Students
Students come to the Parsons MS SDM program from all over the world. Their experience combines studios, seminars, networking, events, symposia, and more. This page will inform you about student projects like First Year Studio and Second Year Studio, student resources, and other opportunities.
PolicyPilot: Bridging Regulatory Literacy in Textile EPR – 2025
PolicyPilot is a specialized digital platform addressing the growing challenge of textile waste through enhanced regulatory literacy of fashion professionals. With textile waste being the fastest-growing component entering landfills and a garbage truck equivalent of clothes discarded every second, governments worldwide are implementing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations to shift waste management responsibility to manufacturers. Despite 87% of fashion executives anticipating regulatory impacts on their business, 70% express limited understanding of these policies. PolicyPilot bridges this critical gap through three integrated tools: The Policy Interpreter translates complex legal language from California SB 707, France EPR Law, and Dutch EPR Regulation…
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CIRLCES – 2025
CIRCLES is a community-driven housing platform designed to make finding a home easier, safer, and more affordable by leveraging pre-existing networks. By connecting users to housing opportunities within their extended circles, CIRCLES ensures a more secure and reliable experience. At its core, CIRCLES fosters trust and connection. Instead of sifting through anonymous listings, users can browse housing offers from friends or mutual connections, creating a safer and more transparent process. Whether searching for a summer sublet, a third roommate, or someone to take over a lease, CIRCLES streamlines the process. Beyond traditional listings, CIRCLES introduces a barter system, allowing users…
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Intent – 2025
Intent is a mindful note-taking app designed to help you make sense of your inner world. In a time when our thoughts are scattered across devices, journals, and passing moments, Intent offers a space to gather, explore, and connect them with purpose. Rather than just storing information, Intent invites you to slow down and reflect. It helps you recognize patterns in your thinking, track how your ideas evolve over time, and understand the beliefs that shape your decisions. Whether it’s a passing thought, a deep question, or a moment of clarity, everything has a place. Intent is for people who…
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Ugly Catering – 2025
Ugly Catering is a sustainability-focused catering initiative that explores the intersection of food, design, and environmental impact. The project seeks to challenge conventional perceptions of beauty and waste in the food system by transforming cosmetically imperfect produce, often discarded despite being edible, into high-quality, visually compelling culinary experiences. By integrating elements of food styling, design, and storytelling, Ugly Catering aims to promote sustainable consumption practices and create behavioral change through hand-ons experience. The project emphasizes the value of surplus and “ugly” ingredients, demonstrating their potential to contribute to gourmet, aesthetically-driven dining experiences without compromising taste or quality. This work contributes…
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Green Frame: Redefining Sustainability in Film – 2025
Green Frame is a sustainability certification designed specifically for the film and media production industry. It addresses the urgent environmental impact of filmmaking by providing producers, studios, and distributors with tools to track, reduce, and report carbon emissions across the production lifecycle, from pre-production to distribution. Unlike existing frameworks, Green Frame is U.S.-based and uniquely combines environmental accountability with economic and cultural incentives. At its core, Green Frame offers a practical certification system supported by a digital platform that includes a carbon tracking tool, sustainability guidelines, and a scoring model. Productions that meet benchmark criteria receive a tiered certification and…
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Clairo – 2025
Clairo is an AI-powered audit toolkit designed for small startups to build ethical, transparent, and bias-aware hiring practices from the ground up. It guides early-stage teams through a structured hiring flow — from creating inclusive job descriptions to flagging potential algorithmic biases in decision-making. Clairo acts as a co-pilot for founders and hiring leads, combining actionable insights with a clear, human-centered interface. By integrating fairness into the core of recruitment, Clairo helps startups scale responsibly while making hiring processes more accountable, equitable, and insight-driven — because the future of work should be built on trust, not bias. Studio Instructor Juanli…
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Elevate – 2025
ELEVATE: Mind & Body in Sync is a Phygital experience designed to help young people strengthen their mental well-being through small, sustainable daily actions. Built on the belief that mental wellness, like physical fitness, requires consistent effort, ELEVATE provides a calm, non-judgmental space where users can check in with themselves, take micro-breaks, and grow emotional awareness over time. Users are guided through short-form videos, daily reflection prompts, and low-pressure activities like 3-minute breathing sessions or mood-based journaling. The platform draws from intrinsic and extrinsic motivation models, encouraging users to explore their own wellness patterns without comparison or pressure. Targeted primarily…
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Unloop – 2025
In today’s digital age, when individuals experience boredom, loneliness, or uncertainty, they frequently turn to digital spaces as coping mechanisms. However, when people enter these environments feeling vulnerable or unsettled, the experience can be less helpful than anticipated, sometimes even amplifying their emotional struggles. Users may find themselves becoming lost in digital spaces, inadvertently losing track of time and weakening their meaningful connections with others. Rather than alleviating their initial emotional states, digital interactions may leave them feeling lonelier, ashamed, and disconnected. Additionally, the fragmented and overstimulating nature of digital environments can disrupt attention, further impacting mental well-being. Unloop directly…
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Abridge – 2025
Abridge is a response to a quiet, familiar tension: the growing emotional distance between students and their parents. As young adults navigate newfound independence, maintaining regular, meaningful contact with family often becomes inconsistent—not due to a lack of care, but because of time, guilt, or emotional overwhelm. Parents, meanwhile, seek small signals of connection, often left waiting in silence. Recognizing this gap, Abridge sets out to reimagine how families stay emotionally present in each other’s lives—without the pressure of constant conversation. Our approach combined observational research, stakeholder conversations, and generative design methods to explore the subtle, often invisible dynamics of…
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In the Loop – 2025
In the Loop is a trusted network of professionally-minded homes designed to support intentional mobility—for work, transition, or exploration. Hosted by remote professionals, accessed by those in motion Studio Instructor Juanli Carrion Designers Mrinal Jadhav Mrunmayee Arjunwadkar Ritika Suryawanshi
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