Retrospective: Guest Appearances
by Derek
A couple months ago, I was casually chatting with faculty member, Jason Santa Maria, about the practitioners we’ve had a chance to meet thus far in grad school. I think he was on to something when he noted that there have been enough rockstar designers visiting the studio to fill a conference. And not just any conference – a pretty good one. Because things were happening so rapidly during the last semester, it’s hard to get a good grasp on just how fortunate we’ve been to have had so many guest lectures/critiques from these individuals. The scary thought is that it’s only been one semester + a week!
To demonstrate what I’m talking about, here’s a list of some of the people who have stopped by to SVA’s Interaction Design studio, either to give a lecture or to be a guest critique in class:
- Andy Budd, Clearleft
- Cindy Chastain, RAPP
- Dave Gray, XPLANE
- Jason Fried, 37Signals
- Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler & Frere-Jones
- Kim Goodwin, Cooper
- Marc Rettig, Fit Associates
- Matt Mullenweg, Automattic, Wordpress founder
- Nicholas Felton
- Peter Thum, Ethos Water founder
- Rob Tannen, Bresslergroup
- Scott Berkun
- Scott Thomas, Obama for America
- Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting
- Steven Heller
- Tina Roth Eisenberg, swissmiss
Not to mention that Jared Spool will be making a visit this week for a event. And this is to complement our already extraordinary rockstar faculty members. Department Chair, Liz Danzico, has done a fabulous job bringing all these influential designers to us. Learning from and meeting them has been an invaluable experience, and I’m excited to know that there will be many more opportunities to come.