2025-06-10 01:53:08
Pre-iPhone, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram, pre-Slack. Pre-rideshare, pre-blockchain, pre-crypto, pre-Zoom. Pre-Hurricane Sandy, Pre-Women’s Marches, Pre-Covid, Pre-X. It was before any of these behavior-changing products, services, and transformative moments the MFA Interaction Design Program at SVA was launched into the world. And yet, from the start, it was designed for the future — preparing students not just for what was next, but for what they could imagine into being.
Since June 2008, I’ve had the immense privilege of serving as its Founding Chair. The program, co-founded with Steven Heller, helps shape the evolving relationship between people and technology. Over these years, human’s relationship with technology has transformed dramatically — interfaces have become infused with intelligence, and intelligence has increasingly dissolved into our behaviors and environments, giving rise to new disciplines and designers’ vital role in responsible AI, ethics, and centering humanity in technology. And with it, the program has evolved.
I’m delighted to share that Adriana Valdez Young has taken on the role of Chair of the MFA Interaction Design to bring the program into its next chapter. She invests a rare and critical blend of creative foresight, thoughtful leadership, and vision rooted in equity, inclusion, and creative innovation. I’ll remain Founding Chair, Advisor to the Chair, and part-time faculty member — supporting the next era of this remarkable community.
It’s a meaningful milestone. Adriana is a remarkable leader: formerly as Director of Programs and faculty member, she helped evolve the design curriculum — launching needed initiatives in emerging technologies. She partnered with me as Interim and Associate Chair, advancing learning models to include capacities in ethics, AI, spatial computing, and founding a Spatial Computing Lab. Her leadership ensures students can continue the program’s vision, evolved for 2025 forward.
MFA Interaction Design original identity, designed by The Heads of State in 2008
Students have shaped the foundation of a digital design landscape. Faculty have taught me more than I can express. And as a community, we uphold the values of SVA’s co-founder Silas Rhodes who challenged us: “An idea is just an idea until you make it real.” Adriana’s leadership continues this legacy — ensuring students have the tools to build the future only they can envision.
It has been the privilege of a lifetime to lead this program through a time of transformation and expansion. My first office was in a converted facilities closet! Today, we occupy a beautiful studio space in Chelsea, NYC — and a Visible Futures Lab that we helped shape — that has hosted countless classes, crits, celebrations, and moments of transformation and discovery. Over the past 17 years, our community has journeyed from Governor’s Island to the Arctic Circle. I couldn’t be prouder of what our faculty, students, alumni, and staff have accomplished.
Here’s to the future — and the ideas, platforms, and futures students will make real. There’s a profound and inspiring future ahead of this program, and I can’t wait to see what the community builds together.
2025-03-25 22:29:58
I returned home to visit with my Mom last weekend. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there becomes a tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were” and the “is,” the past, the present, and perhaps the future.
Tenses get tangled. Nouns don’t flow. The contours of a geography redrawn.
See also:
The thing about long-term relationships
You tilt the energy toward the present; slide all the feelings toward the future, pretend you can sift out the sad parts, the bad parts, the hard parts. Keep only the “is” and the happy so it “will be” in the future. The reflective bits gleaming forward.
In fact, the path to home is people. No matter where she is in the world, the geography of that home I’d always known is where my mother is, where my broader family is.
No matter the changes, there is always a path back home. And “home,” a four-letter word of a different kind — “poof” — transformed.
2024-01-08 21:01:00
On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating students at SVA, I sat behind the unmatched Robert Caro himself during a not-brief graduation ceremony where he would deliver the final Commencement address. I would ask him to sign the hidden book afterward as we walked offstage.
I knew nothing of what seminal authors did after a Commencement address or how to approach one for an autograph of a book hidden under a robe. Yet I was determined. It was 20 years earlier when I had moved to New York City, and used the subway as a reading device for the book. I wrote once about reading Caro’s book for Field Tested Books, a guide to reading a specific book in a specific place, from Coudal Partners:
I’d travel throughout the city in the molded plastic seats of the 1975 Pullman Standard F train. As I read about the making of our parks and transport systems, I’d pass the same on the subway. Sunset Park, 4th Avenue, 2nd Avenue. Two lives, two stories — one on the page, one out the window. But I never finished it. 465 of its pages are unread. Today, my neighborhood replaces chapters. My block replaces pages. My conversations are my marginalia. The city has taken me over.
As I walked off stage that day after the ceremony at Radio City, I learned Caro had been swiftly escorted backstage and picked up by car. Poof. He had left undetected, working behind the scenes as he does, to continue his work. My copy of the book: still unsigned.
I was, then, irrationally excited to learn of 99% Invisible’s power broker book club, 100 pages at a time, commencing January. I am in.
After all this time, I admit I still have 465 pages to go, two decades after starting the book. So it’s for the best. Now I can finish it. And, like my relationship to New York City itself, my relationship with the book continues.
2023-12-14 00:03:47
Empathy is traveling. Traveling from yourself to expand and meet another in their place and context. Travel I did this past week along with nine others to walk alongside Craig Mod, Kevin Kelly, and walkers for a Walk and Talk. With an unbending pace, we walked for seven days in the hills of northern Thailand, across local farms, across elephant camps, across rivers, across bridges and under waterfalls, and into the reality of cultures and one another’s lives. 100.3 kilometers on a path.
This path was a Walk and Talk, a gathering of about 10 people, beginning at the highest point at Doi Inthanon, then descending many conversations and adventures later into the old city of Chiang Mai. It was a path, chartered by our thoughtful local walking partner and seven days unfolded long and full with conversations in sets of two and three, as we traversed together each day. As we traveled, we journeyed in layers — those in the evenings, Jeffersonian Dinner-style, and those in groups by day, winding our ways into each other’s ideas and context. With this formula, empathy quickly emerged.
More than one hundred years before, back in 1909, at least one significant thing happened: someone named Edward Titchener coined the word “empathy.” I learned this from Rebecca Solnit who notes the root word “path” is from the Greek for “passion or suffering.” And “[i]t’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so.”
On Day Four of our own journey, our empathy and attention turned toward another walking companion, a small dog who joined our group. This spirited and besmitten dog joined us at an elephant camp where we had lodged the night before. Gaining the name “TD” for “Thai Dog,” he trailed us over fields and hills, roads and villages, swimming his way down a river to stay with us at one stage.
The river may have been the end of our time with TD, but he traversed tangles of trees, rocks, and swam to hop a bamboo raft and float with us, showing off his rather unflappable side when we got to land. He followed us another 50+ kilometers into the old city of Chiang Mai.
Through the generosity of a series of strangers in the old city, we found TD vet care and a permanent home where he could live north of the city among fields, a (female) dog friend, other animal companions. The particular tenacity of his loyalty was shared and passed on to a caretaker through the kindness of Thai strangers who helped us get him there. Empathy traveled.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Ten days later, they are mingled and entwined — the stories, the remarkable people, the dinner topics, the walking, TD. They are mingled and entwined in a path forward from the hills to Chiang Mai into today and a series of tomorrows. One where everyone gets to return to a home full and expanded.
Coda: So grateful to Kevin and Craig and Chris. Could have walked another 100.3 kilometers — with some rest in between. Thanks to Silvia for manifesting, dog care, and high-speed tuk-tuk rides. Here is everything Craig and Kevin have learned about these walk-and-talks.
2023-06-03 07:39:08
We used to make these crayon mashups as kids. They were combinations of all of our favorite crayons in the box. Choose a couple of most-loved Crayolas, bake them together in a cupcake tin, let them cool, and you had a super-giant-crayon combo of favorites. A paraffin disc of possibility. You could draw with that thing for what seemed like forever.
I think the length of happy can be sort of like that crayon mashup: you get to color only with your favorites with no end in sight. But the hard part is choosing your favorites, leaving most others behind. And if you knew when it would end, you might stop drawing, speed up drawing, overthink the drawing. But when you have only color and paper and tomorrow, you keep on sketching.
“Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes. And the changes are what you become. Change the outcome by changing your circle.” That’s Seth Godin in a passage I learned from Tina Roth Eisenberg in an unmissable Guy Raz interview about her journey to human mashups, CreativeMornings, and happiness.
The trick to the super-crayon was to keep adding new favorites back into the tin, baking, and repeating, for many tomorrows to come. Combining favorites to make new life happinesses.
2022-03-01 00:31:17
“Are you alright?” It was Hanna calling my mobile phone in the middle of July. I had left my Brooklyn neighborhood for upstate New York that summer month “to write” and Hanna, my neighborhood dry cleaner was calling to check in on me — never having called before — worried that something had happened to me since she didn’t see me walking by daily with my dog.
This is New York.
It was on this day 23 years ago that I moved to New York City, intending only to stop here on my way to something else. It seems the city has become my something else, many times over, its pedestrians upon dog parks upon stoops upon protesters upon subways upon heat-lamped dinners becoming the backdrop and material of my world.
Today, I enjoyed looking back on some of my city accounting since:
Am I alright? I am indeed, for I have known what it is to have been a New Yorker.
