Spend two weeks in the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism studio this summer learning how to write compellingly about images, objects, spaces, and infrastructure. The Design Writing and Research Intensive offers students and working professionals—designers and writers alike—a unique opportunity to study closely with leading writers, editors, and critics, and to refine their skills as thinkers, researchers, and storytellers.
Participants will learn essential research and writing techniques, and then develop several projects in media ranging from tweets and video essays to manifestos, personal essays, and articles, culminating in a collaboratively produced publication. By the end of the program, participants will have completed several pieces of writing, contributed to a publication, formulated ideas for stories, and garnered a robust set of tools and approaches for writing authoritatively and imaginatively about design.
A tightly programmed daily schedule of seminars, lectures, writing workshops, and one-on-one tutorials will be supplemented with site visits, design studio tours, and exhibition openings, allowing participants to directly interact with prominent designers, architects, urban planners, and curators.
Each participant will have a workstation in the beautiful, light-filled D-Crit studio in New York City’s Chelsea district, and 24-hour access to department resources.
Faculty and lecturers include: Neil Donnelly, Steven Heller, Karrie Jacobs, Jennifer Kabat, Adam Harrison Levy, Robin Pogrebin, Alice Twemlow, Rob Walker, Mimi Zeiger.
Studio visits include: Antenna Design, frog, Kiss Me I’m Polish, Emily Oberman at Pentagram, Mary Ping, Sagmeister & Walsh, Streng.
Instructors
- Steven Heller
- Karrie Jacobs
- Neil Donnelly
- Jennifer Kabat
- Adam Harrison Levy
- Robin Pogrebin
- Alice Twemlow
- Rob Walker
- Mimi Zeiger
Photos
Photos from the Intensive are now available.
Reading Room
- Adam Harrison Levy
A History Of The World In 100 Objects - Adam Harrison Levy
Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs - Rob Walker
Imaginary Objects and Fictional Critiques
- Justin Davidson
The Glass Stampede - Ralph Caplan
Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV
- Paola Antonelli
On Governing Design - Ada Louise Huxtable
Sometimes We Do It Right
2 Instructors
Alice Twemlow is chair and co-founder of the SVA MFA Design Criticism program. Twemlow is a contributor to Design Observer and writes about design for publications including Eye, Design & Culture, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of What is Graphic Design For? (Rotovision) and of essays for books such as The Barnbrook Bible and 60 Innovators: Shaping Our Creative Futures (Thames and Hudson), and the catalogue for “Graphic Design Worlds” at La Triennale Design Museum. She has directed several national conferences for AIGA and moderated conferences such as the Tasmeem Doha Conference 2011 at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, the College Art Association Conference 2011 Conference in New York, and “Abstract: The Future of Design in Media Conference” in Portland Maine. Alice has recently given lectures at the ICOGRADA conference in Beijing, the QT series at MoMA, and at AIGA Chicago.
Steven Heller is the co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program and the SVA Masters Workshop in Rome. He writes the Visuals column for The New York Times Book Review, a weekly column for The Atlantic online and The Daily Heller / Imprint online. He has written more than 140 books on graphic design, illustration, and political art, including The Design Entrepreneur (with Lita Talarico), Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, Citizen Designer, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State. He is a contributing editor for Print, Baseline, Design Observer, and Eye. Heller is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the School of Visual Arts’ Masters Series Award and the 2011 National Design Award for “Design Mind.”
Neil Donnelly is a graphic designer who makes books, printed matter, websites, exhibitions, illustrations, and typefaces, often with clients in architecture and art. He has worked with the Guggenheim, Yale University, Domus, Columbia University, The New York Times, Princeton Architectural Press, and Storefront for Art and Architecture, among others. His work was included in the 2012 Brno Biennial of Graphic Design, and he has designed commissioned installations for the Gwangju Design Biennale, the New Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. He has taught courses and led workshops at Yale, SVA, MICA, Parsons, Rutgers, and the University of Illinois, and he holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Karrie Jacobs is contributing editor at Metropolis magazine where she writes a monthly column, “America,” about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape, and is a regular contributor to Travel + Leisure, where she writes about destinations of interest to the architectural tourist. She is author of The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home (Viking, 2006), a book about housing in America. Between 1999 and 2002 Karrie was the founding editor in chief of Dwell, a San Francisco-based magazine about modern residential architecture and design. Prior to launching Dwell, Karrie served as the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and she has written about design, technology, and visual language for many periodicals including The New York Times, I.D. Magazine, and Fortune. And in the early 1990s, Jacobs was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors Magazine.
Jennifer Kabat is a writer whose journalism and criticism has appeared in publications from the Financial Times to The Guardian, Wired, Wallpaper*, Condé Nast Traveler, Frieze, New York, The Rumpus, Salon, and Metropolis where she’s a contributing editor. Her novel Our Greater Selves grew out of a story that was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s short story award for new writers, and “As If I Could Assume Your Life” was the only story by an unpublished writer in the British anthology X-24 Unclassified, edited by Tash Aw. She did graduate work in art history at Columbia University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2003 she received an MA with honors in creative writing from the University of East Anglia supported by a grant from the British government. Additionally she’s developed innovative brand strategies and worked on marketing projects for major companies like Nike, Converse, Johnnie Walker, and Apple, and teaches creative writing in her community in the Catskills.
Robin Pogrebin has been a reporter at The New York Times since 1995. As a culture reporter she covers arts institutions, architecture and other issues. She previously covered the magazine industry for the Business Section and city news for the Metro Section. Prior to joining The Times, Robin worked as an associate producer for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News. Before that, she was a staff reporter at The New York Observer. She has also written freelance articles for various publications including Vogue, Departures, Architectural Digest and New York Magazine and her work has been featured in several anthologies. She teaches a journalism seminar at Riverdale Country School. Robin has a BA from Yale University. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.
Rob Walker is a technology and culture columnist for Yahoo News and a blogger at Design Observer, and until 2013 wrote The New York Times Magazine’s Consumed column. He is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House, 2008), Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press, 2005) and the co-editor with Joshua Glenn of Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things (Fantagraphics, 2012). Walker is the co-founder, with Ellen Susan and G.K. Darby, of The Hypothetical Development Organization, and founding collaborator of the Unconsumption project, and is often called on as an expert commentator on the subject of material culture and branding, notably in the documentary Objectified.
Mimi Zeiger is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. She is a founding member of #lgnlgn, a think tank on architecture and publishing. The group’s work has been shown at Urban Design Week, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. As a writer and critic, she covers art, architecture, and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses, and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. Always obsessed with the intersection of architecture and media, she is Director of Communications at Woodbury School of Architecture in Burbank. As a teacher, her cross-disciplinary seminars explore the relationships between architecture, art, urban space, and popular culture.
3 Curriculum
Project 1: Narrative Strategies for Objects, instructed by Rob Walker and Adam Harrison Levy
Rob Walker will lecture on how to develop narratives around objects, while Adam Harrison Levy will lecture on research methods. Students will engage in close observation, archive research, and other means of data gathering, and then experiment with strategies to illuminate an object’s significance through storytelling.
Project 2: Studio Profiles, instructed by Adam Harrison Levy and Jennifer Kabat
This project launches with lectures on Reporting and Interviewing Skills. Students will then perform exercises to develop their interviewing techniques, prepare questions, and do background research, before visiting some of New York’s most prominent design studios in the fields of architecture, interaction design, graphic design, fashion design, and product design. Each student will interview the principal designer and write a studio profile for critique in a mid-Intensive review session.
Project 3: Exhibition Reviews
Students will be introduced to the principles of reviewing across genres and across media, with a focus on the exhibition review as a type. After some initial exercises to hone writing skills, the development of a point of view and argument, and some reading exercises to examine exemplars of the form, students will visit a selection of design exhibitions, and meet and interview their curators, before writing their own reviews, and presenting them for critique.
Project 4: Platform Project, instructed by Mimi Zeiger
Contemporary design writing is no longer confined to essays and reviews published in newspapers, journals, and magazines. Increasingly it finds platforms in digital formats such as Twitter, blogs, and downloadable PDFs. This course will focus on how these alternate formats prove the perfect platform for topical and experimental design discourse. Intensive participants will collaborate to produce a publication featuring their best work to be launched on the final day of the Intensive.
Studio Visits
- Antenna Design
- frog
- Kiss Me I’m Polish
- Emily Oberman at Pentagram
- Mary Ping
- Sagmeister & Walsh
- Chris Streng
Sample Timetable
Week 1
Session 1
10 AM–12 PM
Session 2
1–3 PM
Session 3
4–6 PM
Monday
Introductory Talk: Alice Twemlow
Platform Project Introduction: Mimi Zeiger
Paul Lukas—Show & Tell: Turning Objects into Narratives Lecture and Writing Exercises
Object Writing Exercises and Critique
Critics: Paul Lukas, Steven Heller, Alice Twemlow
Tuesday
Lecture on Research: Steven Heller
SVA Archive Visit & Library Tour: Beth Kleber
Visit Alex Kalman’s Museum, Cortlandt Alley
Wednesday
The Art of the Interview: Adam Harrison Levy
Reporting and Writing Design Studio Profiles: Jennifer Kabat
Interviewing & Reporting Exercises
Thursday
Studio Visits & Interviews
Studio Visits & Interviews
Writing Consultation
Friday
Platform Project: Mimi Zeiger
Writing Workshop
Present and Critique Object Stories
Sunday
Exhibition and Guided Tour (Ellen Lupton): “Graphic Design: Now in Production,” Governor’s Island
Week 2
Session 1
10 AM–12 PM
Session 2
1–3 PM
Session 3
4–6 PM
Monday
Lecture on Urban Curation: Karrie Jacobs
Site Visit: Times Square
Documentation Exercises & Critique
Tuesday
Critique Studio Profiles: Jennifer Kabat
Critique Studio Profiles: Adam Harrison Levy
Waterfront Writing Workshop: Justin Davidson
Wednesday
Platform Project: Mimi Zeiger
Writing Workshop
Platform Project
Thursday
Writing Workshop
Platform Project
Platform Project
Friday
Writing Workshop
Final Presentations
Platform Publication Launch and Reception
4 Participants
Bonnie Abbott is an Australian graphic designer and design writer. After graduating with a BA in Graphic Design and MA in Design Studies, Bonnie split her time between Melbourne and London, working in print and publication. Interested in the practical applications of language and writing as part of graphic design practice, she launched the online journal Gather&Fold and began writing in 2011. She has since been published in Creative Review, Made Quarterly, and Process Journal. She is attending the Summer Intensive as a way to learn outside of her own experience and limitations, and to explore the possibilities of graphic design in society, history, and within the broader design discipline.
Carl Alviani is a writer at Ziba, a design and innovation consultancy in Portland, Oregon. As one of just a handful of writers in a studio full of designers and strategists, he spends most of his time sucking stories out of the creative minds around him, and translating the results into case studies and web copy, guide documents for clients, and articles for print and online publications, including Fast Company, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review. Starting out as a Peace Corps science teacher with an engineering degree, he studied and then practiced Industrial Design in New York City for several years before discovering that he was happier explaining the design process than pursuing it. Like any good Portland stereotype, he spends his off-hours geeking out on food, beer, and bicycles, and is almost as excited about exploring NYC’s new bikeshare program as attending the Summer Intensive.
Tim Belonax is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently works at Facebook, splitting his work between the Communication Design team and the Analog Research Lab. Tim’s work has been recognized by AIGA, TDC, ADC, Graphis, Adobe, Communication Arts, and Society of Typographic Arts, as well as a myriad of publications. His work has also been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad by museums and arts associations. Tim is excited to join SVA’s Design Writing and Research Summer Intensive because of its critical focus on the built environment and its potential to shape design. In his spare time you can find Tim screen printing, playing hockey, or wandering through one of San Francisco’s bookstores.
Shantel Blakely currently lives near Boston and is pleased to meet you. She would like to write for the sake of clearer thinking but also to be read. She is drawn to a kind of suggestive explanation that invites the reader to think in a new way, or wonder what might come to be. As an architectural historian, she builds accounts of the past using primary sources and archives. In research on design in the 1950s, she found the best writing in journals and magazines. Design, it seems, is part of a larger topic called “change”—so she wants to write about the present. What details or venues of architecture and design are scenes of change? Who might be the people to bring us tomorrow’s indispensable invention, or lead us to a happy frame of mind we knew once before? With that in mind, Shantel looks for answers through varied topics—You might find her telling you about stereo photography or French pastry.
amery Calvelli is an advocate for the merit of design. Raised on a farm, she began her career in fashion, working for Giorgio Armani, Agnes b, and as a press representative for Comme des Garçons. In the twenty-first century she has mostly focused on the advocacy of architecture. Having re-located just above the 51st parallel to Calgary in 2009, she is contributing to a local dialogue around the built environment. She hosts a radio show called “space + place” on community-supported station CJSW and is co-founding a series of local design conversations called d.talks. She is attending the Summer Intensive to hone her writing with a more critical focus. She has found that the habitual stroll cultivates a deeper understanding of place, and enjoys the discovery of new things that she missed before traveling a familiar path.
Kate Carmody holds a MA in the History of Design and Decorative Arts. Currently a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, Kate has co-organized, with Paola Antonelli, “Talk to Me: The Communication between People and Objects” (2011); “Born out of Necessity “(2012); and “Applied Design” (2013), among several other exhibitions. Previously, she served as adjunct faculty in the Art and Design History and Theory department at Parsons, The New School for Design; preparator in the department of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History; fellow in the Wallcoverings department at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; and co-organizer of the Big Urban Game and Design Camp while working at the University of Minnesota Design Institute. Kate hopes to learn to like writing at the Summer Intensive. Her two favorite things to do are watch TV and hold small animals.
Del Hepler is an architectural intern and LEED Accredited Professional based out of Charlottesville, Virginia. He graduated with a BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia and has since split his time between New York City and Charlottesville. As an undergraduate, he participated in the design and construction of UVA’s ecoMOD project, which aims to build sustainable and affordable prefab housing. This led to an interest in the social responsibility of art and architecture in a community. More recently, he has become interested in exploring the relationships between architecture and other art disciplines (dance, film, photography, painting, creative writing). He is excited to be joining the Design Writing and Research Summer Intensive to explore how writing creatively and critically about space and objects can strengthen the design process and vice versa. Outside of design, he enjoys reading, painting, and collecting artwork from friends and local artists.
Dana El Ahdab is a graphic designer on weekdays and an assistant scuba diving instructor on weekends. Originally from Lebanon, she grew up in Qatar and studied in the UK where she completed a MA in Design Education at Goldsmiths College. Dana’s interest in edutainment lead her to work at Al Jazeera Children’s Channel for four years, after which she started a design practice that catered mostly to NGOs and educational projects for children. Dana also worked at the Qatar branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University as a Graphic Design assistant professor. During her involvement with Purple Reef, a marine conservation NGO in Lebanon, she became interested in community learning through design practice and critical thinking. She sees the Design Writing and Research Summer Intensive as an opportunity to improve her writing and storytelling skills, in order to access diverse audiences, and promote environmental awareness through design and creativity.
Samantha Fodor holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental and Urban Geography from The University of Calgary. She began a career in the environmental consulting and oil industry, then returned to school to examine her passion for architecture, urban planning, and environmental politics. She developed an interest in journalism while producing an Emmy-award nominated documentary related to oil and energy in the media. A strong passion for design has governed hobbies, including industrial/interior design and writing. She most recently returned to the corporate world as a technical writer, and has plans to shift her career toward design altogether. She is attending the SVA Summer Intensive to further develop her design knowledge and writing, and expand her critical eye. Samantha enjoys indulging in great food, riding her three-speed bike on flat terrain, painting and filmmaking, and listening to rock and roll whenever possible. In keeping with the title of aspiring writer/designer, she currently slings beer to thirsty patrons every weekend.
Liz Guthrie is a graduate of the Growth & Structure of Cities program at Haverford College and received her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University. Liz developed an early interest in nature in cities after living abroad in Paris. Liz has held teaching and management positions with schools and nonprofits on the east and west coasts, which fueled her interests in environmental education and community greening. Currently, Liz is the staff liaison to the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Sustainable Sites Initiative, where she works with volunteers and partner organizations to pioneer a national rating system for sustainability and landscape. As a landscape architect and LEED Green Associate, Liz is trained to see the space between buildings. She is inspired to join the Summer Intensive for the chance to reflect on these architectural intersections—places where ecological and cultural patterns emerge to shape the urban landscape.