The New School - Program in Transdisciplinary Design (TransDesign) - Overview
MFA in TransDesign at Parsons The New School for Design
Located in New York City's Greenwich Village, Parsons The New School for Design has cultivated outstanding artists, designers, scholars, business people, and community leaders for more than a century. Today, when design thinking is increasingly being employed to solve complex global problems, Parsons is leading new approaches to art and design education.
The Master of Fine Arts in Transdisciplinary Design (TransDesign), situated in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, is an academic laboratory for graduate students facing the complex challenges of today's 24/7 global culture through new forms of collaborative, cross-disciplinary practice.
Graduates of the program may work in conventional design consultancies, but will also be qualified to apply their skills in areas outside of traditional design realms. These include careers that involve structuring health care policy; rebuilding infrastructure; and rethinking public education, micro-businesses, and non-governmental organizations
Pioneering Design for the 21st Century
The MFA in TransDesign is a 2-year, 60-credit program focusing on design work that incorporates a profound understanding of the ways that design transforms social relations.
Guided by an international advisory board, including leaders from design and business, the program focuses on projects that bring together experts from a variety of backgrounds and points of view to tackle real-world challenges.
For example, in the face of large-scale disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti, students and faculty members -- together with external collaborators -- would explore how to design resilient infrastructures, taking into account the role of social systems and the impact of the built environment on natural ecologies.
Students work in cross-disciplinary teams, consider issues from multiple perspectives, and emerge with a portfolio of projects showcasing design as a process for transforming lives in the 21st century.
Distinctive Professional Skills
Students of the MFA in TransDesign program learn unique skills and capacities that distinguish them professionally, through a platform of study that combines elements of exploration, research, and creative problem solving.
For example, the reflexive collaboration element of the program places students in flexible, multidisciplinary teams to solve complex design problems. Complexity modeling helps them gain new insights into systems and social structures through visual modeling.
Critical reframing challenges students to turn design problems into design opportunities, while design-led research presents them with research problems to resolve through the design process. In fitness prototyping, they tackle complex problems that don't belong to any single design field.
Flexible Pathways in Studio Environment
Students in the TransDesign program at The New School can enroll in one of 4 flexible pathways that lend focus and depth to the educational experience. In the systems pathway, students examine how better integration of ecological, economic, technological, and social systems can work toward common ends. In the sustainability pathway, students explore methods of shifting attitudes toward sustainable practices.
In the social pathway, students use design to prototype new kinds of behavior and new forms of community. Finally, in the urban pathway, students question how designers can transform the everyday experiences and worldviews of urban dwellers into a global dynamic.
As a studio-based program emphasizing collaborative practice, Parsons's MFA allows students and faculty members to work in adaptable multi-modal project rooms, which are transformed to meet the evolving needs of the program and users. The spaces support social and pedagogical interactions between students in separate pathways.
Distinguished Faculty and Advisers
The MFA in TransDesign program is headed by renowned design innovator, educator, and author, Jamer Hunt, PhD, the current chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design.
The program faculty has representatives from a range of disciplines, as well as an advisory board of design and business leaders that include Bruce Nussbaum, professor of innovation and design at The New School and "BusinessWeek" contributing editor; Tucker Viemeister, chief of the Lab at Rockwell Group; and Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Programs, Speakers, and Symposia
Parsons is part of The New School, a leading university in New York City. Throughout the year, Parsons and other divisions of The New School host events and programming featuring conversations with leading design thinkers, scientists, innovators, and architects, as well as symposia in partnership with other public and private sector sponsors. For example, "Headspace" was a recent symposium on scent and design, held at the Museum of Modern Art, in partnership with International Flavors and Fragrances.