching Design, and The Design Book Workshop, respectively. D-Crit chair Alice Twemlow will give an overview of the program, which trains students to research, analyze, and evaluate design and its social and environmental implications, to develop their writerly voices, and to explore a range of media for reaching their publics.

A selection of recent graduates of the program will talk about how they landed plum jobs and how they are deploying skills learned at D-Crit in their daily work as design writers, editors, educators, researchers, curators, and managers. And designer Massimo Vignelli will reflect on what has been achieved since he wrote the essay “Call for Criticism” in 1983, and what are the priorities for today’s emerging design critics.

See more details & register here. Videos from past open houses:

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