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ACCESS LTD: Design Interventions From SVA Products of Design

This Year's Work Explores Design and Privilege

By Core Jr - May 17, 2016

in NYCxDesign | design.edu | Social Impact

As part of NYCxDesign, the students of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts present ACCESS LTD, a set of roving checkpoints that investigates the way access is granted and denied by design—based on where we're from, what we look like, how we speak, and what we own. Embracing the international theme at the Wanted Design show Manhattan, the students explored the way our national, cultural, and personal identities determine our opportunities—both locally and globally.

"Despite global common ground and interdependence, our differences continue to influence what rights and privileges we enjoy. Using the language and tropes of border control, the work invite guests visiting the Wanted Design exhibition to examine the role of design in granting or limiting an individual's access to place, people, and prosperity."

At the event, visitors received a "passport" and were challenged with collecting a different access stamp at each of the five checkpoints. ADOPT invited visitors to adopt a foreign identity; MOVE explored cultural and traditional dance; CONNECT was a game to match "foreign" words to iconic design objects; REVEAL dared visitors to declare their personalities through their possessions; and EMBODY turned you into a, well, into a kind of furniture monster.

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REVEAL

Checkpoint: REVEAL prompted visitors to consider their power, privilege, and personality through their possessions using a kind of photobooth for your things. Using the vernacular of airport baggage scanning—in fact, all of the interventions used this formal and graphic vocabulary—visitors were asked to empty their pockets and arrange their personal items on a grid, labeling each according to the kind of meaning it held for them. After, they took a top down photo of their recontextualized belongings and shared them on social media. (You can find a ton of these images searching #accessbydesign on Instagram.)

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MOVE

At Checkpoint: MOVE, visitors were invited to dance in front of a motion-tracking device that gauged how convincingly they could move to 30 second clips of dance music from around the world. Predictably, this worked well on Friday night when people had a drink in their hand! (And with kids, of course.)

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CONNECT

One of two interactions around language, Checkpoint: CONNECT was a memory game where guests spun a hopper, received a random language and had 20 seconds to memorize five "furniture words" in that language—table, stool, lamp, clock, and bowl. Presented with photographs of products on exhibit at Wanted Design matching those categories, visitors then had to correctly match them up.

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EMBODY

Checkpoint: EMBODY used a "carnival cutout" with the help of augmented reality—where visitors could create a passport photo of themselves as a kind of furniture assemblage. (The images of the furniture items were actual pieces in the Wanted Design show.)

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ADOPT

Picking up on the language thread, Checkpoint: ADOPT challenged guests to learn how to say one new phase in another language—"Hi, can I tell you about my work?"—again, corresponding to the nationalities and languages represented at the Wanted Design show. People listened to recordings by native speakers in that language, and then received a passport stamp if they recited it correctly. (Well, "close enough" that is. They were hard.)