2023 re:D - Designing Our Urban Future

Regarding Design (re:D) 2023

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Anne Adriance

EDITORIAL BOARD

Cecilia Cammisa, Natalia Dare, Dustin Liebenow, Lisa Sarma, Alex Tapnio, Craig Tiede

PARSONS ADVISORY BOARD

Shana Agid, Ben Barry, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, David J. Lewis, Sarah Lichtman, John Roach, Yvonne Watson

MANAGING EDITORS

Kyle Hansen, Audrey Singer

EDITOR AND LEAD WRITER

John Haffner Layden

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Hannah R. Brion, Carissa Chesanek, Sarah Fensom, Tory Mast, Julia Lynn Rubin, David Sokol

LEAD DESIGNER

Grace Hopkins

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR

Sung Baik

COPY EDITOR

Leora Harris

LETTERS AND SUBMISSIONS

re:D welcomes letters and submissions. Include your year of graduation, the degree completed, and your major or program. Unsolicited materials will not be returned.

CONTACT US/ADDRESS CHANGES

re:D, Attn.: Marketing and Communication, 79 Fifth Avenue, 17th floor, New York, NY 10003; red@newschool.edu

REGARDING DESIGN, SEPTEMBER 2023

POSTMASTER

Send address changes to Regarding Design (re:D), 55 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011.

CREDITS

Cover—Grace Hopkins; News—Sherwin Banfield; Amie Brockway-Metcalf; Monique Carboni; Photograph courtesy of Micaiah Carter and Sarah Hasted (International Art Advisory LLC), New York; Columbia University Press; Danielle Lair Ferrari, BFA Communication Design ’22; Yibo Fu; Getty Images; Emil Hernon; Marisa Morán Jahn; Arielle Jovellanos; Tuomas Laitinen; Yuqing Liang; Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images; Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy of American Ballet Theatre; Olivia Pecini; Ines Pottier (Girl Management); Daniel Sauter; Martin Seck; Eshita Sharma, BBA Strategic Design and Management ’22; Joe Steele, MS Data Visualization ’18; Studio Albert Romagosa; Chris Vidal Tenomaa; Claudia Tomateo; Rewriting—Billion Oyster Project; Cadmapper NYC; ChatGPT; David Goddard; Bob Gruen; Daniel Kons for Studio189; Mark Kurlansky; Chenxiao (Nini) Li/Midjourney/Cinema 4D; Life After People fan wiki; Bruke Marew; Midjourney; Juno Morrow; NYC Open Data—Citywide Outfalls; Riffusion; Hedi Slimane; Granamour Weems Collection/Alamy Stock Photo; Alan Weisman; WikiMedia Commons; New Models—Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Andrea Estrada; Lauro Rocha Fotografía; Marcelo Lerner; Aiyo O’Connor; Co-designing—Lisa Deurer; Hester Street; Drishti Jaggi; MacKenna Lewis Photography, Maki Huang Ozowa; Nicole Schwarze; Brooke Singer; Isabella Yu; Profiles—(Tracy Reese) Courtney Blackett, Karen Sanders; (Elizabeth Sanders) Danny Perez, Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; (Aucher Serr) Aucher Serr, TWO-N, Inc.; (Ben Chase) Child Poverty Action Lab, Health Equity Collective, IDEO.org; (Alvaro Velosa) BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), BIG + Atchain, BIG + Synoesis; (Nora Krug) Hanna Hrabarska; (Sabrina Dorsainvil) Julianne Jensen, Stephen Walter; (Vanessa Rosales) Juan Moore; (Emily B. Yang), Gale Fassbender, Sarah Kuszelewicz, Electra Mars; re:WIND—The New School Archives and Special Collections, Courtesy F. Schumacher & Co.; We’re Parsons—Matthew Mathews. The New School is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution.

Published 2023 by The New School.

Produced by Marketing and Communication, The New School.

Regarding Design (re:D) 2023

re:D—An award-winning showcase of work by Parsons students, faculty, and alumni—celebrates more than a century of changemaking creativity and critical thought

Designing Our Urban Futures

Community. Innovation. Research. Systems. Scale. Change. This issue of re:D —like much of the work at Parsons—interweaves these phenomena in creative new ways. As society continues to evolve and urbanize, our community is developing novel solutions to perennial problems, addressing the need for affordable housing— the focus of a Consortium for Trans/disciplinarity project (see page 12)—and fostering sustainable communities with local nonprofits (see page 18). Also taken up on these pages are new challenges, like guiding the meteoric rise of AI and machine learning with responsibility and creativity, in collaboration with a new corporate research partner, LG AI Research (see page 6).

In this issue, you will find cause for pride and inspiration for connecting with the Parsons community, which spans the world and transcends disciplinary boundaries in search of more sustainable urban futures.

ABOUT THE COVER

To reflect this issue’s theme of innovative co-designed approaches to bolstering urban resilience, the re:D team asked community members to share words that came to mind in thinking about an equitable urban future. The call came in the form of QR posters placed in university buildings during the Parsons Festival and yielded words that re:D’s designer, Grace Hopkins, used to generate imagery, employing the text-to-image AI software programs Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, and DALL-E. The results ranged from fantastical to photorealistic, with verdant (“green” was a recurring term) futuristic cities the prevailing typology. Of the highly iterative process, Hopkins says, “As with any new technology, there are a lot of surprising outcomes from AI—some that inspire new creative approaches, and some that get quickly discarded.” Hopkins organized hundreds of software-generated images by subject—depictions of buildings, nature imagery, and representations of people living in an urban future—for the cover. She was intrigued by the way the process, a combination of digital automation and skilled handwork, reversed the typical method of working with AI. “We think of technology’s ability to organize content and humans’ capacity to create, but in this case, my design resulted from culling and presenting from the output of generative software freed to create. I gained fresh insights by playing a new role in the process,” says Hopkins—an approach encouraged at Parsons. (At right are thumbnails of AI images generated in the cover-design process.)

NEWS

Recent achievements of our community of students, faculty, and alumni innovators

REWRITING THE CODE

Parsons’ explorations of artificial intelligence and machine learning reflect the school’s human-centered approach

NEW TRANSDISCIPLINARY MODELS

The new Consortium for Trans/disciplinarity (CT/d) is transforming an affordable housing project in Brazil into a model for work done throughout the university and beyond

CO-DESIGNING IN COMMUNITY

Juanli Carrión’s course is guiding students as they partner with local and global nonprofits to help communities thrive

PROFILES

Meet our changemaking students, faculty, and alumni and discover work that is making the world a better place for all

WE’RE PARSONS

Learn more about us and what we offer

RE:WIND

Meet fashion alum Sherl Nero ’61, who led design at Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant, a groundbreaking Black-owned Brooklyn-based home goods firm

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1 BUILDING ROBLOX

Parsons entered the metaverse through a new partnership formed by N Ventures the university’s professional education and licensing unit—between the school and the global online gaming platform Roblox. Students in the MFA and BFA Design and Technology programs, led by Kyle Li, an assistant professor of communication design and technology, collaborated over the past semester with Roblox leadership to research 3D digital fashion using Roblox tools and then create a capsule collection of virtual garments for gaming avatars. Six School of Fashion alumni mentors provided critical guidance to the student teams, and model and activist Karlie Kloss and designer Wes Gordon served on the crit panel. Zhenyu Yang, MFA Design and Technology ’23, BFA Fashion Design ’20, described the process of designing digitally as “freeing—I didn’t need to run around finding materials, and there’s no worry about physical wearability.” Li described the initiative—covered widely in the press and featured on CNN's Next Frontier series—as providing “tools that are likely to become increasingly relevant in students’ careers,” an observation backed by impressive sales figures for digital gear already on the market. Roblox’s millions of users worldwide can now buy Parsons’ digital avatar garments on the Roblox website. newschool.edu/red/roblox newschool.edu/red/robloxshop

2 PARSONS FESTIVAL 2023

This year’s May festival featured a diverse array of events, including exhibitions of cutting-edge student work and a special pre-Commencement celebration honoring Indigenous students. The BFA Design History and Practice program, offered by the School of Art and Design History and Theory, presented a capstone exhibition tour followed by a symposium. The School of Fashion (SOF ) screened two livestreams of its A.NEW 2023 BFA Fashion Design Runway, and AAS Fashion Design graduates showed work at the University Center. The School of Art, Media, and Technology’s BFA Illustration program hosted a graduating seniors book launch and a thesis screening at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, where MFA Fine Arts and BFA Photography graduates also held their thesis exhibition and reception. BFA Fine Arts graduate showed work at the Parsons East building. Graduating students in the MS Data Visualization program delivered keynotes and demonstrated their theses at the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center. All three Communication Design programs ( AAS, BFA , and MPS) held a thesis book launch during Commencement week. The School of Constructed Environments showcased student work in architecture, interior design, product and industrial design, and lighting design in exhibitions held at the Parsons East and new 39 West 13th Street buildings. BFA and MFA Design and Technology graduates mounted their thesis show, Entropy, at

6 East 16th Street, displaying interactive work, mixed-media installations, products, games, and augmented and virtual reality spaces. Graduating seniors from SDS’s Integrated Design program hosted Fig 23, a series of exhibitions and live events, at 2 West 13th Street. A printmaking and artists’ books popup exhibition was held at the Making Center. Four multimedia team projects created by students from Parsons and the university’s performing arts college were presented at the University Center. SDS’s MFA Transdisciplinary Design program held a thesis showcase, and SOF’s MFA Textiles program created an immersive installation and hosted an open studio at 39 West 13th Street to showcase the fourth generation of graduates. Graduates from the BBA and MS Strategic Design and Management programs held annual symposia. newschool.edu/red/festival2023

3 PARIS PARTNERS

This past year featured another series of industry collaborations that gave Parsons Paris students exclusive access to high-profile partners. Last fall, first-year MFA Fashion Design and the Arts students engaged with MM6 Maison Margiela, the legendary fashion company carrying forward the influential vision of conceptual designer Martin Margiela. During the five-month project, the MM6 Maison Margiela creative team challenged students to reimagine the brand’s philosophy from a personal, artistic perspective. The brief called for responding to the brand’s design

motifs and strategies—such as trompe l’œil, circles, and unexpected juxtapositions—and radically reconfiguring three pieces by varying proportions, sizes, or materials. In the interest of sustainability, students used unconventional materials, including the company’s discards and deadstock. To record their process, students created a newspaper and photographed one another’s collections using family members and friends as models, just as Margiela did. The work was on public view on campus, accompanied by a publication documenting the project.

Faculty members Francesca Bonesio, Bridget O’Rourke, Stephanie Nadalo, and Carlos Franklin led BFA Art , Media, and Technology students in a partnered project with art directors and curators of Paris Photo—Europe’s largest photo fair—to develop strategies for making the emerging artists and galleries segment more accessible, diverse, inclusive, and sustainable.

Last May, MA Fashion Studies alumni (Ariel Stark ’19, Angelene Wong ’19, Sandra Mathey García-Rada ’20, Ilaria Trame ’22, Stephanie Lever ’22, Ayaka Kitagawa ’22) and Kathryn Frey, BFA Art, Media, and Technology ’21, partnered with Centre Pompidou to create Fashion Interventions at Centre Pompidou participatory performances inviting visitors to reflect on the museum’s permanent exhibitions. newschool.edu/red/MM6

4 INCORPORATED INK

Each year, our community shares its creativity in print. Recent faculty publications include Material Health: Design Frontiers by Alison

Mears and Jonsara Ruth of Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab, which explores the complex intersections of health and design. Marisa Morán Jahn, assistant professor of design strategies, published Design and Solidarity: Conversations on Collective Futures, a collection of dialogues on the transformative potential of mutualism and design. David Gissen, professor of architecture and urban history, received broad press coverage for The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, which critiques architecture’s failure to address disability.

Marco Pecorari, Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies program director, edited Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion, a comprehensive survey of topical theory, which includes a chapter by Emmanuel Cohen, director of the First Year Curriculum (Integrative Studio and Seminar). Morna Laing released Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, an investigation of the female body and fashion in light of sociocultural shifts. Assistant professor of strategic design and management Rhea Alexander published A Design-Driven Guide for Entrepreneurs: Strategies for Starting Up in a Multiverse. Emeritus professor Peter Wheelwright released the novel The Door-Man, which was listed among the New Yorker 's Best Books of 2022. Lori Grinker, AAS Photography ’80, assistant professor of journalism and design, published Mike Tyson, a collection of never-before-seen photographs. David J. Lewis, dean of Parsons’ School of Constructed

Environments, wrote Manual of Biogenic House Sections, a call for a full embrace of plant-based and low-carbon building materials. Bill Shaffer, MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies ’17, wrote The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father’s Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism, a biography of Robert Ray Hamilton that took shape during his Parsons studies. Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies ’19 alums Philippa Nesbitt and Angelene Wong (with Paul Jobling) published Fashion, Identity, Image, which explores the apparel industry’s recent engagement with intersectionality and nonbinary identities. Manuel Lima, MFA Design and Technology ’05, shares a framework for a socially beneficial ethical design practice in The New Designer : Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change. Arielle Jovellanos, BFA Illustration ’14, illustrated the graphic novel Girl Taking Over : A Lois Lane Story, by author Sarah Kuhn. Sarah Hasted, a part-time assistant professor of photography, edited Micaiah Carter: What’s My Name, which features the influential work of Micaiah Carter, BFA Photography ’17. Matt Delsestom, MA Theories of Urban Practice ’14, published Design and the Social Imagination, which explores the way design can be used to address challenges and build more sustainable communities. newschool.edu/alumni/bookshelf

5 PARSONS BENEFIT

The 74th Parsons Benefit—an annual celebration of fashion and its influence—

brought together the university community and celebrities to recognize the contributions of members of Parsons’ network. Held this past May at Cipriani, the benefit raised $1.7 million for student scholarship funds and included two new $10,000 scholarships from the NMG x Fashion Scholarship Fund. Presiding over the event were Wes Gordon, creative director of Carolina Herrera; Alexandra Moosally, co-founder of Saint New York Partners; and Gena Smith of LVMH. The honorees were Geoffroy van Raemdonck , chief executive officer of Neiman Marcus Group; Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing; and model Naomi Campbell. The evening was described as a celebration of “inclusivity, diversity, and democratizing fashion” by Rousteing, whose award was presented by Anna Wintour, Vogue editor in chief and global chief content officer for Condé Nast. Former First Lady Michelle Obama addressed Rousteing by video. Marc Jacobs accepted Campbell’s award in her absence as Kim Kardashian, actor Jodie Turner-Smith, and model Cara Delevingne looked on. A static show of pieces by BFA and AAS Fashion Design students and an installation of works by MFA Textiles students were on view, and students in the MFA Fashion Design and Society program—now under the direction of Lucia Cuba Oroza, MFA Fashion Design and Society ’12—presented looks on a runway. Pauline Roberts, Performer-Composer MM ’23, Performer-Composer MM student Carlos Cipoletti, and MFA in Contemporary Theatre and Performance student June Seo from the university’s performing arts college filled the room with music, and raps by Busta

Rhymes brought attendees to their feet. University leaders wore designs by alumni: School of Fashion dean Ben Barry wore an embellished suit by Jacques Agbobly, BFA Fashion Design ’20, and Parsons Paris executive dean Florence Leclerc wore an ensemble by Parsons Paris graduate Amina Galal, BFA Fashion Design ’23. parsonsbenefit.com

6 COMMUNITY ACHIEVEMENTS

Morry Galonoy, part-time assistant professor in Parsons’ School of Art , Media, and Technology, was recently elected chairperson of Queens Community Board 2, a role in which he promotes democratic process with his local community. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York chapter honored associate professor Andrew Bernheimer with the Medal of Honor for design excellence. Among the 2023 AIA award winners were faculty members Sharon Egretta Sutton (Topaz Medal) and Evan Shieh (New Faculty Teaching). This year’s Metropolis Future 100 list included 2023 MFA Interior Design grads Namita Chandrashekar and Annabelle Schneider and BFA Interior Design grad Young Kim BFA Fashion Design alum Carly Cushnie ’07 designed costumes for Lifted, the first production of American Ballet Theatre with an all-Black cast and creative team. This year, MIT awarded Noemi Florea, BA Environmental Studies/BFA Integrated Design ’23, a grant to develop Cycleau, a water filtration system she invented while a New School student. The creative technology studio recycleReality, launched at Parsons, won two OBIE Awards

for its work on the 2022 “Breakthrough Artist” ad campaign with Amazon Music and Overall Murals. Namra Khalid, BFA Architectural Design ’20, was among the winners of the inaugural Young Climate Prize, given by the nonprofit The World Around. Nao Takekoshi, BFA Fashion Design ’89, was recently named creative director at the Austrian-based knitwear firm Wolford. A mural depicting Breonna Taylor by artist-activist Yetunde Sapp, BA Liberal Arts/BFA Fashion Design ’23, was chosen for exhibition at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. Andrea Geyer, an associate professor of new genres, and Dafna Naphtali, a Eugene Lang College part-time assistant professor, were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships this year. Ibada Wadud, an assistant professor of strategic design and management, worked with New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand to introduce the Fabric Act, a piece of legislation aimed at reinvigorating the garment industry and promoting industry equity. Sherwin Banfield, BFA Illustration ’99, paid homage to the rapper Biggie Smalls in a sculpture selected as a spring 2023 public art installation in DUMBO. Part-time faculty member Lani Adeoye, AAS Interior Design ’14, won first prize at Salone Satellite 2022 with RemX, a prototype for a walker made from the kind of natural materials that have been used in Nigeria for decades by Adeoye’s own Yoruba community. This year’s Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Awards winners include BFA Fashion Design alumni Elena Velez ’18, Catherine Holstein ’06, Emily Adams Bode Aujla ’13, and Prabal Gurung ’01.

and Parsons professor Daniel Sauter received the Architectural League’s 2022 Independent Project Grant, which is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. The award will help fund Sauter’s development of Ocellus XR, an app producing 3D visualizations of climate risk, social vulnerability, and proposed green infrastructure for NYC. The project team includes USL director Timon McPhearson; Joe Steele, MS Data Visualization ’18; Xinyue Elena Peng, BFA Design and Technology ’22; Schools of Public Engagement research fellow Claudia Tomateo; and USL associate director Chris Kennedy. Students from Parsons’ Design and Technology programs attended the 2023 MIT Reality Hack, a communityrun XR event, at which they won top prizes in four categories; students receiving awards included four from the MFA program (firstyear student Nikki Dami, Beatriz Ribeiro ’23, Hong Hua ’23, and Yixuan Liu ’23) and BFA students Heeya Mody, Julia Daser, Grace Park , Pepi Ng, and Eloise Yalovitser. Artist Rachel Marks, a part-time Parsons Paris First Year Curriculum instructor, began a two-year residency with the Paris Philharmonic, for which she and community members created Symfolia—an installation with a tree-ring motif made of recycled musical scores and instruments. Parsons Paris BFA Fashion Design alum Petra Fagerstrom ’22 was a finalist in both the 38th annual Festival D'Hyères fashion competition and the International Talent Support Contest 2022. Students in a recent MFA Textiles course joined forces with the materials firm Aquafil to create products using the company’s ECONYL® nylon, which can be deconstructed and recycled at the end of their

life. Hannah Kim, Jason Phillip Greenberg, and Xinyu Wang, graduates of the MFA Textiles program, won the Designing for the Future Award and exhibited their designs at NeoCon in Chicago. Padina Bondar-Gibbs ’20 and Aradhita Parasrampuria ’20 (who also earned a BFA Fashion Design degree at Parsons and now serves in her graduate program’s faculty) received the Student Award, one of Interior Design magazine’s 2022 Best of the Year Awards. Taku Yhim, BFA Fashion Design ’22, received the $10,000 prize in the cotton manufacturer Supima’s national competition. He and fellow alum Aradhita Parasrampuria (see above) were also among the six finalists for the Swarovski Foundation’s Creatives for Our Future grant. Artist, illustrator, and Parsons Paris graduate Rachel Cunningham, BFA Art, Media, and Technology ’17—whose work Vogue called “romantic, artsy, and sexy”—was deemed “one to watch” by the magazine’s Paris edition. Bel Zaiden, AAS Fashion Design ’22, helped Lucky Brand launch its second collection of apparel made partially with secondhand garments. Parsons School of Design alums Rachel Gorman, MFA Design and Technology ’23; Oscar Schrag, MFA Industrial Design ’23, BBA Strategic Design and Management; and Jessica Thies, MFA Industrial Design ’23, won the Science Sandbox Prize for Public Engagement at the 2022 Biodesign Summit for their humorous and speculative performance project, Order of the Bovine. MFA Design and Technology graduates Yuqing Liang ’22 and Yibo Fu ’22 won the Student Notable Interaction Award from Core77 for their machine learning–based truthor-dare game machine, Trouble Maker. Of

the 26 2022 CFDA student awards, which carry prizes of up to $50,000, 12 went to Parsons graduates: 9 to 2023 BFA Fashion Design alums ( Arjahn Cox , Bradford Billingsley, Angel Pan, Grace Gordon, Elizabeth Dewald, Helen Sotropa, Samuel Pickett , Vivian Luo, and Isabella Kostrzewa) and 3 to MFA graduates from the School of Fashion (Melany Corchado, MFA Fashion Design and Society ’22; Haixi Ren, MFA Fashion Design and Society ’23; and Jasmin Risk , MFA Textiles ’23, BFA Fashion Design ’16). Fabian Malmhagen, MFA Industrial Design ’23, won the prestigious Green Good Design Award for his piece Last Chance in 2023.

7 COMMENCE WITH THE NEW

At each Commencement, The New School presents honorary degrees to community leaders whose work aligns with the university’s changemaking ambitions. This year’s recipients were Iranian American journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad; inclusive fashion designer Telfar Clemens; composer, singer, and visual artist Cécile McLorin Salvant; and acclaimed author and LGBTQ advocate Jennifer Finney Boylan, who served as Commencement speaker. Student speakers Kamilah Tibbitts, BA Media Studies, and Ruby Thelot , MFA Design and Technology, were joined by student emcees Veronica Espinal, MA Media Studies, and Xusheng Yu, MFA Industrial Design. Graduating student Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson, BFA Jazz and Contemporary Music, performed a special jazz set.

Parsons’ ex P lorations of artificial intelligence and machine learning reflect the school’s commitment to human-centered research and P ractice

Rarely do technologies spark passionate debate and interest the way artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have in recent months. Although these tools have been developed over the course of decades, their growing prominence in public discussion makes the field seem new and unexplored. The Parsons community has been experimenting with AI and ML for years, though, applying our school’s characteristic blend of curiosity and criticality. Read on to learn about students, alumni, and faculty who are coding creativity and wellness into the new technologies shaping daily life.

At Parsons, the conversation on digital tools has always been open and framed by the creative possibilities and complications that technology brings. Today’s engagement with AI and ML is no different. As designers, artists, and entrepreneurs in our community consider introducing new applications into their practices, they’re asking important questions. Their line of inquiry is not so much about what buzzy programs like ChatGPT or Midjourney can or can’t do, but about how they can be used to develop—or advance—a creative concept or address a design challenge. They’re asking how tech can help us envision a more sustainable and socially just future for New York City, its creative industries, and the world as a whole. Or how it can foster innovation to connect individuals more closely. And they’re asking how the many biases and limitations of algorithmically driven tools can be circumvented, freeing creatives to pursue what is important to them, including progress toward a more inclusive world.

An essential part of Parsons’ examination of these emergent technologies is intensive research, which is being carried out in part by a new three-year partnership—the LG AI Research & TNS Parsons Collaboration—with the electronics corporation LG Group. The research focuses on investigation rather than product development, but the initiative is not all theoretical, as many of the exciting AI- and ML-related projects unfolding on campus demonstrate. Students working on the partnership are harnessing the generative possibilities of play to discover ways these technologies can promote collaboration. From free-form explorations unexpected results emerge. In a course on the future of fashion, for instance, design and photography students exploring AI developed a bubble that can help long-distance couples communicate. Dubbed the LoveSphere, the project is described below, as are projects

involving tech-assisted music, anti-anthropocentric speculative fiction, and others that raise a critical question: What do we want our future to be?

Introducing creatives to AI—and acknowledging concerns surrounding the technology—is the goal of Creativitywith.ai, a website developed by MFA Transdisciplinary Design ’22 alums and part-time Parsons faculty members Julienne DeVita and Henry Lee. Their homepage prompt is designed to put site visitors at ease. “Are you curious about AI? Uncertain? Intimidated? Excited? Unsure? Jazzed?” it asks. “Regardless,” the site assures the visitor, “you’re in the right spot.” The interface guides users to a library of AI programs. GIFs hinting at the programs’ functionalities form a grid. Included are applications that turn speech into animated drawings (Scribbling Speech), mimic the sounds of multiple instruments playing at once (Nsynth: Sound Maker), allow users to create multi-user apps without knowing anything about code (Bubble.io), and more. With its inviting interface and growing archive of simple descriptions, Creativitywith.ai seems like an artist’s tool kit aimed at bringing ideas to life.

DeVita and Lee, along with their collaborator, Jeongki Lim, an assistant professor of strategic design and management, began the project in spring 2021 in a course called Creativity, AI, and Social Justice. “The project was based on the desire to understand the applications of AI and creativity for ourselves and for students,” Lee says. Accessibility was paramount. “The aim is to show that no matter who you are, you can engage with AI—you don’t need to know how to code or have a computer science degree,” says DeVita. With novices in mind, the designers asked themselves how they could in effect say, “Here’s the front door, here’s the ‘Welcome’ rug,” says Lee. Relying on what Lee calls design basics—“simple colors, lots of white

space”—the team got the site running in a matter of weeks. Since then, DeVita notes, “over 90,000 users have found Creativitywith.ai just through Google search.”

The site’s main goal is to amplify users’ own creativity. “Creativity isn’t coded,” DeVita says. “There will always be space for human creation, because creativity is not linear. That gives the site its optimistic feel; we’re trying to encourage a sense of excitement about AI and promote education instead of fear.” For DeVita, Lee, and Lim, what is essential for creatives working with AI is the act of reframing the technology as a collaborator instead of a tool. Collaboration is made possible by AI technology’s responsiveness to a designer’s input and often yields surprising and unforeseen results. The artist or designer plays a critical role in deciphering and ultimately creating meaning from AI’s outputs. “That switch inspires the human collaborator to think critically. It shows that AI can’t exist without us, and that’s an important perspective to have right now, given the anxiety about it replacing us,” DeVita says. She nonetheless acknowledges an understandable concern. “AI will replace some jobs,” she concedes, “but humans will continue to adapt, and we should focus on how.”

“

t he beauty of bringing ai into this conversation is that there will always be s Pace for human creation, because creativity is not linear.”

Julienne devita, faculty, mfa transdisciPlinary design

Exploring the ways we can continue to adjust to the expanding technology landscape is central to Parsons’ LG partnership, which Lim is overseeing. Through academic research, scholarly exchanges, and exhibitions, the LG collaboration supports exploration of AI technologies and their application to creative industries, many of which are based in New York. “This is a new type of industry partnership,” Lim says. “We’re not here to give deliverables or to launch classes—we’re working with LG to develop new ways of looking at and using technologies, and through that investigation, together we’re shaping how technology will be developed.”

Adam Brown , The New School’s vice provost for Research, notes that Parsons is uniquely well equipped to examine the development of evolving digital tools while addressing the “critical ethical and cultural questions that must be asked in relation to technical advancement.” The advantages of this partnership are multifarious, he says: “LG benefits from the university’s intellectual input, and our students gain numerous educational opportunities. Such hands-on learning can be transformative as our students pursue jobs in this field and ultimately become innovators themselves.” Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, dean of Parsons’ School of Design Strategies, adds, “This partnership demonstrates the value of exchanges between technologists and strategists operating in a values-driven learning ecosystem at creativity’s cutting edge.”

The LG partnership began in September 2022 with a symposium that brought together leadership from LG AI Research and Parsons faculty and students to delve into the most pressing questions relating to AI and the creative community. Lim also staged a two-day hackathon with students, many of whom were new to AI. Together they tested a prototype of a text-to-image generating tool that LG has been refining. Lim notes that the tool is not unlike Midjourney or DALL-E , which generate digital images from language descriptions or prompts, but rather than yielding just one or two images, LG’s tool produces a number of examples from one prompt. At the hackathon, students of various design disciplines developed original projects. Central to them all were Lim’s guiding thoughts on when and how designers should bring AI into their practices. “If we create a tool where students are focusing on using AI to make their final product, that will prevent them from making their own work,” Lim says. “But if AI tools are applied during the ideation stage to help students crystallize concepts, it can enhance the students' creative learning and endeavors.” The projects initiated during the hackathon established a foundation for the partnership’s academic research; many of them are ongoing.

Last year, Lim co-taught the course AI, Metaverse, and the Future of Fashion with Abrima Erwiah, director of the Joseph and Gail Gromek Institute for Fashion Business. Erwiah says that AI accelerated students’ process of envisioning their projects—imaginative design-focused socially beneficial proposals. “Because AI can quickly organize information, the technology allowed students to take all these data points, question them, and identify where to begin,” says Erwiah. “In just an hour or two of class, students were able to iterate ideas and translate them into visuals with ChatGPT or other tools, which helped them broadly imagine many possible ideas.”

Erwiah notes that projects concerning mental health were a priority for students because of the pandemic. In the class, third-year Parsons students— Chenxiao (Nini) Li, BFA Communication Design; Liwen Sang, BFA Fashion Design; and Siran (Eva) Wang, BFA Photography—developed LoveSphere with couples in long-distance relationships in mind. Their project addresses both the mental strains of separation anxiety and the realities of a global society in which virtual connections can supplant realworld relationships. The trio describe LoveSpheres as life-sized transparent balls used by distance-separated couples, with each member occupying their own bubble. Inside, the LoveSphere evokes sensations of touch and allows for communication with the remote partner. Inspired by “puffer jackets and air-filled clothing,” Li used Midjourney to render striking images of hypothetical users occupying the large diaphanous spheres envisioned by the team.

To produce feelings of comfort, LoveSphere would rely on multiple AI technologies, including Clo3D, a 3D modeling and simulation software taught at Parsons. An inner layer of the sphere would shrink and expand to embrace the person sitting within, simulating touch—“like a hug,” Sang explains. Users would wear VR headsets to experience a fully immersive session with a remote partner. In virtual reality, they could construct and explore a world together, talking, playing games, or even “building their own love house with furniture or NFT artwork,” Sang says. Though Wang says real-time communication—like a FaceTime exchange—is their “end angle,” a ChatGPT function in the LoveSphere could help couples revisit earlier conversations when a partner is unavailable. “We’re thinking about couples who live in different time zones,” says Wang.

“ lg benefits from the university’s intellectual in P ut, and our students gain numerous educational o PP ortunities. s uch hands-on learning can be transformative.” a dam b rown, n ew s chool vice P rovost for r esearch

“ if ai tools are a PP lied during the ideation stage to hel P students crystallize conce P ts, then it can enhance the students’ creative learning and endeavors.”

J eong K i lim , faculty, school of design strategies

The goal of providing emotional support anchors recent work by other members of the Parsons community, including 2023 MS Strategic Design and Management graduates Andrés Galicia Hernández , Ifah Pantitanonta , and Akanksha Shrivastava . Ai.ly, their joint thesis, is designed to help young people find jobs, one of life’s most stressful pursuits. Begun in the Design Research class taught in fall 2022 by Jack Wilkinson and developed this past spring in assistant professor of strategic design and management Rhea Alexander ’s Capstone Studio 2 course, Ai.ly is a voice-enabled AI chatbot that focuses on job interview preparation. Through research, the Ai.ly team found that new graduates often feel unsupported during this phase of the job-finding process. A business opportunity emerged.

The strategic designers determined that AI could be employed in motivational interviewing, a micro-counseling technique known as OARS (Open questioning, Affirming, Reflection, and Summarizing). The OARS method helps individuals discuss and manage activities leading to positive behavioral change and constructive habit formation. Encouragement is at the heart of Ai.ly. “Everyone needs a little push sometimes,” Shrivastava says. “Ai.ly is designed to be your trusted interview companion and boost your confidence.” The AI-powered platform, which functions as a Chrome plug-in with a personalized dashboard, scans job postings, generates relevant interview questions, and drills applicants on answers. Recruitment sites today often employ AI tools to assess candidates and cull résumés; Ai.ly offers the same capacity to jobseekers, allowing them to quickly find good leads. “We want to empower candidates in their job search with AI,” says Galicia Hernández.

Ai.ly is now in its implementation phase, as the designers develop the product, gather input, and design the pilot. “In the next few months,” Shrivastava says, “we’ll begin refining Ai.ly, incorporating feedback, and seeking investment to bring the product to market.”

New technology is also being explored on campus on a systems level. The internal workings of New York City were central to ML and the City, a class co-taught last spring by Sven Travis and Christopher Kirwan. Travis, co-director of the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons’ School of Art, Media, and Technology (AMT), and Kirwan, an AMT part-time faculty member whose work focuses on urban planning, guided students in applying easily accessible ML tools in projects using city data on urban media and the urban environment. “We gave students the flexibility to use data and the flow of information to create new models,” Kirwan says. Kirwan and Travis encouraged students to use their imaginations in applying ML to urban challenges. “We have a lot of problems in New York City that machine learning should help us solve, but we didn’t want students to be limited by that,” says Kirwan.

For Travis and Kirwan, exploration is key. “The advent of computer networks has made NYC more sophisticated in its ‘self-connectedness,’ and has enabled us to see the city as a living organism,” Travis says. Kirwan challenges students to use the living city metaphor as a way to

think about data, with a “blood flow” of information driving the systems at work within the urban organism, and then model different realities and scenarios. Travis notes that a major benefit of the class is students’ access to urban data sets, which can inform their projects.

To illustrate the point, Travis cites a class project by Gabriel Lee and Guan-Hao Zhu, both first-year MFA Design and Technology students, and Sayidmurad Sayfullaev, a senior in the BFA Architectural Design program. Inspired by the conservation-focused Billion Oyster Project, the group developed an interactive map that features speculative narratives representing possible futures of oyster beds in a post-human New York City. Lee explains that the group fed ChatGPT-3 a variety of creative nonfiction sources that explore “what might happen to the built environment and nature in a post-human world—specifically data corresponding to location descriptions.” Among the sources were Big Oyster by Mark Kurlanksy, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and Netflix’s TV show Life After People. “Then we put in the names of oyster research stations and reefs around the city,” Lee says. “We gave specific

locations, and then GPT-3 gave us back descriptions of what the locations will be like in the future without humans, when nature is healing on its own.” The designers then edited the descriptions, put them in the future tense, and added them to the interactive map.

The group is using fiction as a vehicle to examine AI’s limitations, such as its tendency to generate outputs that are not based on fact or existing sources. Zhu hopes that the map will lead users to question perspective, authorship, and context in relation to the descriptions in light of the fact that they were produced by AI. Given the random nature of what ChatGPT-3 creates and the human impulse to derive meaning from output, Zhu likens the AI tool to a fortune teller. The human collaborator’s role is to interpret output and scrutinize its sources. Lee says that one must “heavily curate” results in order to create something interesting. “Some of the outputs are hallucinations or things that sound convincing but aren’t necessarily true.”

Still, Lee notes, AI’s ability to generate output that is not fact based makes it particularly well suited to developing speculative futures that could prove useful in environmental preservation discussions. Using AI, projects like this one harness data to virtually envision a not-so-bright future that we could avoid by eliminating destructive practices.

“

t he advent of com P uter networ K s has enabled us to see the city as a living organism.”

sven t ravis, co-director, mfa d esign and t echnology P rogram

Agarwal and Nagabhushan created posters titled “Are You Sure?” asking listeners to try to distinguish original music classics from (mostly unsuccessful) imitations produced by AI software.

Another group of first-year MFA Design and Technology students in Travis and Kirwan’s course orchestrated AI software tools in a different kind of artistic feat, one resulting in a newfound appreciation for play in creative pursuits. Isha Agarwal and Nidhi Nagabhushan set out to explore artistic authorship through CYAN (Create Your Album Now), a music-generating immersion in technology. Their idea was to choose famous musicians associated with different genres and New York neighborhoods—like Bob Dylan with Greenwich Village and Duke Ellington with Harlem—and use AI programs to generate sound-alike songs. They would employ Riffusion to create real-time audio, Midjourney to generate album covers, ChatGPT to write lyrics, and Speechify to voice them, prompting all the programs with keywords relevant to the original artists and their musical form and associated locale. The designers then devised a plan to link to playlists of both the original and the AI songs on QR posters that they would hang throughout the city, encouraging bystanders to listen and compare.

In practice, though, Agarwal and Nagabhushan found that the AIgenerated songs were generally incoherent; they rarely captured the nuances of musical genre and derived too literally from the keywords used as prompts. Somewhat unexpectedly, CYAN became a poignant articulation of AI’s limitations—especially in comparison to the results of human expression applied to an artform like music. “Speechify and other text-to-speech applications can read lyrics aloud, but they can’t emulate singing,” Agarwal says. In the end, the project’s creative output was humor, not music. “Sven and Chris named us ‘the laughing group’ because we were laughing at all of the humorously bad outputs the AI gave us,” says Nagabhushan. Nonetheless, AI had, in a way, led her to incorporate play more deeply into her creative process.

Anew conversation on AI and ML will open this November, when Lim stages Art, Design, and AI, a campus exhibition mounted in collaboration with LG AI Research and featuring work resulting from an open call to creators throughout The New School. According to Lim, the exhibition demonstrates “how students are striving to be transformative and creative by engaging with and reflecting upon AI tools.” The show will coincide with a second symposium mounted by the Parsons–New School–LG partnership to advance research and practice with new technology. The conference will bring together computer scientists, social activists, artists, and other critical voices, effectively “setting The New School and Parsons up to be an alternative intellectual site to discuss AI,” says Lim. “The value of being in a place like Parsons and involving the New York City community is that when individuals here engage with new tools, they interrogate them and begin thinking about how to make them more relevant to the world today.”

“ t he value of being in a P lace li K e Parsons and involving the n ew yor K c ity community is that individuals here engage with new tools and begin thin K ing about how to ma K e them more relevant to the world today.”

J eong K i lim , faculty, school of design strategies

new TRANSDISCIPLINARY moDels

THE NEW CONSORTIUM FOR TRANS/DISCIPLINARITY IS POISED TO TRANSFORM A DESIS LAB PROJECT TO SAFEGUARD AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN BRAZIL INTO A MODEL FOR WORK DONE THROUGHOUT THE NEW SCHOOL AND BEYOND

TRANSDISCIPLINARY

A BLUEPRINT FROM BRAZIL

Of all the elements required to sustain a city, affordable housing is a linchpin that has come loose. Inflation in American real estate has become so pronounced that approximately 40 percent of Los Angeles, Miami, and New York residents spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on housing; in Asia, those costs can exceed half of a person’s income. As an affordable housing crisis looms over cities worldwide, governments around the globe are trying to rein in the threat with measures ranging from revolving funds to 3D-printed residences.

São Paulo, Brazil, is one urban center where the housing emergency has deepened in the absence of such solutions. Because the construction of public housing proceeds at a snail’s pace and private investors have largely ignored inclusionary zoning incentives, as many as 1.2 million people face extreme housing insecurity in a metropolitan area of almost 23 million. Favelas are a common sight, as are abandoned high-rises occupied by squatter populations. To remain close to their jobs—which are vital to the local economy—Paulistas must often choose between informal communities and tenements operated by predatory landlords, known as cortiços. Alternatively, they can settle on the city’s fringe, where the commute to work averages two and a half hours each way.

In 2015, a group of São Paulo professionals stepped into the leadership gap separating the public and private sectors. They founded the nonprofit FICA (Fundo Imobiliário Comunitário para Aluguel, or “Community Real Estate Rent Fund”) to house low-income locals in single-family rental apartments that the organization had rehabilitated. In 2020, with the support of the Wealth Inequality Initiative, FICA began acquiring tenantoccupied cortiços in order to introduce to Brazil an ethical business model founded on fair rents and a management culture that welcomes residents’ participation.

The launch of this initiative, known as Compartilha (“Sharing”), followed FICA’s invitation to Parsons professors Lara De Sousa Penin and Eduardo Staszowski to join its new international advisory board. Soon after, the two professors—who founded Parsons’ Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab in 2009 and currently lead The New School’s graduate minor in Civic Service Design—recognized that FICA could foster more collaborative management of its cortiços through service design. As Penin explains, “Designing for services means trying to understand people’s needs, their existing relationships, the ways to best serve them, the artifacts created in the process, and how outcomes

Last December, the Henry Luce Foundation held a symposium with DESIS Lab to explore topics including ethical landlord practices. The foundation followed a 2022 grant to support DESIS Lab’s affordable housing work with a 2023 research grant to fund the creation of narratives and photo documentation of alternative housing models.

Working with São Paulo residents, the FICA–DESIS Lab team designed plans for affordable housing units that involved minimal redesign and adaptive reuse of discarded materials.

A DEDICATION TO JUSTICE AND ATTENTION TO MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ARE ESSENTIAL TO THE PRACTICE OF TRANSDISCIPLINARY DESIGN.

are co-created by all involved in a service.” In particular, she and Staszowski felt that a tool called a service blueprint would help FICA not only visualize the tenant-landlord evolving relationships but also help them refine what they already do. As Penin points out, “the service blueprint offers a bird’s eye view of a service very much like a floorplan of a building.”

Yet the educators also note that the use of a service blueprint, like any service design effort, can succeed only by avoiding top-down consulting. “Effective service design is about opening doors in a multidirectional way,” Staszowski says about approaching FICA and its stakeholders as equals. In fall 2022, Parsons received a $275,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for DESIS Lab, enabling him and Penin to share with students the opportunity to engage in this best practice.

Leticia Takeuti—who recently earned a master’s in anthropology from The New School for Social Research after completing the Strategic Design and Management undergraduate program at Parsons—was among the students who answered DESIS Lab’s call. She and her classmates diagrammed the process through which a Compartilha resident secured housing, from lease application through occupancy. The team identified vital artifacts involved in the process, including the tenant

application and lease and messages sent through the WhatsApp platform, through which most Brazilians communicate. By thinking deeply about interactions and the artifacts they produced, DESIS Lab members discovered forms of exchange that could be developed further. “When applicants are signing contracts, for example, it is important to create space for them to familiarize themselves with the documents and process, which might be new or different,” Takeuti says of one possible revision. “Another example involves what happens after move-in. We need an intermediary between FICA and the tenants, and a social worker would feel less intrusive to the community.”

Just as important, DESIS Lab sought the input of all stakeholders without weighting or judgment. To prepare themselves to represent the Compartilha experience from the perspective of tenants, whose voices have historically been ignored, the students immersed themselves in interviews recently conducted by FICA. (The project team decided that holding a new round of interviews could be seen by residents as intrusive.) Speaking about the process of documenting FICA’s point of view, Takeuti says, “I could reach out to board members anytime, and they were so openminded about new ideas.” Fabiana Endo, an institutional coordinator and project manager

at FICA, says that DESIS Lab members on the project made equity a priority throughout their efforts. “Working with DESIS Lab and the students was inspiring,” says Endo, a civil engineer and architect. “I don’t have the words for it—they created this very respectful environment in which everyone was superempathetic, and they saw things that we would not have seen in our daily routines.”

Staszowski agrees that DESIS Lab’s approach to the Compartilha blueprint was unique in its evenhandedness, noting that “we cannot stay within our realm of privilege and expect people to share with us what they’re doing.”

Staszowski, a co-director of Parsons’ MFA Transdisciplinary Design program, points to DESIS Lab’s dedication to social justice and attention to multiple perspectives in the FICA project, two features essential to the practice of transdisciplinary design.

To heighten awareness and expand application of transdisciplinary design throughout The New School, Staszowski, John Bruce, and Hala Abdel Malak—all co-directors of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program— are now also serving as founding co-directors of the Consortium for Trans/disciplinarity (CT/d) with anthropology professor Hugh Raffles . A partnership between the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program, DESIS Lab, and GIDEST (the

Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, housed at The New School for Social Research), CT/d has a twofold mission. “One of CT/d’s aims is more frictionless movement for students, faculty, and learning partners,” says Bruce. Malak adds, “What’s really great about The New School and Parsons is having the social sciences, humanities, and design in one place, and through CT/d, we’re offering a structure for all that transdisciplinary work to be tightly interwoven.”

The consortium’s second goal is to encourage academics to treat a project’s stakeholders as co-authors rather than passive constituents, employing empathetic methods like those used by DESIS Lab members for the Compartilha blueprint. “We can only move forward through other ways of knowing, of learning from communities that have been marginalized and whose voices are rising,” explains Malak, whose work in urban resilience includes a highly regarded rethinking of refugee housing.

CT/d has already begun broadcasting its presence across the university. Launch activities this past academic year included the consortium’s spring dialogue series, which introduced its guiding principles to a wide audience. One member of that audience was MFA Transdisciplinary Design student

Fatou Kiné Diouf, who says, “The CT/d dialogue speakers helped me better grasp the intersection of social justice and thinking about organizational dynamics.” She also believes that CT/d’s embrace of the views of underrepresented people has the potential to turn traditional academic hierarchies upside down. “I know from back home—Senegal—that lived experience is an important kind of learning, yet thinking about ancestries and spiritualities as scholarship is radical.” For this coming fall semester, CT/d plans to develop its practice further with what it calls a “Superstudio” course, in which students will investigate the planning process for building in the Brazilian Amazon and efforts to advance Indigenous knowledge systems and improve infrastructure throughout the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond. Erin Dixon, who oversees knowledge and Indigenous leadership with Reconciliation Canada, an advocacy group facilitating dialogue and economic justice action, will serve as one interlocutor for the students. Dixon hopes the dialogue emerging from the CT/d course will serve as “preparatory ground to find that new way forward together—all peoples, all places.”

Meanwhile, the partnership between DESIS Lab and FICA continues to model both process and results for CT/d’s path forward through the Compartilha blueprint, which has

“ THE CT/D DIALOGUE SPEAKERS HELPED ME BETTER GRASP THE INTERSECTION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THINKING ABOUT ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS.”

Fatou Kiné Diouf, MFA Transdisciplinary Design student

“ ONE OF CT/D’S AIMS IS MORE FRICTIONLESS MOVEMENT FOR STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND LEARNING PARTNERS.”

achieved broad impact. “Because the service blueprint helps FICA think about the kind of organization they want to work in,” Penin says, “I have since brought this project to my whole Civic Service Design minor core class, Public and Collaborative Services, with students building service blueprints for the shared and single-family apartments and for a new FICA initiative, called Housing First, that addresses homelessness.” Endo explains that Housing First is funded by São Miguel Arcanjo Parish to help Paulistas reintegrate into society, offering them permanent addresses, social services, and job training. She adds, “The differences between the two blueprints have to do with the intensity of work that is required of us, rather than the types of services. Housing First basically has more frequent social worker visits to make sure everything is OK.” Endo says that in-house staff at FICA are now creating blueprints for a range of services. The diagrams have become a shared language for its members.

That language could very well spread throughout Brazil. Endo explains that FICA has discovered social housing nonprofits that have recently been organized elsewhere in Brazil. Although the housing situations in these locations demand site-specific responses, the groups spearheading them have expressed a desire to follow in FICA’s footsteps. “The blueprints are a clearer vision of our processes,

our way of working; they’re also useful for others,” says Endo. “So we are incubating a group of advocates in the state of São Paulo and in the city of Curitiba. By giving other groups access to our blueprints, that process can happen more quickly. I see FICA as a national reference in social non-speculative property in Brazil.” That influence could even extend beyond Brazil, thanks to a new Henry Luce Foundation grant funding the documentation of CT/d’s work in Brazil, a project to be conducted in partnership with the Magnum Foundation, an offshoot of the celebrated photojournalism agency.

The project's impact may be as deep as it is broad, says Takeuti. “I’m definitely bringing my experience at Compartilha with me into my career and academic endeavors. I intend to continue working in the social sector with nonprofits, and I think the blueprint tool just equipped me to be more agile in understanding the internal environment of an organization. I hope that wherever I go, I have the opportunity to share this blueprint or even start new mappings.”

As CT/d gains stature and followers and projects like Compartilha multiply, the effects will be felt far beyond the world of academia. An ever larger number of urban resilience advocates could soon see their work transformed by transdisciplinary design.

“ I’M DEFINITELY BRINGING MY EXPERIENCE AT COMPARTILHA WITH ME INTO MY CAREER AND ACADEMIC ENDEAVORS.”

Leticia Takeuti, MA Anthropology ’23; BBA Strategic Design and Management ’20

Through a creative course focused on impact and community engagement, Juanli Carrión is guiding students from Parsons and our university’s performing arts college as they partner with local and global nonprofits to help communities thrive

As an artist-activist whose work focuses on social and environmental justice, Carrión has for years been developing an approach to art that incorporates creative strategies for sustainable social change into his work. Today Carrión is an assistant professor of creative community development at Parsons and a faculty member in the MA Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program at The New School’s performing arts college. Students from both schools are learning together in his Sustainable Creative Placemaking course, for which he recently forged partnerships with Bronx nonprofits needing support to carry out their mission of keeping communities strong and resilient.

Collaboration is familiar terrain for Carrión, who founded OSS Project Inc., a nonprofit that connects communities with artists to create local gardens that serve as platforms for knowledge sharing and community development. The Spanish-born artist is also adept at working across cultural contexts—a skill he cultivates in his students—having presented projects around the world in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Spain’s CentroCentro, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in India.

“Looking at my work today, you might not see my performing arts background,” says Carrión. “I finished my intermediate degree in piano at the Conservatorio Profesional de Villena when I was young, and you can see that training in my earlier work. I did an opera performance on the border of Mexico, directing it and creating the musical arrangements.” His teaching involves leading lively discussions on storytelling in community development and requiring students to present their research, features that connect with the capacities Carrión himself has gained in his interdisciplinary creative career.

Carrión’s creative place-making course welcomes students of all disciplines who see opportunity in combining art and community outreach and working alongside top leaders in creative community development here and abroad. Bringing his former connections and previous collaborators into the classroom and giving students the tools with which to engage with nonprofits, governments, and local stakeholders on their own, Carrión offers students a large array of potential collaborators.

Juanli Carrión, faculty, School of Design Strategies

His students have recently been working on initiatives with Bronx organizations and businesses abroad that draw on creativity to integrate communities and help them thrive.

“I focus on ways we can build solid engagements early in the process of working with communities,” says Carrión. He adds that the rest of the semester’s coursework entails collaborating directly with partners, creating sustainable strategic plans, and taking steps toward putting plans into action—which includes devoting classroom time to addressing new insights and challenges that arise along the way.

“I FOcus on ways we can bUIld solId ENgagements earLy IN the pRocess Of workIng wiTh cOmMuNItIes.”

ABOVE: Carolina Trinker is drawing on her textile practice to develop knowledge-sharing opportunities with local Bronx creators; the Textile Tales workshop will bring together crochet, block printing, and natural dyeing.

TOP: Irisdelia García focused on the Kingsbridge Armory, to which she has long-standing ties.

house community workshops and educational resources. YMPJ’s needs for these spaces inspired Trinker to rethink her textiles practice and imagine ways to apply her fabric-based art in the Bronx development projects.

“I'd never before thought about place or my work so expansively,” says Trinker. “The more formal research I undertook, the more I understood that textiles are a thing of place and a thing of community.”

abandoned factory site between Westchester Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard. “We’re pleased to be organizing a weaving program this summer at Concrete Plant Park, which Carolina has been hard at work on,” says Hunter.

The freedom to work outside of the classroom attracted Carolina Trinker, a second-year MFA Textiles student, to Carrión’s course. “It’s exciting to think about how to create opportunities to use what we’ve learned in the studio to help sustain communities—and sustain those benefits outside of academic environments.”

Trinker notes that the course brings together creatives working hands-on in various media and gives them a way to get out of their studios and into communities. The opportunity has encouraged her to reimagine her creativity and even consider new career paths.

“In school, we’re creating these inner worlds in a safe studio environment where we're free to explore,” says Trinker. “I saw Juanli’s course description and thought, ‘This is interesting for after I leave college.’”

In fieldwork at a local nonprofit, Trinker was introduced to Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice (YMPJ) and their work with the Westchester Avenue Station, a Cass Gilbert–designed South Bronx rail station that has fallen into disrepair, and the Southview Economic Hub, a large underused space beneath the Bruckner Expressway at Bronx River Avenue. YMPJ has been engaging the local communities in transforming the two spaces to offer employment opportunities and

Trinker is interested in helping lead workshops in the Westchester station after its restoration is complete. She is also looking to take part in other community projects to foster lasting connections among Bronx locals. She points to a nearby garden that supplies neighborhood residents with food. “It turns out that the people who run the garden are looking for a fiber workshop or basketry. People in my MFA Textiles program do basketry, so maybe workshops can lead to a long-term collaboration between my program and some organizations. I think my program would benefit from the exchange students would have with Bronx textile makers.”

Trinker is now organizing a team of students in the textiles industry to plan a six-week series on weaving that will facilitate community storytelling. “The prospect of having support for arts programming in our parks and an opportunity to document community stories and weave them into textile art pieces is an important new initiative here. Acknowledging the importance of storytelling and how our lives are interconnected is essential to our placekeeping efforts and support to communities,” Hunter says.

Bronx community advocate Nathan Hunter has been collaborating with Trinker in her efforts to build community by design. Hunter serves as the foodway coordinator with the Bronx River Alliance, a community-based nonprofit focused on restoring the Bronx River corridor. His organization partnered with YMPJ on the creation of Concrete Plant Park, situated on an

As an MFA Contemporary Theatre and Performance graduate student at The New School’s performing arts college, Irisdelia García admits she felt like a “fish out of water” when she began Carrión’s course along with design students from Parsons. But her passion for community engagement through theater—along with her existing creative practice, which connects her regularly to Bronx communities—quickly demonstrated how her skills complemented those of her Parsons peers.

Working with a local nonprofit was important to García, a Bronx native. For Carrión’s course, she partnered with the Kingsbridge Armory, one of the last extant

“I'd nevEr BeFOre thought AbOuT pLAce OR my work so ExPansIvely.”

armories in New York City. García conceived a creative engagement project to reimagine the armory and its role in the area. Now in the exploratory phase of their redevelopment plan, the armory’s leaders are reviewing a proposal to transform the armory into a cultural center, she says. The proposal inspired García’s project—a documentary-based arts education program for youth in Kingsbridge, the surrounding neighborhood. The program would involve interviewing young people in local public schools to spark their interest in theater and turning their stories into scripts and performances, all interwoven with archival research on Kingsbridge’s history.

“My hope is to make my program a sustainable part of the armory’s cultural engagement,” says García. “The point is to develop programming that meets communitybuilding needs, so that when you leave, the benefit exists without you.”

While developing her armory proposal, García worked with Andrew Harris, a project manager at Hester Street, an NYC justicefocused community development nonprofit that facilitated the local partnerships for the course. Hester Street helps communities build resilience through inclusive planning and design support— the latter provided by Parsons students in Carrión’s course, who bring fresh thinking and energy to creative community development.

“Involving students is important: They're leading the thought and work of the next decade,” says Harris. “Parsons as a whole and the students in this particular class are significant because questions that fall outside the traditional box get asked.”

Harris goes on to explain that Carrión’s students are ideal partners for local nonprofits because they are both creatives and passionate New Yorkers—even if for only a few years while in school. Those paired identities enable students to provide the “necessary input for sensitive community engagement,” he says.

He also notes that the practical applicability and resilience-bolstering capacity of the projects emerging from Carrión’s course set these students apart from peers of other design schools. Harris notes that “the students’ proposals can help shape and enhance our communities, enabling them to thrive in the future. These projects are 100 percent applicable in real spaces. That's unique.”

Also working on the project management side of Hester Street is Ryan Westphal ’20, an MFA Transdisciplinary Design alum. Westphal agrees that the students offer something special in terms of creativity that benefits communities.

“Parsons does transdisciplinary work really well,” says Westphal. “Juanli’s class has classically trained musicians, artists working with fabrics, and people coming with a business perspective. It truly is a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary course. When you bring all of these different perspectives into the community, what comes out is unique.”

While studying in Parsons’ MFA program, Westphal looked at many local organizations working on social benefit projects, wondering what he as a young graduate might offer. Now that he is a professional at an organization he once researched with interest, Westphal realizes that nonprofits like his are enriched by collaborations with students with innovative ideas. “Students in Juanli’s class and others across Parsons bring a critically needed and particular blend of design, strategic planning, and thinking,” he says. “They are also uniquely prepared to put in the necessary work.”

business development proposal with the aim of educating her community about food and nutrition while making craft industry work more accessible.

“It's a country of arts and crafts, but there is a division between rural and urban areas,” says Vaidya. “The level of craft among nonurban artisans is very high—that’s something most people living in cities are unaware of—which means there’s economic opportunity there.”

Vaidya hopes her community-fostering ambitions will find support at Sudarshan Chemicals Industries, a high-end pigment and specialty chemical supplies firm and potential partner on her project. Vaidya has already connected with Madhuri Sanas, deputy general manager of CSR & Administration Media Communication for the company, to discuss plans.

“At Sudarshan, we’re working with very underresourced communities to promote gardening and farming to reduce malnourishment and create green zones in nearby villages,” says Sanas. “Students like Iti are supporting and promoting us. Whenever she's in India, she’s a part of our community."

Vaidya is grateful to Parsons for giving her a space in which to create art and a chance to uniquely contribute to the world. Creating a new network for herself and investigating critical global issues during her studies have revealed the potential of helping others with her craft. “Even if you’re spreading your message to just one person, your work is successful,” says Vaidya.

Parsons MFA Textiles student Iti Vaidya is focusing on a project that develops green spaces in Roha, India, an industrial town where her parents live. Vaidya—who has a background in print design, apparel, and textile embellishments—saw an opportunity to apply her art practice to community building. In her studies, she has been deepening her handcrafting skills in natural dyeing, weaving, printing, and felting and exploring polyculture farming. She has drawn on her home country’s agricultural traditions, incorporating farming programs into a traditional textiles–based

Carrión and his course have clearly transformed the ways students in the creative arts consider their practice and its potential impact. Through partner engagements, students develop a better understanding of creativity as a fundamental capacity enabling organizations to advance their missions. The process has given students a blueprint for making a lasting difference in communities, helping people build healthier, happier, and more resilient futures.

"When students see the creativity involved in community development,” says Carrión, “it changes them completely. We're putting creativity to work for something really useful.”

“the PoINT Is To devElop PROgramMINg thAt meets comMUnIty-buILding needs, so thAt when yOU leAve, the BenEFit exIsts wIthout yoU.”

profiles

Meet our changemaking alumni, students, and faculty and discover work that is making the world more beautiful, just, and sustainable

A talent for sewing and drawing landed Tracy Reese, BFA Fashion Design ’84, a spot at Parsons at a special time. The Detroit native came to New York in the early 1980s, when the school was still situated in the Garment District. “Parsons was in the thick of it!” says Reese.

Reese recalls taking classes in draping, patternmaking, and textiles. She remembers wearing a lab coat and white gloves while examining rare garments in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume archives. Her student designs were critiqued by Donna Karan and other fashion giants. Classmates like Marc Jacobs became friends and collaborators.

After graduation, Reese built a successful business and made a name for herself. She ran her eponymous fashion line in New York City for 23 years, winning accolades and dressing celebrities including former First Lady Michelle Obama.

In 2018, Reese decided to close her business. Having seen the effects of fast fashion and “the constant need for newness” on people and the planet, she felt that “the old system doesn’t work anymore.” And she missed her hometown.

Civic

The time seemed right to move back to Detroit and start a venture involving more sustainable and equitable practices. “My hometown has so much heart, grit, and opportunity,” says Reese. It also has a thriving creative community to tap into. Reese named her initiative Hope for Flowers.

Reese still designs beautiful clothes featuring her trademark striking colors and flattering cuts, all while redefining the way a fashion business operates. Her company makes community outreach a priority, offering free art classes for young people and workshops for adults on everything from jewelry making and bookbinding to composting and gardening.

“Hope for Flowers expresses my hopes for the planet,” says Reese, “and for the seed of creativity in us that needs to be nurtured.”

“Hope for Flowers expresses my hopes for the planet— and for the seed of creativity in us.”

Students

elizabeTh �ander�

Real-Time Curator

Elizabeth Sanders began the MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies program in 2019, when planning for the exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, was underway. Part of a curatorial fellowship her program maintains with the museum, the project was a dream come true for Sanders. Then COVID-19 hit.

The Cooper Hewitt team, headed by celebrated designer and curator Ellen Lupton, emergency physician Bon Ku, and the MASS Design Group, switched gears as the world was upended. Sanders began collaborating with the curatorial team over Zoom.

“I love sinking my teeth into a topic,” says Sanders, “and the pandemic offered design researchers a rich field to explore.” Curators looked at the design of real-time data and objects related to the virus—everything from face masks and protective headgear to a 3D printed valve that turns a scuba mask into a ventilator. The exhibition also addressed epidemics throughout history and the innovations they spawned.

Sanders’ contribution centered on an exhibition section titled “Visualizing the Pandemic,” which focused on social inequality. Especially compelling was her work with a New York Times team creating data visualizations to convey the unfolding effects of COVID-19 on the city. Sanders also continued conducting research for a thesis on COVID-19’s impact on Toronto housing and the emergence of encampments.

Sanders contributed to Health Design Thinking: Creating Products and Services for Better Health, a book employing graphics to show health disparities between urban populations.

Alumni auch�r serr

“Data visualization is a combination of graphic design, Web development, and data analysis,” says Aucher Serr, MS Data Visualization ’18. Serr came to the master’s program at Parsons with a background in cognitive science and philosophy and a fascination with “how we as humans make sense of our world and abstract things.”

Parsons offered what Serr describes as “a safe, dedicated space to test yourself to create.” She also learned to accept the reality that many ideas are discarded. “The freedom to fail and experiment—that was new to me,” she says. “Parsons helped me navigate ambiguity.” As a “type A perfectionist” in an increasingly data-driven world, Serr finds the ability to “suspend certainty” to be an invaluable skill.

Today Serr deals with data, and lots of it. As a senior data visualization developer for the productivity-enhancing company Atlassian, she designs analytics tools to help the company better understand and use data. Much like product design, the job involves a collaborative process of prototyping and iterating to find the right solutions.

In December 2021, Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics opened at Cooper Hewitt, and Sanders was there. “When I finally got to see the exhibition in person, it was transformational,” she says.

Serr created data visualizations tracking NYC MTA ridership data by neighborhood during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Serr finds the storytelling possibilities of data exciting. Describing a project mapping NYC subway ridership data during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, she says that it “became about the neighborhoods whose residents stayed home—a story of equity and privilege.”

It may seem as if data visualization is all about simplifying data, but Serr explains that’s not always the goal. “We have to be careful not to reduce complexity,” she says, “but embrace it in a way that’s approachable and understandable.”

“The pandemic offered design researchers a rich field to explore.”

“Parsons helped me navigate ambiguity.”

ben chase

Social Impact Designer

IDEO.org

For Ben Chase, MFA Design and Technology ’08, good design always starts with people: understanding their needs and the way they will be affected by a product or service being created. “If we don’t design something amazing, no one is going to want to use it,” says Chase. “And if what we’re designing isn’t steeped in the lived experience of the people who will be using it, then it will be irrelevant.”

It's a philosophy that has served him well throughout his career, particularly in his current role as chief operating officer at IDEO.org, a global nonprofit design and innovation firm that emerged from the celebrated consultancy IDEO. To illustrate the value of design in creating solutions that can be scaled, Chase describes working with the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) in Dallas to address the low rate of participation in the WIC food benefit program for mothers and children. The CPAL–IDEO.org team developed and tested a variety of creative solutions with mothers, administrators, and even supermarket managers to make the program better reflect and respond to the needs of participants, resulting in an increase of 90,000 WIC benefits packages delivered in the last year.

IDEO.org’s work in designing and launching the Health Equity Collective, with funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is another example of the way the organization uses design and creativity to promote urban resilience and equity. A cross-disciplinary cohort of more than 80 activists, scholars, and medical practitioners envisioned a healthcare system that is patient-centered, accessible to all, and grounded in justice, then iterated prototypes to bring that vision to life. “Design can help solve specific problems and help us imagine a world without them,” says Chase.

Chase credits Parsons with equipping him with tools and perspectives that helped shape his career, citing faculty member Katherine Moriwaki, who instilled in him a sense of the importance of user research—a key part of his work today. “I think about her and the lessons she taught all the time,” says Chase. He also mentions former program director Sven Travis for the joy he brought to his work. “You need a sense of abundance if you’re going to make art and design really inspiring things,” says Chase.

Chase considers design fundamental in formulating more equitable and inclusive systems. “My hope is that we can move from a top-down approach to a system where communities are empowered to bring their expertise to bear,” says Chase. “This is why design strategy and creativity are more relevant now than ever before.”

IDEO.org designed a suite of materials, including those shown here, to inspire and engage the Health Equity Collective.

IDEO.org and the Child Poverty Action Lab prototyped solutions to make the WIC shopping experience easier, including in-store guides and wayfinding to the right products.

“Design can help solve specific problems and help us imagine a world without them.”

alvaro velo�a

Alvaro Velosa, Master of Architecture ’14, has always been fascinated by cities and urbanism. It’s one of the reasons he chose to pursue a master’s at Parsons—a school whose interdisciplinary focus allowed him to study architecture in combination with urban design.

For his thesis, Velosa developed an affordable housing proposal involving the use of prefabricated units situated on an abandoned elevated railway in Queens, New York. Inspired by Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, the proposal calls for modular construction and repurposing of existing infrastructure, with the aim of reducing building costs and improving efficiencies. The plan also includes a bicycle path connecting nearby subway lines and increasing sustainable transportation options in the predominantly car-centric area.

A class with celebrated architect and visiting professor Bjarke Ingels eventually led Velosa to his current role at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), where he continues to focus on urban design and its social and cultural impact. Among his projects at BIG is a reimagining of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, which runs through Brooklyn Heights. His design includes a public park space over the below-grade road to reduce noise, pollution, and vibration affecting those living near the highway. Velosa’s plan is also aimed at strengthening the connection between the neighborhood, existing public parks, and the East River waterfront. “All of our projects are infused with people-first ideas,” explains Velosa, citing community workshops held to ensure that the views of local residents were reflected in the plans.

Connecting architecture with well-considered urban design is the basis for another of Velosa’s projects at BIG: Robert De Niro’s Wildflower Studios, currently under construction in Queens. Located on the former site of the Steinway & Sons piano factory, the facility incorporates 11 state-of-the-art sound stages in an innovative stacked format, making it the world’s first vertical commercial studio. Velosa and his team worked with the community to address their needs in the plan, which includes revitalizing the nearby Steinway Creek waterfront and creating a publicly accessible promenade. Construction of the studio will provide much-needed jobs and bolster New York City’s bona fides as a television and film production center while breathing new life into an industrial corner of the borough.

Velosa says that his studies at Parsons laid the groundwork for his current success. He credits professors Andy Bernheimer, David Leven, and Mark Gardner with helping shape his path there. “Parsons reinforced my interest in urban design,” says Velosa. “The school’s energy was very inspiring.”

“All of our projects are infused with people-first ideas.”

Students isabella Kr�b�

For BFA Architectural Design and BA Urban Studies student Isabella Krebs, coming to Parsons meant being able to pursue several academic interests simultaneously. “I wanted a truly interdisciplinary degree,” says Krebs, “along with the many opportunities that Parsons—and New York City—provide.”

The opportunities came early for Krebs. It was during her first year at Parsons that she learned how sustainability could be incorporated into her architecture and urban studies programs. “Courses such as Green Roof Ecology and Urban Resilience— taught by professors from the Urban Systems Lab—changed my trajectory,” says Krebs.

This led Krebs to the Healthy Materials Lab, where she became a researcher at the Donghia Healthier Materials Library, helping other students explore alternative, environmentally friendly building materials. She also participated in the Circular Economy & Co-Design summer program at Aalto University in Finland, where she explored ways in which cities can become more equitable and sustainable.

Krebs’ interests at the intersections of architecture, urban design, and sustainability have culminated in her two thesis projects. Her Urban Studies thesis examines urban flooding in Bangkok and the ways vernacular Thai stilt architecture could be adapted to a large, dense urban environment to create more resilient housing for vulnerable residents. “It’s really about the decolonization of architecture in Bangkok,” explains Krebs.

Building off that research, Krebs’ Architectural Design thesis tackles social and climate justice by proposing modular, sustainably built housing for residents of the Khlong Toei settlement in Bangkok that is resistant to flooding but can also be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere, given the need for frequent relocation and rebuilding in a river delta.

These are insights that Krebs hopes to take forward in her career. “Architecture is not just making and not just engineering,” she says. “It needs to take into consideration the well-being of the community and the environment.”

“Architecture needs to take into consideration the well-being of the community and the environment.”

Faculty

“I try to use my work to highlight the problems of the world.” says Nora Krug, associate professor of illustration. For Krug, an award-winning illustrator and teacher, that seems like something of an understatement.

Indeed, the German-born Krug is drawn to “subjects that make me angry,” which many would shy away from. War, tyranny, injustice, and suffering inspire her to unearth important stories of people we might not otherwise come to know. She believes that “illustration should be taken seriously as an art form able to effectively engage political subjects”—a view she communicates to her students at Parsons.

Krug’s most recent focus has been the war in Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, she was deeply disturbed by the harrowing events. Krug noticed that personal accounts of the war were rarely present in the news and was determined to depict personal experiences through her craft. She envisioned a visual diary of two real-life acquaintances—a Russian artist and a Ukrainian journalist. She pitched the idea, and the Los Angeles Times and several European newspapers eagerly agreed to run it.

It wasn't Krug's goal to portray Russians as victims, equate the experiences of Russians and Ukrainians, or facilitate reconciliation. Instead, she sought to highlight the complex, far-reaching effects of war on people by presenting two sharply contrasting perspectives on the war—those of a Ukrainian and of a Russian. She interviewed the people she calls her “protagonists” by text message and conducted additional research as the war unfolded.

Over the course of the year, Krug delivered weekly installments of the visual diary to the newspaper. The series will be released in book form by Ten Speed Press in fall 2023. Titled Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia, the project was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the 2023 Overseas Press Club competition’s Runner-Up citation in the Cartooning category.

Krug’s previous books were no less ambitious. Her visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, is a heartfelt examination of World War II and her own family history. It was included on the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2018 list and won praise from The Guardian, NPR, and TIME magazine. Belonging also received several awards, including the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2019 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. Krug’s visual storytelling also animates On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a graphic edition of historian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling book Lessons for Resistance Against Totalitarian Regimes.

Although Krug is as much a writer as an artist, she compares her work to documentary filmmaking, a subject she discovered at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts before receiving a Fulbright to pursue an MFA in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts.

“I see text and image as a visual unit,” says Krug, adding that she’s had the good luck to work with art directors who have given her the freedom to design her own books and covers. Krug doesn’t keep regular sketchbooks; instead, she immerses herself in her projects, using research as “the backbone” of her visual narratives.

Working by hand, Krug scans drawings and paintings into a computer and uses Photoshop when needed. In her own work and in critiquing work by her students, Krug is interested less in technique or medium than in the expression of an idea or emotion. Her perspective reflects the influence of German Expressionism, which she appreciates for its “rawness, immediacy, and subject matter.”

Krug has been teaching illustration at Parsons as a full-time faculty member for 16 years and is currently codirecting the program. She encourages her students to find their own voice, just as she has found hers. “Every student comes to class with a different set of experiences,” Krug says. “I want to be sensitive to the stories they want to tell.”

“I try to use my work to highlight the problems of the world.”

“Illustration can be an act of empathy.”

Alumni �abrina Dorsainvil

Civic Designer & Public Artist

sabrinadorsainvil.com

Sabrina Dorsainvil, MS Design and Urban Ecologies ’14, came to Parsons with a background in art, design, and community development. She asked herself, “How do I bring those things together?” She found the answer in the Design and Urban Ecologies program, which she joined in its inaugural year.

“Parsons expanded the way I thought about design,” she says. Her master’s coursework helped her develop the skills she sought to bring together interests in art and community building and bridge theory and practice.

After graduating, Dorsainvil took those insights to the Boston mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics as its first director of Civic Design. There she explored ways creativity can help a city better understand residents’ needs and design improved services along with them.

This work led Dorsainvil to join See You in the Future, a collective developing ways to use art and storytelling to address complex urban matters related to substance use, poverty, housing, and mobility. In creative workshops, Dorsainvil and team guide participants to engage with art as a means of sharing their lived experiences. “It’s an important way to see other people, honor their existence, and recognize their humanity,” says Dorsainvil.

Alumni

Vane�sa rosal��

Fashion Philosopher @vanessarosales_

“I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old,” says Colombian-born Vanessa Rosales, MA Fashion Studies ’14. But she also felt that she didn’t fit the typical mold of a writer.

“I wasn’t one of the boys or someone’s muse,” she says.

Rosales found her calling when she discovered other writers interested in the intersection of fashion, feminism, and culture. Truman Capote was an early hero, along with Kennedy Fraser, Holly Brubach, Cathy Horyn, Judith Thurman, and Guy Trebay.

Dorsainvil recently joined the nonprofit design studio Agncy as director of Design Strategy and Creative Practice. At Agncy, she devises creative means of bringing about equitable change in Boston communities and organizations. For her, “the ultimate goal is to create the conditions for people to lead the way in designing their own alternative futures.”

Vanessa Rosales’ podcast and

(“Uncomfortable Woman”), explore aspects of contemporary women’s lives, including fashion.

After studying journalism in Argentina and writing for magazines, Rosales heard about a new fashion studies program at Parsons. Here was a rare opportunity to study “fashion as object, as image, as idea, in terms of social class, race, and politics,” says Rosales.

Rosales found studying in the program a transformative experience. “One class changed my life,” says Rosales, referring to Marilyn Cohen’s course Film and Fashion. Being immersed in New York street style was also an eye-opener. “It’s wonderful to be an ogler in the city,” says Rosales.

Rosales has carved out a vibrant career as a writer, podcaster, and teacher who looks at “fashion through a lens of social class, race, and politics.” Her book of essays, Mujer Incómoda (“Uncomfortable Woman”), tackles subjects like “the patriarchy, the female gaze, and what it means to be a woman,” says Rosales. The book has touched many Latin American readers and is now in its fifth edition.

The self-described “disobedient scholar” also hosts two podcasts—Mujer Incómoda and Popularmente (“Popularly”)—and is critic-inresidence at the School of Visual Arts. Through her various platforms, Rosales inspires us to think about how “fashion can be related to capitalism and misogyny, but it can also be revolutionary and liberating.”

“I look at fashion through a lens of social class, race, and politics.”

“Parsons expanded the way I thought about design.”

Faculty emily yang

Speculative Futurist emilybyang.com

@studioemilybyang

When Emily Yang, a part-time faculty member in the BBA Strategic Design and Management program, watches a movie like Minority Report, she’s not just enjoying a sci-fi action thriller. She’s thinking about what it can tell us about algorithmic bias.

The science fiction genre serves as a dynamic teaching tool in courses Yang teaches, such as Science Fiction: Designing the Future Through Speculative Design and Storytelling. Considering how “volatile and uncertain the world feels now,” she says, design students can learn a lot from sci-fi.

“Look at Snowpiercer,” Yang says. “Humanity is saved by technology, but the human problems continue.” She points to author Ursula K. Le Guin, who “was already talking about gender fluidity” in her futuristic literature 30 years ago, and Margaret Atwood, who “coined the word ‘ustopia’ to remind us to look for the dystopia latent in utopian societies.”

When students in Yang’s classes envision and create their own sci-fi world of the future, they are challenged to consider equity, sustainability, and a range of human factors. They think about how cities function, what homes look like, what food is eaten, how transportation works. “We often feel like it’s hard to change the future,” Yang says, “but it is possible.”

Yang points out that Parsons has a world-class program in speculative design led by renowned faculty members Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Yang joined the department with a master’s in design engineering from Harvard and a degree in economics and art history from NYU. She has worked as a UX designer and currently consults on the field of futures design. Yang is also a fine artist who creates ceramics and block prints exploring gender and other social issues and her Chinese American heritage.

Yang appreciates her students’ openness to new ideas and their critical thinking. As she puts it, “My students make me feel like the field of design is just beginning.”

“My students make me feel like the field of design is just beginning.”

We’re Parsons— and we’re designing a world you want to live in

Parsons School of Design—consistently ranked among the top art and design schools in the United States and around the globe—has sent changemaking artists and designers out into the world since its founding more than 120 years ago. Today we’re part of The New School, a major university in New York City offering programs in subjects ranging from the liberal arts and humanities to the performing arts to media, management, and more. Here and at our Parsons Paris campus, a diverse community channels its creative and critical capacities into fostering a more equitable, sustainable, and beautiful world through innovative art, design, and architecture.

WHAT CAN YOU STUDY HERE?

Degree Programs

Architectural Design (BFA)

Architecture (MArch)

Architecture and Lighting Design

Dual Degree (MArch/MFA)

Art, Media, and Technology (BFA) Parsons Paris only

Communication Design (BFA, MPS, AAS)

Data Visualization (MS)

Design and Technology (BFA, MFA)

Design and Urban Ecologies (MS)

Design History and Practice (BFA)

Fashion Design (BFA, AAS)

Fashion Design and Society (MFA)

Fashion Design and the Arts (MFA) Parsons Paris only

Fashion Management (MPS) on campus or online

Fashion Marketing and Communication (AAS)

Fashion Studies (MA)

Fine Arts (BFA, MFA)

History of Design and Curatorial Studies (MA)

Illustration (BFA)

Industrial Design (MFA)

Integrated Design (BFA)

Interior Design (BFA, MFA, AAS)

Interior Design and Lighting Design

Double Major (MFA)

Lighting Design (MFA)

Photography (BFA, MFA)

Product Design (BFA)

Strategic Design and Management (BBA, MS)

Strategic Design for Global Leadership (MS)

Textiles (MFA)

Transdisciplinary Design (MFA)

newschool.edu/parsons/academics

Continuing and Professional Education  Parsons also offers certificates and courses that help you prepare a portfolio, explore art and design, or fast-track your career or entrepreneurial ambitions.

newschool.edu/parsons/continuing-education

Executive Education

Parsons Executive Education—part of Continuing and Professional Education at The New School— offers business leaders transformative skills for a rapidly changing world.

newschool.edu/parsons/executive-education

CONTACT US

To learn more about our programs—ranging from undergraduate and graduate degrees to continuing and professional education programs—visit us online.

Inspired by Africa, Made in Bed-Stuy

Sherl Nero ’61 and the Design Works of Bedford-Stuyvesant

Today everyone knows Brooklyn as a hotbed of creativity. Fewer know of a Black-owned design company in Brooklyn that flourished in the 1970s and whose design director was a Parsons alum. Re:D dug into the New School Archives to learn more.

Sherl Nero (1939–2006) studied fashion design at Parsons and went on to work as a sportswear designer. In 1971, she was hired as design director by the Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant (DWBS). The newly established business was backed by the economic development program of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, an economic initiative launched by Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1967. DWBS was the brainchild of textile designers Leslie and D.D. (Doris) Tillett and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Nero was instrumental in creating DWBS’s distinctive fabrics and surface designs, inspired by research trips to Benin, Nigeria, Ghana, and Togo. In 1971, House Beautiful described the aesthetic as “bold in concept and color with a strong African feeling,” extolling such motifs as “huge banana leaves in sun yellow or flame red, abstract fish scales in pale coral and white.” The design scholar Phyllis Ross writes, “Nero used her tremendous knowledge of craft traditions and techniques, such as batik and block printing, to imbue mass-produced goods with the character of handcraft.”

The launch of DWBS was greeted with major shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Many of its designs were licensed to leading textile manufacturers such as Burlington Domestics, Martex Fabrics, and Pepperell.

DWBS closed in 1979, but today its contributions are attracting new audiences through exhibitions and articles by scholars like Ross. The textile manufacturer F. Schumacher & Co. offers DWBS’s Fish Scale pattern in a range of colors, helping to keep Sherl Nero’s talent alive.

House Beautiful described Design Works textiles as “bold in concept and color with a strong African feeling.”

55 WEST 13TH STREET

NEW YORK, NY 10011

The images generated by AI software and shown here on re:D ’s cover are based on creative direction from our designer. To the best of our knowledge, they are copyright- and license-free. Please contact us at the address shown on the masthead with any questions.