Jake Barton earned the National Award for Interaction Design award for Local Projects, the media and design firm he founded that specializes in work for museums and public spaces. The award is given to a firm or individual demonstrating outstanding work in the design of interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Local Projects is recognized as a leader in the field of interaction design for physical spaces, and in the creation of collaborative storytelling projects where participants generate content. The firm’s clients include SF MoMA, The National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the Sugar Hill Museum of Children’s Art and Storytelling in New York City. The firm is currently working on media projects for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects).

The National Award for Communication Design is an honor that recognizes exceptional work in graphic or multimedia design. Paula Scher has been at the forefront of creating iconic, witty and accessible graphic design for more than 40 years. Known for work that re-imagines typography as a conduit for communication, Scher has created images that have become ingrained into the American vernacular. Scher has been a principal in the New York office of renowned design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, and she has developed identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients including Bloomberg, Microsoft, the Museum of Modern Art, the Public Theater, the High Line, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

In addition to a gala for award winners, The National Design Awards also organizes National Design week educational programs held in New York City each fall. From October 12 – 20, 2013, design enthusiasts can receive free admission to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and participate in public programs focused on the work of Award winners. For a complete list of 2013 National Design Award winners and to learn more about National Design week, visit cooperhewitt.org/national-design-awards/2013-winners.

SVA Close Up spotted Hsiao’s portrait of Abramovic while perusing SVA Portfolios for content to share on the College’s main Tumblr page. Once the portrait was posted on Tumblr, it then hit SVA’s Twitter page with a tag to the Abramovic Institute, and the rest is history—just a few hours later the photo surfaced.

“Just saw this Instagram photo with her holding the print!” Hsiao wrote on his blog. “I feel so honored to have her actually seeing it!”

To view more of Chemin Hsiao’s work, click here. For more information about the Abramovic Institute, visit its website. And if you’re not already on SVA Portfolios, sign up today— it’s free to all SVA alumni, faculty members and degree-seeking students.

“Branding is about giving shape and form to an idea or experience,” explains student Janavi Kotarthi. “In this case, it was telling a narrative about NYC through messaging, design and visual experiences.”

The SVA students worked over six months—in addition to regular coursework and full-time jobs—to create not one, but four logos, as well as product photography, store windows and displays, and print and digital marketing campaigns—even a tricked-out pretzel cart, one of the few student concepts that wasn’t realized. Students also built prototypes and fabricated display elements at SVA’s Visible Futures Lab alongside the MoMA Design Store team.

“Destination: NYC uses a flexible identity where disparate elements, from all corners of the world, collide, contrast and combine into a vibrant whole,” explains instructor Mark Kingsley. Along with a streetwise pigeon, a pretzel, graffiti, newspaper box and plastic deli bag make an appearance in the logos.

The collaboration has already proven a learning experience on both sides. “You have to be empathic to the client’s needs,” says Randy Gregory, Kothari’s classmate. “There are many external forces guiding a project, and as professionals, we need to be aware of and respect those forces.”

“The students’ work has inspired new thinking around our visual presentation of product in the catalog and in-store,” says Brian Bergeron, Assistant Creative Director at the MoMA Stores.

New York is the eleventh locale in MoMA’s Destination: Design series, which began in 2005 and has since featured Finland, Denmark, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Japan, Seoul, Brazil, Portugal, Istanbul, and Mexico; some of MoMA Design Store’s bestselling items are a result of the series.

Destination: NYC runs through the mid-August. Visit momastore.org to view the students’ work in action. Watch SVA’s Facebook page and SVA Close Up for photos and more on the collaboration.

Images: MPS Branding Department Class of 2013; MoMA Design Store window, photo by Mark Kingsley.

Recent graduates winning awards include Donna Kwon and Rina Joonwon Lee, who won the only Gold Pencil awarded in the Non-Traditional Campaign category, while Antonio Perez won the only Gold Pencil awarded in the Website category as well as a Silver Pencil in the Online category. MyTran Dang and Jin Young Yoo swept the Product Design category by winning both the Gold and Silver Pencil awards, and a Silver Pencil was awarded to Gin Chen and Ke Jun Liu for their Print campaign. Juniors Irina Siraeva and Angie Talavera earned a Bronze Pencil in the Print category, while Silver Kim, Joo Hyun Kong, Andrew Haupt, and Holly A. Trotta won a Silver Pencil in the Non-Traditional Single category. Lauren Hom and Camilo Galofre, who received the only Gold Pencil in the Integrated Branding category, also won the Client Pitch competition of the show, in which only five schools competed to propose an idea.

Winning teams were honored at an award ceremony at the IAC Building in New York City on May 6, where they received the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Pencils along with cash prizes. Finalists are recognized in a listing in the One Show Annual and online in the Awards archive.

Founded in 2005, the One Show Young Ones competition is sponsored by The One Club, a not-for-profit organization that champions excellence in advertising through the promotion and celebration of design work. For a complete list of the 2013 winners and to learn more about the competition, visit the One Club website.

Mattiuzzi’s film The Compositor, which follows a young man on a surreal journey of self-discovery and awakening, was recognized in the Alternative category. Loube’s documentary Every Tuesday: A Portrait of The New Yorker Cartoonists follows four of the venerable magazine’s illustrators (Drew Dernavich, Emily Flake, Sidney Harris, and Zach Kanin) as they meet for a weekly “roundtable” with lunch as the backdrop. Past Student Academy Awards winners include Spike Lee, Robert Zemeckis, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Trey Parker.

Loube and Mattiuzzi will travel to Los Angeles for a week of networking and industry activities that culminate in the awards ceremony on June 8th at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal placements will be announced at the event; Gold medal winners will receive $5,000, while Silver and Bronze medalists will receive $3,000 and $2,000, respectively. Comedian, actor and 1978 Student Academy Award winner Bob Saget will host this year’s ceremony.

For more details and ticket information, visit the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website.

Brushwick Studio is completely run by SVA alumni. How did that come about? Did the idea for the collective originate while you all were in college?
The studio was started by Hyesu Lee, Chi Birmingham, Pat Kinsella, and I in our last year of the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program (class of 2011). In the MFA program you get to share a communal studio space with your fellow classmates, and when we were graduating we decided we wanted to keep that tradition and sense of community going by starting our own communal workspace in Bushwick.

Why did you decide to base the studio in Bushwick?
We decided to base our studio in the Morgantown neighborhood because it’s an awesome spot. Lots of artist studios all around, great bars and music…the area just has a great feeling of optimism and enthusiasm.

What kind of projects have you guys been commissioned to do so far, and what kind of projects do you hope to do in the future?
We are a studio of illustrators and we all work on various illustration projects for the advertising, publishing, editorial, and fine art markets. This month, Chi did some illustrations for The New York Times; Hyesu worked on a branding project for Kraft foods; Dasha Tolstikova (MFA 2012 Illustration as Visual Essay) is in a group show in San Francisco this month; Pat has illustrated for various editorial clients; and I’m working on some murals for a NYC advertising agency. Our work is really varied. Check on us in month and we will all be working on totally different projects!

How did your experience at SVA prepare you for the work you’re doing today?
I think the best way to become successful at any profession is to surround yourself with other people who are already successful in that profession. In SVA’s MFAI program, you get to study with Marshall Arisman, Mirko Ilic, Viktor Koen, Carol Fabricatore, David Sandlin, Carl Titolo, Matthew Richmond, Riccardo Vecchio, and the list goes on and on. Additionally, the program invites visiting artists and art directors to give lecture and critiques. I’ve met Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Aviva Michaelov, Jordan Awan, David Saylor, and tons of other people in the industry. These experiences were invaluable. (Also, students are guided through the program by the amazing Kim Ablondi.)

What’s next for Brushwick Studio?
We’re still growing and adding new members to the studio as well as participating in the larger art and illustration community. Later this month, we’ll be participating in the annual Bushwick Open Studios. Y’all should stop on by!

At the by-invitation-only ceremony at the SVA Theatre on May 7, Shubhashish Bhutiana’s film Kush, inspired by the true story of a teacher’s struggles to protect her one Sikh student from escalating violence, received awards in the categories of Outstanding Film, Outstanding Achievement in Directing, and Outstanding Achievement in Editing. John Strong was awarded Outstanding Achievement in Directing for Out of Center, and along with Nicholas Stango received Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for the same film. Sara Ho’s Crabby Day, an animated film about an imaginative child and a baby crab, was honored for Outstanding Achievement in Traditional Animation and Outstanding Achievement in Traditional Character Design. The Outstanding Documentary (Film) award went Katherine Knight for Cicada Psalm, Michele Malecki received Outstanding Achievement in Traditional Production Design for Catastrophe, Deanna DeMaglie won Outstanding Achievement in Stop Motion Animation for Bagelwolf, and Abdool Laltaprasad received the Outstanding Achievement in Screenwriting Award for The Sum of One.

Awards in 11 categories were presented in all, and students were also recognized with a number of prestigious industry honors. Java Jacobs received the New York Women in Film & Television Award, Colin Hingel took the Independent Filmmaker Project Award, Daniel Rodrigo Arias was given the National Board of Review Human Spirit Award, Emma Huckstadt and Ankit Somani received Gotham Honorary Sound Grants, and Java Jacobs and Mark Floyd were named National Board of Review Student Grant Recipients.

Filmmaker and SVA faculty member Annie Flocco produced the program, faculty member and media personality Valerie Smaldone hosted the program, and presenters included industry notables Melissa Leo, Geoffrey Fletcher, Andrew Jarecki, Lisa Jackson, Fred Seibert, Peter C. Frank, Frank Gresham, and Chris Newman, among others.

The ceremony can be seen at new.livestream.com/sva/dusty through May 20th.

Images from top down: Actor Melissa Leo with Shubhashish Bhutiani, Outstanding Film Award Winner; group shot of winners and presenters.

SVA: How did you come up with the idea for Coastermatic?

TASH: We had a class called Entrepreneurial Design, and for that class there is a $1,000 project. We came up with Coastermatic in February [of 2012], and so it was a process of how can we prototype this idea as quickly as possible to see if people are interested in it. We did a bunch of promo coasters that we took to South by Southwest, and we had a sign-up page, and then from there we built out pages incrementally over a couple of months.

It was really interesting to see how people responded to it. Coastermatic originally was going to help us pay for another project we were going to do over the summer, but in the end, it sort of embodied a lot of the same ideas—helping people personalize their homes and bringing visual media into reality.

SVA: So why coasters?

TASH: Their simplicity. And as an exploration into co-creation and digital fabrication, I think a single secular form is very easy to grasp, it’s easy to understand. The idea that there are four coasters was a design choice, and it’s intentional because of the fact that there’s enough of these different canvases to tell somewhat of a story if you want to take it in that direction, but you can still put images of your pet or your kid on there if you just want to do that.

A lot of people are doing really creative things with their coasters. One person in particular has a wooden table, and she took photos of the texture of the wood on her table and then put that printed onto the coasters, and now the coasters sit on the table in the exact positions of the wood grain where she took the image. So there’s some interesting opportunities in terms of how people creatively use that constraint to create both a personal product, but also a product that very much suits a specific context.

SVA: Since you see all the orders as they are placed, do you see a trend of where these orders are coming from?

TASH: So far we’ve sold coasters to lots of places—I think at least 15 countries by now. We had a blog post in PSFK last June that got picked up by another blog in Brazil, so we sold a bunch of those in Brazil. I think there was a magazine in France that wrote about us, and we’ve done a few in France and Japan, and then all over the States. People in New York seem to like us a lot. It’s really interesting to kind of see what kinds of coasters people make from different parts of the world.

SVA: That was going to be my next question. What’s the most bizarre or most interesting order that you’ve had?

TOM: There was one in particular, which was a set. They are all of the same dog wearing different outfits. So that was a brilliant one. We do have a higher proportion of pets and children-related coasters, and also landscapes—those are popular choices. I’m sure there’s an interesting relationship between the type of image and the location of where it comes from. I think it’s also interesting to see the different press coverage we’ve received and from where. We were featured on Swiss Miss, a design blog, and following that we had a lot more design-y focused images. So it’s been interesting to see how that breaks down and why different press may lead to different types of images.

SVA: What are your plans for the future?

TASH: Well, we’ll finish up here [at SVA] in May, and then in the summer we’re going to focus on building out Coastermatic. We launched last May, and we’ve been adding little bits and pieces to it throughout this year, but there are a whole bunch of things we really want to dig into. So one thing we’re really interested in is designing our own sets and making those available to people.

Another thing that we’re interested in exploring is co-creation. We think it’s really interesting that Coastermatic doesn’t exist unless a customer comes to us with their images. So how can we extend that to these sort of pre-designed sets, or maybe there’s a way that we can extend it to other types of data, which is part of what Tom’s been exploring through his thesis work.

SVA: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

TASH: Because they’re a tabletop item, the coasters become a really interesting conversation piece. What does it mean to have images on your table? They’re not as in-your-face, they’re more low key. And it’s been interesting. Liz Danzico, the chair here, bought some in the beginning. She had someone over, and they ended up having a whole conversation about the images that she had on her coasters on the table. And so there’s something that’s really nice about the conversational aspect of them.

Greil Marcus © Bozi/CORBIS

The author of over a dozen books, including the highly acclaimed Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975), Marcus first began writing criticism in 1968 at Rolling Stone, where he remains a contributing editor. He has since written as a music, film, television, and literary columnist for Artforum, The Believer, City (San Francisco), Esquire, Interview, The New York Times, Salon, and The Village Voice, among many others, and his work has also appeared in Another Room, The London Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, Die Zeit, and more.  His column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears monthly in The Believer.

Since 2000, Marcus has taught at Princeton, the University of Minnesota, New York University, and most frequently at the New School and the University of California at Berkeley. SVA Close Up caught up with Marcus recently for a conversation about everything from Malcolm McLaren vs. Andy Warhol to Berkeley in the ’60s and Jann Wenner’s editing style at Rolling Stone.

SVA: You went to the University of California, Berkeley in the ’60s. What was that like?

GREIL MARCUS: It was the opening of a new world. The professors were tremendously challenging and often very charismatic and enticing, and there was just a tremendous eagerness to learn, and a sense of absolutely no limits as to what you could learn. And then the second year I was there, in 1964, there was a tremendous amount of civil rights activity on the campus, which mainly had to do with racist hiring practices throughout the Bay Area at the time. There were a lot of demonstrations that were organized partly on the campus—sit-ins, pickets, marches—against these kinds of practices.  Businesses put pressure on the University, which responded by banning all political activity on campus, including public speech and handing out literature. Spontaneously, all sorts of people, and political groups from the Communist DuBois Club to Students for Goldwater, formed the Free Speech Movement, which turned into a three-month battle culminating in a sit-in where students took over the administration building of the University, and over 800 people were arrested, which at the time was the largest mass arrest in the history of the United States, even bigger than during auto strikes in the 1930s. So it was a tremendous conflict, and it was also probably the most exciting and the most instructive and the most intellectually galvanizing event that I have ever had any contact with at all.

And if Berkeley was a great environment for learning before this, it was doubled-down afterwards because everything people were learning in class—whether it was in physics, whether it was in English, whether it was in political science or history or biology—was coming to life in front of your eyes on campus. And so there was an urgency of discussion in classrooms, and a re-commitment on the part of so many teachers to their subject matter. It was a life-changing experience. And in a way—whether in music, art, movies, or politics—I’ve always looked for something that liberating and thrilling.

SVA: I read somewhere that when you started writing for Rolling Stone after college, there were no rules there and you got to do whatever you wanted.

GM: Well, I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do you write about this kind of music, so people were trying absolutely everything with a great sense of freedom and experimentation and success and failure, and a feeling of, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t because we don’t want to be intimidated by what somebody might think of what we’re saying.”

SVA: It sounds like that shaped you in a tremendous way as a writer.

GM: Oh, sure. And, you know, Rolling Stone, they hired editors from their writers. If you looked like somebody who actually knew what you were doing, they’d say, “Well, why don’t you be an editor.” You’d say, “Okay.” And you had no idea what that meant. When I first became an editor I thought it was my job to make everything read what I considered well, so I simply rewrote everything that was sent to me. I learned that wasn’t really a great idea after a while. [Laughter] And Jann Wenner—who had started the paper and was the editor—his approach to editing was to cut the first paragraph, and cut the last paragraph. And you know, it almost always worked.

SVA: You’ve made no secret of the fact that you favor Brit punk of the late ’70s/early ’80s over music that was coming out of New York at the same time. Why is that?

GM: I think if you look at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols in a way modeling themselves after Andy Warhol, you have something much richer and much more playful and less predatory. With British punk, it seemed that people had found a way to talk about anything, and they were absolutely desperate to do it, whether it was with humor, hysteria, a kind of mindless heedlessness, or a very intense intellectual precision, depending on who you were listening to at any given moment.

When I was a kid in the ’50s and you turned the radio on, say, starting around 1955 or ’56, you just couldn’t believe what was coming out of the radio. And every time you turned your head or turned the radio on again, something new and different and stranger and wilder and more ridiculous and more thrilling would be there. The same thing seemed to me to be happening with Punk in England in ’76 and ’77 and ’78, and really on for the next several years.

SVA: Do you think the current politics of our time are being accurately reflected through art and music?

GM: What I value in art and politics is what you might just call public life—shared life among citizens in a particular time and place—the way in which in art certain manifestations of public life or politics are enacted or reenacted, translated into a different language in art, whether that’s music, visual art, movies, poetry, novels. That to me is what’s so valuable: when you see the things that are unintelligible or incomprehensible, that are garbled in political speech, in newspaper stories, in headlines, that are just babble, but somehow get translated into something lucid and transfixing, and you say, “Oh my God! That’s what’s happening.”

You know, the truest example of that for me would be the Rolling Stones song “Gimmie Shelter,” which came out in the late fall of 1969, right about the time that all of the notions of ’60s liberation were beginning to implode and turn back on themselves and devour themselves. And suddenly a sheen of defeat, escapism, ugliness, and crime was beginning to cover over the utopian impulses of the years before. And that song turned that sense that I think people had that hadn’t put into words, that they didn’t want to put into words, didn’t want to talk about—that song turned that into a tragic drama, a terrifying drama that sounded so powerful you just couldn’t bear not to listen to it again and again and again. And it’s interesting that that song has never been off the radio since then, it still speaks for a sense of desperation and terror and loss that people have never ceased to feel.

SVA: Could you recommend a few essential albums for students graduating this year, ones that fit the tone of moving on to a new stage of their lives?

GM: I’ll give you three. The Gang of Four, Entertainment; Al Green, The Belle Album; and Cat Power, The Covers Album.

SVA: What advice do you have for graduates?

GM: I think the most important thing for an artist—whether that artist is a writer, or a painter or a designer or a musician or a movie maker—is to be aware of clichés. Be aware of shibboleths, phrases, catch phrases, shortcuts in language, whether it’s visual language or written language or spoken language, that people use that are utter camp, that mean nothing, and are essentially a way of shutting people up, of shutting conversation down. I distrust anybody who starts a statement with “Of course.” When somebody’s telling you that, “Of course,” what they essentially mean is, “Shut up. Don’t think.” People need to be aware of clichés, and they have to train themselves to avoid them like death. Always know when you’re using some sort of dumb phrase like, “At the end of the day.” Don’t ever speak that way in whatever language you’re using. Just be aware that that’s not your language, that those aren’t words that you chose—whether we’re talking about technique or actual words—be aware that someone else chose them for you. You may think you’re saying something, but in fact you’re a ventriloquist’s dummy. So that’s what I’d say. Be aware of cliché. Be self-conscious about it. Be rigorous. Run away from it.