What: WantedDesign Challenge: WaterCycle
When: Friday, May 17-20, 2013, presentation of the final projects: May 20, 3 PM
Where: WantedDesign
269 11th Avenue, New York
Why: For a second year, WantedDesign will host a transatlantic student design challenge, which will take place in real time at the event. Led by Mark Bechtel and Christian Schneider, faculty members at Parsons The New School for Design, students representing diverse design disciplines will work on teams to develop new products and systems that address one of the most valuable resources on the planet, our water supply, in the face of population explosions in megacities such as New York.

What: Wasteless
When: May 18-21, 10 am-9 pm; Sunday 11 am-7 pm
Opening Reception: May 18, 6-9 pm
Where: Poltrona Frau New York
145 Wooster Street, New York
Why: Parsons The New School for Design and Poltrona Frau, the world’s leading producer of luxury home furnishings, present an exhibition of work by Parsons product design students under the direction of faculty member and noted designer Andrea Ruggiero. Students were challenged to design and develop new objects using leather scraps collected over a period of two months at Poltrona Frau’s factory in Tolentino, Italy. The resulting objects are intended to expand the Poltrona Frau brand into everyday leather goods for the home and office, while elevating waste material into a premium product.

What: Parsons Festival
When: Through May 24, 2013
Exhibition Reception: May 21, 6-9 pm
Where: Parsons The New School for Design
25 East 13th Street, New York
Why: Parsons The New School for Design presents its third annual Parsons Festival, showcasing the creativity and talent at Parsons, a global leader in art and design education. The Festival includes an exhibition of thesis and capstone projects from the architecture, interior design, lighting design and product design programs in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons.

In April 1970, Papers of the Regional Science Association published an essay that would forever alter the field of urban planning. Titled “Social Processes and Spatial Form: An Analysis of the Conceptual Problems of Urban Planning,” it constructed an unexplored critique of urban disciplines vis-á-vis capitalism. The result created a dialectical theoretical framework, and forever changed the way many urban practitioners viewed their disciplinary tools and formal training. Ultimately, this heralded an ongoing formation of radically new and unseen forms of urban practice. In 1973, this essay became the first chapter of Social Justice and the City. David Harvey’s seminal second book split the way our cities are read, and created entirely new research paths for his contemporaries and younger practitioners.

Forty years later, Social Justice and the City is as relevant as when it was first conceived. As the processes of urbanization fall faster than ever at the control of the elites, an unprecedented wave of enforced spatial segregation radically alters our urban realities. Today, Social Justice and the City provokes views and directions that remain at the core of any imaginary for resistance, and an action towards the belief that socially just forms of urbanization are possible.

The 40 year commemoration of Social Justice and the City will pay tribute to the lasting work and influence of David Harvey. The day will be introduced by Harvey, who will share his views on the book and its 40 year trajectory. Harvey will then be joined by a diverse array of urban practitioners, from artists to academics and designers, whose practice has been transformed by Social Justice and the City.

Participants Include: Sharon Zukin, Don Mitchell, Andy Merrifield, Margit Mayer, Peter Marcuse, Ayreen Anastas, Martha Rosler, Miguel Robels-Durán, Rene Gabri, William Moorish, Andrew Ross, Jeanne van Heeswijk, William Tabb, John Krinsky, Teddy Cruz, Erik Swyngedouw, Nik Heynen, Neil Brenner, Melissa Wright, Tom Angotti, Linda McDowell, Miriam Greenberg, Richard Walker and others.

RSVP & Information: urban.parsons.edu

“The festival is an exciting opportunity for the public to come face to face with the breadth and depth of work of the next generation in art and design,” said Parsons Executive Dean Joel Towers. “This annual event enables us to provide a look at the creative process across a range of media, and present cross-disciplinary, collaborative work that speaks to the high level of innovation, critical thinking, and social engagement at Parsons.”

This year, Parsons Festival is an official event of the first NYCxDESIGN, the inaugural citywide event celebrating New York City’s diverse design scene.

The following are a selection of events featured in the Parsons Festival, including exhibitions of graduating student work. For more information, including a full schedule of events, please visit www.newschool.edu/parsonsfestival.

Parsons Festival 2013 is made possible by the support of Sony and Chelsea Wine Vault.

The conference will feature the insights of an international mix of artists, designers, researchers, and scholars in the field, including curator Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art, designer Laurene Leon Boym of Boym Partners, and the acclaimed artist Ernesto Pujol. The conference will also serve as the platform for the launch of the international Gender Design Network (iGDN), a new initiative aimed at connecting designers and artists around this topic.

The conference is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

The symposium will include a keynote address by Peter-Paul Verbeek, a professor of Philosophy of Technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and author of Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Other featured speakers include Alison J. Clarke, a professor of Design History and Theory at University of Applied Arts Vienna; Victor Margolin, a professor emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Clive Dilnot, a professor of Design Studies at Parsons; Jürgen Häusler, Chairman, Interbrand Central and Eastern Europe; Hugh Dubberly, the principal of Dubberly Design Office, an interaction and service design firm based in San Francisco; Cameron Tonkinwise, the director of Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and former associate dean of Sustainability at Parsons; Orit Halpern, an assistant professor of History at The New School for Social Research; Aleksandra Wagner, an assistant professor of Sociology at The New School for Public Engagement; and James Dodd, Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.

Presentations include:

• Objects + Markets: Mia Lundström, creative director of Home Furnishings at IKEA of Sweden, in conversation with Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Susan Szenasy
• Objects + Language: Akiko Busch, design writer
• Objects + Subjects: Jonas Damon, creative director, frog; Rochester Institute of Technology professors Janet Borgersen and Jonathan Schroeder; and Parsons Product Design Director Rama Chorpash
• Objects Arranged: Hannah Plumb and James Russell of JAMESPLUMB; design philosopher Leonard Koren; and Peter Wheelwright, author, architect and associate professor at Parsons
• Objects Many and Few: A Conversation Between a Minimalist and a Maximalist: Collector and editor Fritz Karch; David Mann, MR Architecture + Décor; and Pilar Viladas, design editor, T: The New York Times Style Magazine. 

AFTERTASTE was initiated in 2007 as a series of lectures and roundtable conversations dedicated to the critical review of interior design. The symposium is intended as an expansive meditation on the concept of the interior environment and its constituent elements. Launched in 2009, the MFA Interior Design program at Parsons was established to provoke progressive change in the field by asking questions, challenging ideas, and speculating on presumptions. By redefining approaches to interior design, expanding the scope of the discipline and bringing new thinking to old knowledge the program is building robust research that will influence and enhance the Interior Design discipline and the education of the Interior Designer for the 21st century.

DesignFile will feature a wide range of books, from short, text-only works to full-length illustrated publications. The text-only books will disseminate specific ideas and research to a specialist audience, while the illustrated books will treat broader subjects and offer enhancements such as embedded audiovisual and multimedia files.

The line will release at least six to 12 titles annually during its first three years. Among the three publications to be released Feb. 1 are Design Cult by Steven Heller, The Miser’s Purse by Laura Camerlengo and Hacking Design by Avinash Rajagopal, all of which are priced at $2.99.

In Design Cult, Heller reaches into the most contemplative recesses of his mind to offer an entertaining new collection of ruminations on the nature and future of design. A renowned designer, author, critic, co-chair, MFA Design Department, School of Visual Arts and National Design Award recipient, Heller expounds on such disparate topics as Milton Glaser, Japanese masks, velvet touch lettering, anthropomorphism and people in glass apartments.

The Miser’s Purse, originally written by Camerlengo as a thesis for the Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt Master’s program, tells the compelling story of how a small, decorative purse became deeply embedded in 19th-century Victorian popular culture. Known at the time as long purses, gentlemen’s purses or simply purses, they came to be called miser’s purses because their diminutive openings made it difficult to retrieve coins. The e-book contains 29 images and a video of the author demonstrating how to use a miser’s purse.

Originally written by Rajagopal as a thesis for the School of Visual Arts Master’s of Fine Arts program in design criticism, Hacking Design examines both common histories and persisting misunderstandings between hackers and designers and uncovers shared ground on which the two creative communities can work together. Rajagopal nimbly skips between the computer and design communities, from Makerbot to the Hacking Ikea site, from 3-D printing to DIY, providing 23 illustrated examples.

All DesignFile publications will be formatted as EPUB 2.0 files and accessible through any e-book reader.

The artworks brought together in The Public Private—several presented for the first time in the United States—address these issues from psychological, legal, and economic perspectives and use strategies ranging from hacking to self-surveillance to reflect upon the profound changes in our understanding of identity, personal boundaries, and self-representation.

Among the works on view are Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces/Face to Facebook, showing for the first time in New York. It is a multimedia installation of one million Facebook profiles, which were appropriated by the artists, filtered using facial-recognition software, and then posted on a custom-made dating website sorted by facial expressions. Eva and Franco Mattes’ The Others is a video installation composed of 10,000 photos the Mattes have acquired through a software glitch that gives remote access to personal computer files. The core of the work is not just the presentation of these images, but the act of “stealing” and moving them from the private into the public realm.

Other artists and works represented in the gallery include Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, Luke Dubois’ Missed Connections, Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi, Carlo Zanni’s Self Portrait with Friends, Panoptic Panorama #2: Five People in a Room by James Coupe, Paulo Cirio’s Street Ghosts, Ben Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator, and Nicholas Felton’s Annual Report series.

Public programs, including conversations with the participating artists, will take place during the exhibition run. For more information, visit the SJDC website.

Parsons Announces Academic Center in Paris

In 1921, Parsons became the first American art and design school to establish a campus in Paris. Among its achievements, Parsons Paris was the birthplace of the Parsons table, an icon of Modern design, in a studio led by the designer Jean-Michel Frank in the 1930s.

Parsons Paris is situated in an intimate, atelier-like setting at 45 rue Saint-Roch in the 1st arrondissement near many of the city’s important cultural destinations, including the Louvre, l’Opéra, and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The school will offer undergraduate, graduate and study-abroad programs that reflect the areas of study at Parsons in New York, while contextualized to take full advantage of the city’s cultural resources. This includes undergraduate programs in Fashion Design, Strategic Design and Management, and Art, Media and Technology; and graduate programs in Design and Technology, Design Studies, Fashion Studies, and the History of Decorative Arts and Design.

Parsons Paris will enroll an international mix of students, who will study with a faculty of French and European art and design educators as well as visiting professors from around the world. Students will become part of the larger community of The New School, the academic home of Parsons. This university, based in New York, offers interdisciplinary study in liberal arts, social sciences, international affairs, management, public policy, media studies and the performing arts. Students will be able to study online or at its New York campus, supplementing their coursework with classes in other subjects.

Parsons Paris represents the first step in a new global initiative at Parsons, which recognizes how the quickly expanding interaction between cultures, markets and regions of the world has revolutionized the practice of art and design.

In addition to Parsons Paris, the university is also developing projects in Mumbai, Shanghai, and other major urban centers. For more information, about visit www.newschool.edu/parsons/global.

This daylong symposium will feature presentations by eight young designers from Denmark, winners and nominees of the Danish Design Award 2012, who will be led through a design review by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. The designers will also present their work in a moderated discussion with Rama Chorpash, Director of Product Design at Parsons, and Nille Juul Sorenson, Director of the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen.

The featured designers will include Thea Ubbe Ebbesen, Anne Danielsen, Johannes Grove, Anders Backe, Mads Kjøller Damkjær,Amanda Betz, Søren Rose, and Troels Grum-Schwensen.

The symposium will also include a presentation on the current restoration of the Trusteeship Council Chamber at United Nation, designed by the preeminent Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl in early 1950s, which is considered a masterwork of mid-century modern design. The Danish designers Kasper Salto and Thomas Sigsgaard were selected through a design competition to design new furnishings for the chamber, as part of a desire on the part of Denmark to restore the chamber as both an example of the Danish design tradition, but also showcasing the best of contemporary Danish design.

Reservations: soppet@um.dk