Projects Studio 1: Public and Private
PGTD 5100
6 credits // 90 contact hours
Course Description
Students explore strategies and practices of turning cultural observation and analysis into design projects with instantiated outcomes. By investigating the ways in which design blurs the lines between the public and the private, students learn to assess and identify patterns of social practice and change and to communicate those patterns using design methods. Students complete a short, intensive project and a longer, more exploratory project. Special emphasis is placed on students’ ability to articulate a well-founded design brief and to assess the most appropriate forms of response. Students also familiarize themselves with the design process for complex projects done by collaborative teams. They examine workflow and process in order to build a sound foundation for creating innovative design.
Projects Studio 2: Emergent Social Forms
PGTD 5101
6 credits // 90 contact hours
Course Description
With the proliferation of communication technologies that link people more directly, a growing number of social forms are emerging from open networks. In some cases, these are challenging the hegemony of centralized networks in power and scope. In this course, students investigate ways of triggering small-scale social change. While they may not necessarily utilize communication technologies, students are required to prototype networks, nodes, and rule-sets that activate and build community. Whether these schemes are local or global, analog or digital, their emphasis is on harnessing the power of swarms. Students further explore the working methodologies that the design curriculum emphasizes. The level of complexity is increased; working in groups, students address broader, more socially challenging situations. Students are expected to research and analyze social networks and the emergent practices that help to form them, as well as develop strategies for fostering new kinds of communities and networks. Emphasis is placed on the ability to frame a design brief on an achievable scale and to create final proposals that provide criteria for self-assessment.
Projects Studio 3: Transnational Social Flows
PGTD 5200
6 credits // 90 contact hours
Course Description
Communication technologies and travel has allowed people to establish social ties across vast distances. This course explores cultural assimilation, acculturation, reconfiguration, and subversion as practiced by communities and groups who are no longer nation-bound. Students research larger networks of flows that cross urban, regional, and national boundaries. They analyze the circulation of goods, ideas, people, and finances as new organizational forms and find points of intervention in order to improve them. Emphasis is placed on creating and managing multiple partnerships, both in terms of communication and work flow. Students also incorporate those affected by a project into the design process. They are expected to identify and contact community members in order to conduct informed interventions into global flows. As this project can take on different shapes (systems, protocols, sites, spaces, maps, services), students must be able to defend the form their project takes.
Course Title: Thesis Preparation
PGTD 5220
3 credits // 3 hours per week
Course Description
Building off of the research methods and practices developed during the second-semester course Design-led Research, this thesis preparation course requires students to develop a large but focused design-led research project, which emerges from their research interests. Students initiate and outline their project during the first semester of their second year and devote the majority of their final semester to it. The course culminates in a public Thesis Statement presentation, which articulates the scope and scale of the research project, demonstrates its relevance to an external community or public, and identifies the members of the thesis committee. The thesis committee must include at least one New School faculty member and two external advisors. Throughout the course, the instructor reviews how to compose a master’s thesis, document the strengths and weaknesses of past thesis projects, and craft a research project that is innovative, original, and appropriate. Projects in MFA Transdisciplinary Design are collaborative; thesis students must form a team—whether with other students or with people outside the program—that serves as the basis of this collaborative effort. This course emphasizes early production sketches, prototypes, and other forms of visualization and materialization that reinforce the design-led emphasis of the thesis project.
The course also works in parallel with the Professional Communication course, where students map a professional community and identify their roles as designers within it. This exercise informs the thesis preparation process, and students are expected to be able to explicitly connect their research and project with an external community.
Thesis Project
PGTD 5201
12 credits // 12 hours per week
Course Description
Thesis Studio, which follows Thesis Preparation, is the culmination of each student’s experience in the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design program. Students conduct design research on an emerging aspect of the design field. Theses are expected to advance the theoretical, technical, material, or formal state of knowledge in design. They must demonstrate rigorous analytic thinking as well as coherent project development and design resolution; projects must be fully documented and compellingly presented using appropriate two- and three-dimensional representations or models.
The thesis is conducted under the guidance of a thesis committee, which must include at least one New School faculty member (who functions as thesis director) and two external advisors. Studio time is organized into regular one-on-one critiques with the thesis director, along with at least three critiques with the thesis committee during the course of the semester. While the majority of the course is made up of independent work, students meet at regular intervals to share and review their progress. Because of the strong emphasis on collaboration in the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design program, students are encouraged to work on joint or team theses. Even working independently, however, a student must identify people outside the university who are integral to the success of their thesis.
In order to receive a final grade, students must meet the following two principal objectives: give a thorough and well-crafted Thesis Presentation to the thesis committee, students, and invited guests and critics; and document their project in a comprehensive, compelling way. In both cases, students must situate their design work as research, critically reflect on its outcomes, and communicate the meaning and impact of their findings. Students also create an online home for their project that allows faculty, advisors, and external stakeholders to follow their progress.
Transdisciplinary Design Seminar I
PGTD 5000
3 credits // 3 hours per week
Course Description
This seminar provides the intellectual and contextual background for the transdisciplinary program. Design now interacts with increasingly complex cultural, technological, and economic forces. Traditional design disciplines are no longer adequate to address complex, global problems. By exploring this shift, the course contextualizes the pressures to maintain specialization in design and the forces that currently challenge the disciplines. Literature and projects are used to argue that design can play a role in reshaping cultural practices. Students investigate not only cultural theory but also design case studies that have impacted cultural practices. In addition to readings, presentations, and discussion; each student is expected to lead discussions on readings.
Transdisciplinary Design Seminar II
PGTD 5010
3 credits // 3 hours per week
Course Description
This advanced seminar explores contemporary topics in transdisciplinary design with an emphasis on how transdisciplinary designers define their practice in relation to traditional design fields. Is transdisciplinary design simply an alternative methodology or does it pose critical questions that challenge the specialization of traditional design? How does transdisciplinary design fit within the field of design and how might it evolve? This course works with the thesis course to encourage students to think about the central aspects of the practice of transdisciplinary design. Students present their work for discussion, analysis, and feedback. They are expected to frame their projects in terms of larger cultural, political, and technological shifts. By critically reflecting on their own design processes, students articulate how their practices relate to traditional design and to emerging opportunities. After their first presentation, students present a second time to show how the initial discussion influenced their work. The aim is not only to strengthen students’ thesis projects, but also to allow them to discover what it is that makes them transdisciplinary.
Design for this Century
PLDS 5400
3 credits // 6 hours per week
Course Description
This lecture course introduces first-year graduate students to design as a way of acting in the world. Examples are drawn from the full spectrum of design professions and activities. Design is related to major shifts occurring in the 21st century, particularly the unsustainability of the present and the emergence of the artificial as the medium of existence. The course is divided into three parts: in part I, design is viewed structurally (how we can comprehend the capabilities of design?); part II looks at design poetically (what is the resonance of design?); and part III construes design as Meta-Design(how have shifting conditions and challenges necessitated that design become an expanded field of practice?).
Design-led Research
PGTD 5130
3 credits // 3 hours per week
Course Description
This course runs in tandem with the Thesis Project and introduces students to the idea of practice-led research in a studio context. Students learn how designing is fundamental to research by developing a design-led approach to research that emerges from their work. The course focuses on project-specific research and on the designer researchers who advance the field. Students become familiar with design-led methods that improve research and inform design projects. They contextualize their practice as one that poses questions and responses while delivering design outcomes. Together these two objectives allow students to define a critical framework for their thesis project and acquire the tools to conduct relevant research.
Students also explore strategies to understand social and technological practices and systems. Social practices are diffuse and invisible. The opportunistic and exploratory nature of design presents a solution-oriented strategy for researching and understanding complex conditions and behaviors. This strategy serves as alternative to those used in the humanities and sciences. The course requires a level of explicit understanding about how designers “think through making.” Students also must understand how one weds these practices with criteria for research, so that their work is purposeful, inquisitive, informed, methodical, and communicable. In training students to reflect critically on their own ways of working, the course presents a discursive, solution-oriented, performative, and multi-modal approach to practice.
Intensive I: Orientation
PGTD 5110
1.5 credits // 22.5 contact hours
Course Description
The Transdisciplinary Design curriculum employs nontraditional techniques and methods that new students may not be familiar with. In this studio course, students are introduced to the skills and capacities needed to succeed in the Transdisciplinary Design Projects courses. Orientation takes place during the first week of school when all other classes are on hold. Students are expected to be present for the entire week and to familiarize themselves with new approaches and methodologies.
Intensive II: Charrette 1
PGTD 5111
1.5 credits // 22.5 contact hours
Course Description
Once each year, the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design holds a three- to five-day charrette that brings together students from across Parsons to work on a single theme. Students work in teams during the charrette, collaborating with graduate students from other disciplines—including fine arts. The topic of the charrette varies from year to year and is broad enough to allow for multiple types of projects. Students need to delve deeply into the process and work collaboratively and quickly to finish their projects. In order to accommodate this, all other graduate classes are suspended so that students can maintain focus. Guests from outside communities and industries work with the faculty to develop a topic that is forward-looking, speculative, and open to multiple outcomes.
Intensive III: Workshop
PGTD 5210
1.5 CREDITS // 22.5 contact hours
Course Description
The Transdisciplinary Design curriculum alternates between longer studio projects that extend the design process and short, intensive projects that closely simulate a professional work environment. This one-week workshop serves as a research and development laboratory for industry and community partners. Experts from a range of fields are brought in as guests. Each workshop features two to three unique projects developed by faculty, external partners, or visiting designers. The process to create the project differs significantly from the workshop process: teams are smaller, the scope of the project is more narrow and focused, and external sponsors work more directly with students. Each student participates and completes only one project per workshop. All visiting designers and projects are posted in advance; students are expected to sign up before the first day of the workshop. Each team is limited to 15 students or fewer. While the workshop takes place over four days, students must be prepared to show their work to visiting designers at pre-assigned dates and times. The workshop demonstrates how the Transdisciplinary Design program serves as a hybrid of the research culture of the university and the innovative practices of industry.
Intensive IV: Charrette 2
PGTD 5211
1.5 CREDITS // 22.5 contact hours
Course Description
Once each year, the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design holds a three- to five-day charrette that brings together students from across Parsons to work on a single theme. Students work in teams during the charrette, collaborating with graduate students from other disciplines—including fine arts. The topic of the charrette varies from year to year and is broad enough to allow for multiple types of projects. Students need to delve deeply into the process and work collaboratively and quickly to finish their projects. In order to accommodate this, all other graduate classes are suspended so that students can maintain focus. Guests from outside communities and industries work with the faculty to develop a topic that is forward-looking, speculative, and open to multiple outcomes.
The role of second-year graduate students in the charrette differs significantly from that of the first-year students. Instructors expect more leadership, organizational energy, and facilitation of group collaboration. This means that second-year students are encouraged to facilitate the integration of the team’s efforts and to support the overall success of the group.
Professional Communication
PGTD 5230
3.0 credits // 3 hours per week
Course Description
In this course, students map the emerging field of transdisciplinary design and examine their development in relation to it. Students present how their work meets the needs of the industry and how they themselves fill the emerging roles for designers. The course emphasizes communication; students must formulate a strong argument—through writing and visual representation of their work—for their practice. What are each student’s core skills and how do those fit within larger institutional and professional capacities? What communities will they be serving? What kinds of firms are doing this type of work? Students produce a five-year plan and a working portfolio (analog, digital, and web-based) that places their work within a broader context. Visiting industry professionals describe their own career paths and how they navigated professional networks to find work.