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Thursday, 12 June 2008 | Levent OZLER
MFA in Interaction Design Offered at SVA in Fall 2009
New Degree From School of Visual Arts Bridges Design and Digital Media
A new advanced degree program focused on the design and business of digital media will be offered at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York City, beginning in the fall of 2009. An MFA in Interaction Design will focus on the critical role of the designer in creating useful and usable digital products and services. The department will be chaired by Liz Danzico, an expert in information architecture and usability, who conceived the program with Steven Heller, a design historian, New York Times columnist, and co-chair of the MFA Design Department at SVA.
"In its most basic form, interaction design involves a conversation between a person and an interface," says Danzico. "Whether it's a Web site, a mobile phone or a kiosk at the airport, great interaction design starts with an understanding of people."
The MFA program will engage students in concepts central to interaction design, including design research, human-computer interaction, interface design, graphic design, information architecture, and ubiquitous computing. The two-year, 60-credit program will provide an environment where students can explore designing a range of experiences that cross visual, conceptual, and technical boundaries. Working in interdisciplinary teams, students will work in the field and in the studio to develop practical design solutions to real-world problems. Enrollment will be open to designers and non-designers alike-a diverse group of professionals interested in exploring the overlap between digital media and the landmark contemporary design practices that define SVA.
The faculty will consist of leading practitioners in Web design and graphic design, writers and design researchers. A portion of the faculty includes: Christopher Fahey, founding partner, Behavior, and author, graphpaper.com; David Womack, co-author, Becoming a Digital Designer: A Guide to Careers in Web, Video, Broadcast, Game and Animation Design (Wiley, 2007), editor, Adobe ThinkTank, and consultant on digital strategy and content; Jason Santa Maria, creative director, Happy Cog Studios, and author, jasonsantamaria.com; Karen McGrane, founding partner, Bond Art + Science; Khoi Vinh, design director, NYTimes.com, and author, Subtraction.com; Paul Ford, novelist and editor/programmer, Harper's Magazine, and author, Ftrain.com, Rachel Abrams, designer, writer and creative director, Turnstone Consulting LLC; and Jeffrey Zeldman, founder, Happy Cog Studios, co-founder, The Web Standards Movement, publisher, A List Apart, the standard reference for Web design, and co-founder, An Event Apart, a conference for people who make Web sites.
Liz Danzico is a user experience professional with particular focus on information architecture, usability, and editorial. In addition to writing and teaching design, she's helped build and manage user experience teams at Barnes&Noble.com and Razorfish, the award-winning interactive agency now owned by Microsoft, and was the director of experience strategy for the national staff at AIGA, the professional association for design. In addition to her user experience work for Happy Cog Studios, a Web design consultancy based in New York, she is the editor-in-chief for A Brief Message, a site for design opinions in short form, editor for Rosenfield Media, a publishing house dedicated to user experience books, former editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, the online journal of information architecture, and former managing editor of VOICE: AIGA Journal of Design and GAIN: AIGA Journal of Business and Design. She serves on the board of directors of the New York chapter of AIGA and on the advisory board of the Information Architecture Institute, a multinational professional organization. Danzico created the first Interface Design course at FIT, has taught Design History at The New School, and is a frequent lecturer at universities and conferences worldwide. She writes at bobulate.com.
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