re:D (regarding Design) Spring 2010 Cover Design William Bevington With his cover designs for this issue of re:D, William Bevington, associate professor of information mapping at Parsons, explores play as a means of discovering, learning, and deriving intellectual pleasure. Bevington invites readers to make connections and associations, promising surprises in return. He says, “The design has six or seven layers, but most significant is the relationship between the analog-based design of the front cover, created using the rules and structures of early technology—typewriter, carbon paper, handmade paper—and the digital design of the back cover, made with contemporary tools, ideas, and capabilities.” The covers complement each other, sharing several elements but allowing for different conclusions from the same information— an apt metaphor for Parsons’ approach to education. According to Bevington, who created hundreds of thumbnails and full-sized sketches to create the symmetries, “Play is hard work!”
Issue Theme Play Play, this issue’s theme, is understood as a rich mode of learning and problem solving. It is both approach and outcome: an experiential, experimental way of developing content and the end product of a design process. Described in this issue are play-based methods like those used by members of the Parsons community in Senegal and Copenhagen to highlight the need for coordination between emergency relief workers and climatologists during climate-change disasters. Within Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments, related design disciplines interact, yielding new ideas for building products and communities in their interplay. In each example, a belief in play as an essential means of discovery informs the end result. Likewise, each reflects an understanding that underlying all meaningful play are rules and structures that facilitate learning.
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partners in design In collaboration with New School and external partners, the School of Design Strategies
(SDS) has developed Designing w/, a communication platform consisting of videos about participatory design methods, a publication documenting SDS courses and collaborations, and a one-day symposium exploring these projects with partners, students, and faculty. Designing w/ takes its name from an approach in which designers work directly with end users to solve design problems. Through this collaboration, they develop a shared understanding of the challenges addressed by design, identify opportunities, and devise innovative solutions to problems. designingwith.parsons.edu
work wear Workwear, a series organized by Shelley Fox, director of the new MFA Fashion Design and Society program, celebrated workwear in American fashion and demonstrated its influence on contemporary perceptions of New York as a fashion capital. The exhibition included installations by Fox, the Donna Karan Professor of Fashion Design at Parsons; artwork by Norton & Sons in collaboration with artist Jeremy Deller; and films by Paul Fejos (Lonesome, 1928) and Denis Piel (Donna Karan: Seven Easy Pieces), as well as ones by Boudicca specially commissioned for Workwear. See page 03, images 15–17.
prize WINNER Alumnus Douglas Segulja, MArch ’09, of the School of Constructed Environments, won the first-place Kölner Design Preis International (Cologne Design Award International). Prizes are awarded for the best thesis projects by students from partner universities of the Köln International School of Design.
Segulja designed a polytechnic high school to train students to become railroad mechanics and engineers.
trayless tuesday Faculty members Debby Lee Cohen and Jessica Corr recently led first-year students in an effort to remove polystyrene from New York City cafeterias. Cohen—founder of Styrofoam™ Out of Schools (SOSnyc)—Corr, and students worked with the NYC Department of Education (DOE) to develop Trayless Tuesdays, a campaign to replace polystyrene trays with recyclable versions. Parsons students prototyped alternatives in biodegradable materials and designed graphics to support the project for the DOE. The effort keeps more than 2.4 million trays out of landfills monthly. See page 02, image 09.
hidden agendas Parsons’ MA Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design and Cooper-
Hewitt, National Design Museum, presented “Secrecy in the Decorative Arts and Design,” the 19th Annual Symposium on the Decorative Arts and Design. The symposium addressed the theme of secrecy from an historical perspective on decorative arts, design, fashion studies, art, architecture, material culture, anthropology, literary criticism, and related fields. Carolyn Sargentson, former head of the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, delivered the keynote address.
brand stand For more than a decade, students from Columbia Business School and Parsons have collaborated in The Design and Marketing of Luxury Goods, an interdisciplinary course offered through the Luxury
Education Foundation. The course gives business and design students access to top executives from global luxury brands. This year, student teams led by Heico Wesselius, Jeff Ng, and Carlos Teixeira developed products and marketing strategies, including social media tools and service design, for Assouline, Chanel, Fresh, Graff, and Louis Vuitton. According to student team member Alex Liang, “The course was amazing, and the instructors helped my team achieve work that went beyond our own expectations. Our client has even invited us back to the company to present to other members of their management team.”
FASHION ANCHOR Five BFA Fashion Design ’09 grads competed to create a dress for Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts to wear to this year’s Academy Awards. Fabiola Arias, Kwame Brako, Shawn Reddy, Samantha Sleeper, and Frejya van Noort presented designs
to Roberts and Suze Yalouf Schwartz, executive fashion editor-at-large at Glamour. Arias, Brako, and Reddy were selected as finalists during a fashion show on Good Morning America, and Roberts chose Reddy’s dress to wear while interviewing at the Oscars.
ANATOMY LESSON Integrated Design alumna Polina Ulendeeva ’08 received a U.S. patent for Comfort. Play. Teach., a plush toy that when unzipped reveals detachable soft human organs, created for her thesis project. Intended for children from five to seven years of age, the toy provides opportunities for learning through play. It comes with a coloring book that gives facts about human organs. “I was inspired by the works of young designers, such as the popular Ugly Dolls,” says Ulendeeva, who is reaching out to major toy companies to bring her product to market.