Johann Sagan

Dear guests,

Welcome to the 2023 MA Design Exhibition! We are pleased that our students’ work and commitment is being publicly recognized and celebrated.

As these young designers complete their studies with us here at the Department of Design, and prepare to leave our halls and enter their working lives, they are going forward with a number of questions.  “What will my role in the field be? What should design as a field contribute to the world?”

Just as design as a field responds to its context, the students’ projects are emerging from the environment from which they came, and in which they have learned and lived, and in which they will soon work as professionals. They are entering a world of challenges: professional challenges, political challenges, technical challenges, and social challenges, even existential challenges. But, the students have approached these challenges with the foundation of empathy and care.

Underlying each of these projects is a deep sense of caring. Each of these new masters approaches their project with care for their subject and for the world around them. Some projects deal with restoration and repurposing existing structures and places.  Other projects address the needs of underserved populations and the experiences of under-recognized users. The projects celebrate the worn, the aged, folkways of local traditions and crafts, and urge us to develop new practices and approaches to design as we have known it. All the projects have some sort of critical engagement with the field and fundamentally interrogate the field’s practices and aims.

It’s a sign of the world that they come from that this kind of care is necessary.  And it gives me great hope about the world that they’re going into that this care forms the core of their values and their practice.

Congratulations to each of our new masters!

Johann Sagan, Ph.D.

MA Program Coordinator