Class is not in session...

From September 2 to December 9, 2020, this site served as the online portal for the course Design Practicum for 14 students. The summary from this semester was written by Mindy Seu on January 17, 2021. This course had three primary projects, two tours, weekly meetings, and presentations with visiting guests.

P1: Internet Archive with Amir Esfahani

Amir Esfahani, Director of the Artist-in-Residence program at Internet Archive, co-led this project. On the first day, he gave us a tour of the Internet Archive and introduced the collections on archive.org. Students created a unique collection, added its contents and metadata, and showcased this through a double-sided poster. These tabloid prints were risographed by the press TXT Books. To kick-off the second half of this project, Kurt and Rob gave us a tour of TXT Books and the process of riso-printing. Later, they mailed out a packet of each students’ poster to the first 50 subscribers at Internet Archive.

P2: IDEO with Joanne Cheung

Joanne Cheung, senior designer at IDEO, created a collaborative conversation series between Project Drawdown and our students. Students broke into small groups, developed research about five climate leaders (Elizabeth Bagley, Jamie Beck Alexander, Miranda Gorman, Emilia Jankowska, Mamta Mehra), conducted interviews, and transcribed then edited with Otter.AI. A subgroup was formed to design and code a custom site to house these interviews called Drawdown Dialogues. The original groups illustrated and created promotional videos for each interview.

Please check out drawdowndialogues.com!

P3: Mason Gross Galleries with Jackie Thaw

For our last project, students created four proposals for a Mason Gross Gallery redesign, including a wordmark, signage, wayfinding, printed and web applications. One will be selected, finetuned and applied in 2022.

Group 1: Catie Esposito, Anna Pittas, Marinelle Manansala, Zhongxuan Lin → presentation

Group 2: Pauline Yanes, Xinyi Huang, Alexa Reyes → presentation

Group 3: Sarah Poon, Steve Tomori, Yogini Borgaonkar, Yuchao Wang → presentation

Group 4: Sebastian Lijo, Derek Li, Nick Plyler → presentation