The MA Design Studies program welcomed its third cohort with a series of Orientation events designed to introduce everyone to Parsons, the New School, and New York City; and, most of all, to get to know each other a bit before diving into classes. The week began on Monday, August 18th, with official welcomes, followed by informal introductions, toasts, and a wide-ranging conversation with professors Clive Dilnot and Jilly Traganou at Director Susan Yelavich’s loft in Soho.

Appropriately for a program that explores values and ideologies embodied by design, on Tuesday we visited the Guggenheim Museum for a guided tour of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.

On Wednesday, Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine at the Rubin Museum of Art offered a contemplative respite in the middle of a week of concentrated informational meetings with librarians, archivists and student services administrators.

The day after exploring bodily health at the Rubin, we shifted gears on Thursday and looked at how design can contribute to the health of the city and its residents.  We were hosted at the loft of Marpillero Pollak Architects in Tribeca, by MAP partner Linda Pollak, who shared insights into how she and her partner Sandro Marpillero approach the design of urban open spaces in conjunction with residential architecture, museums, and cultural institutions.  After a conversation that ranged from the efficacy of New York City’s project to plant a million trees to designing for differently abled bodies, we were treated to a tour of MAP’s live-work loft with its own unique network of open spaces.

Thoroughly saturated, but with a better sense of each other and the program they’ve embarked on, the Class of 2016 closed out a week by celebrating with all of  the other new MA and MFA students at a reception on Thursday evening at Parsons—a reception that marked not just the end of Orientation but the beginning of a host of  exciting new academic trajectories.

Tags: class of 2016, orientation