Subtraction

The School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Design Criticism program is holding its annual D-Crit Conference on 2 May. The headliners are moderator Julie Lasky, Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, 2x4 founder Michael Rock, and Harvard metaLAB director Jeffrey Schnapp, among others.

However, the real meat of the conference will be the thesis presentations from this year’s graduating class. Yesterday afternoon, I went to the D-Crit space on 21st Street in Manhattan and joined Nicola Twiley as a guest critic for a dry run of the class’ conference presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised by how unusual, inventive, fun and substantive they were. They are definitely not your run-of-the-mill thesis presentations; rather they’re out-of-the-box proposals for taking design criticism out into the real world, where it can reach audiences who would otherwise be completely indifferent to such things. I’ll be there on 2 May and you should be too. Get your tickets here.