Department Blog
Department news, events, and snapshots of student life at SVA in New York City.
RSVP FOR OUR ZOOM INFO SESSION ON NOV 1ST
〰️
RSVP FOR OUR ZOOM INFO SESSION ON NOV 1ST 〰️
Featured Posts
All Blog Posts
BIRTH REBORN: Using Design to Address Barriers to Equitable Maternal Care for Black Women
At a time when the maternal mortality rate in the US is soaring, Victoria Ayo's thesis, Birth Reborn: Using Design to Address Barriers to Equitable Maternal Care for Black Women, aims to give voice and power back to black women and mothers. Her project explores how design can build more awareness, facilitate the integration of ancestral knowledge, leverage the community, and help eliminate barriers to equitable birth outcomes. Victoria proposes new realities for collective care, bringing the wellbeing of mothers out of isolation and into solidarity.
DARE + DEFY: A Woman’s Place in the Great Outdoors
As an avid climber and hiker, Alexia Cohen found herself interested in examining the role of women in the great outdoors. When she started climbing three years ago, she attended an event organized by Flash Foxy—a group of women dedicated to celebrating and empowering women climbers. Through this event, she met her climbing partner Janice, who as Alexia recalls “quickly became a friend and a mentor. Her guidance and support helped me develop my climbing technique and become more comfortable in this new space.” She also began to understand the importance of community and women mentors in traditionally male-dominated spaces.
TEAMBUILDING AMERICA: A Declaration of Interdependence
For Hannah Rudin’s thesis, Teambuilding America: A Declaration of Interdependence, she set out to tackle the issue of political polarization in America. Using the strategies of contact, action, and future-building, Hannah designs interventions meant to bridge political divides and address polarization within society at large, as well as within the workplace and between family members.
HYSTERICAL WOMEN: Designing Experiences to Counter the Current Gaslighting Healthcare System
Through her thesis, Hysterical Women: Designing Experiences to Counter the Current Gaslighting Healthcare System, Rhea Bhandari aims to elevate the healthcare experience of women by designing more efficient and empathetic diagnostic and treatment strategies, and providing women with new tools with which to track and communicate their symptoms.
FOOD JUSTICE: Through the Power of Knowledge Sharing
After learning of food deserts and food insecurity in New York, Danish designer Gustav Dyrhauge quickly decided to dedicate his thesis, Food Justice: Through the Power of Knowledge Sharing, to food justice and the problem of food insecurity. He designed workshops, services, and experiences in collaboration with Brooklyn youth, towards the goal of job security, food security, and the celebration of cultural heritage through culturally-appropriate food.
PROSUMERISM: Crafting Alternate Consumption Experiences
In her thesis Prosumerism: Crafting Alternate Consumption Experiences, Sowmya Iyer explores whether products and services can ease the consumer’s guilt of excessive spending and materialism by providing them with options that best fit their values of sustainability. She also wanted to find out if these products/services could be adaptive to the consumer’s lifestyle and built for their convenience. As part of her research process, Sowmya spoke to researchers, innovators, educators, authors, and artists exploring ways to reduce the effects of modern consumerism on the environment.
HACKING THE RACIAL BINARY: Design Provocations for Identity and Shame
Manako Tamura has spent the last year trying to reconcile her experience as an assimilated immigrant of color by interviewing, designing for and reflecting with the generation 1.5 immigrants of color who, like her, migrated to the US in the most formative years of their identities. Going into this journey, she first thought her thesis was going to be about transnationalism, where the main tension she had to resolve was around immigrants’ countries of origin and their adopted homelands. “As I spoke with users and experts on the subject, it became clear that the real tensions had to do with the transactional nature of assimilation where,” she reveals, “one could not embody both American and another culture.”
IN EQUALITY: Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy
Bernice Wong’s thesis, In Equality: Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy, explores our relationship and role in the interconnected systems that allow some to prosper and others to suffer exploitation or enslavement. She traces the state of labor rights in today’s American agricultural industry back in time to the abolition of slavery in 1865, understanding that agriculture in the U.S. remains rooted in a system historically intended to control and repress the black body. Her design projects seek to intervene where there are structures of abuse, confronting the issues of immigration, exoticism, colonization, and race as intersected and inseparable.
GENTLEmen: Challenging Adults to Raise Feminine Boys
In his thesis GENTLEmen: Challenging Adults to Raise Feminine Boys, Andrew Schlesinger explores gender identity, masculinity, stereotyping, parenting, education, and male culture. Andrew has been investigating the restrictive nature placed on men and the necessity for them to conform to a masculine ideal, which is destructive to themselves and those around them. Through the feminist movement, most would acknowledge there has been a significant approach towards teaching girls traditionally masculine traits. This thesis argues we need a similar, foundational shift to teach boys feminine traits.