Welcoming New Faculty To DSI For The Spring Semester
January 15, 2014 /3BL Media/ - The challenges we face and the opportunities we have to address them change constantly. And so do we. This semester at MFA Design for Social Innovation, we’re honored to welcome six remarkable new faculty members, and some new courses, to our program.
Rachel Abrams will teach Technologies for Designing Change. She is founder of Turnstone Consulting where her clients include American Public Media, the National Multi-family Housing Council (with Pentagram), and Amnesty International, the Atlantic Media Group, City ID, Karsan Automotive, The New York Times, PentaCityGroup, Pentagram Design, the Queens Museum of Art and others. Rachel publishes and presents widely to US and international audiences. Her focus connects digital transformation and emerging technologies, graphic facilitation, sustainability, transportation strategy and urban policy-aiding by design. Before founding Turnstone, Rachel worked with IBM as a user experience strategist for ibm.com, with branding consultancy, Imagination (USA), as a content strategist in New York, and before that in London, for Nokia, The Economist, the BBC and as a British Parliamentary researcher. She received her undergraduate degree in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and her Master's degree in Computer-related (interaction) design from the Royal College of Art in the UK.
Jaimie Cloud, who will teach Environmental Ethics, is the founder and president of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and a pioneer in the field of Education for Sustainability (EfS). She writes and publishes extensively, and consults, coaches and teaches in schools and school districts around the country and in other parts of the world. She has developed exemplary curriculum units and full courses of study, and has produced a set of EfS Standards and Performance Indicators that schools are using to innovate their own curricula to educate for sustainability. She is Chair of Communities for Learning, Inc., a member of the Advisory Committee of The Buckminster Fuller Institute, on the advisory board of The Future We Want, and serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Education for Sustainable Development. Jaimie is inspired by the opportunity to promote the new paradigms of schools as learning organizations, children and young people as leaders, and schools and communities learning in partnership for a sustainable future.
Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin will be co-teaching Thesis III. They run the design office PlayLab, Inc in the West Village. They’re currently in the middle of building the world’s first water-filtering floating pool in the East River with Family Architects called + POOL, designing a hideout in the woods in upstate New York, and operating and designing a quarterly architecture publication called CLOG. Together they’ve helped launch a pie shop in Alabama, a graduate-level course in Saudi Arabia, and may or may not have just designed and built a truck for Bruno Mars.
Steve Daniels and Justin Levinson will be teaching a new class called Disruptive Design for Makeshift Cities. Steve uses technology to promote making and creativity around the world, especially in environments of scarcity. He is a researcher, designer, and developer in IBM Research's Social Computing Group, where he contributed to the development of a platform for hosting and developing mobile applications for basic phones in emerging markets. He currently designs and develops the user interface for doctors to use Watson to diagnose and treat patients. Steve is also the Editor-in-Chief of Makeshift, a quarterly magazine and multimedia website focused on street-level ingenuity and invention around the world. Makeshift was inspired by research he conducted on informal systems of innovation in Kenya, published in the book Making Do. Previously Steve founded A Better World by Design, an annual student-run conference at Brown University and RISD dedicated to design and technology for social impact, and the Brown Noser, Brown's satirical news empire. He also co-founded the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Met charter high school, a program and building designed to help at-risk students learn business skills and launch small enterprises. Steve is a Sandboxer, aspiring global nomad, and advisor to various social innovation projects. He loves all kinds of music and has toured in eight countries as a jazz trumpeter. Justin is the Director of the Makeshift Institute, and built out the on-line presence and product strategy for the start up. He is an author and hacker.
Co-teaching Games for Impact with the amazing Asi Burak this year will be Naomi Clark, who has been designing and producing games for over two decades, ever since she started creating text-based virtual worlds in high school. She’s designed everything from multiplayer web games, such as the seminal Sissyfight 2000, to casual downloadable games, Flash games for kids and Facebook games. She’s worked for LEGO, Gamelab, Blue Fang, Rebel Monkey, and Fresh Planet on titles like LEGO Digital Designer, Miss Management, and Gamestar Mechanic, among others. Naomi is currently co-authoring a textbook on game design and developing an independent game with the Brooklyn Game Ensemble. She also works as a freelance game designer in New York City, consulting on games involving companies like PBS, Disney, Fisher Price, Wizards of the Coast, Atari, and many more.
And this is only the new stuff. Please check our site for the full curriculum and apply if you haven’t already. dsi.sva.edu/apply
