The School of Visual Arts’ new Visible Futures Lab blends high and low-tech fabrication tools to empower the next generation of student designers.

In the MFA in Products of Design program, Allan Chochinov gives students the opportunity to investigate and influence real-world problems. Whether looking at clean water access or early childhood education, graduate students coming into the Visible Futures Lab design product prototypes to engage their clients in new ways of thinking about problems.

Allan believes “a designer’s true superpower is probably making the invisible visible.” Through the new making studio at SVA, his students have had the opporunity to make their ideas immediately tangible, introducing a new immediacy into their work.

“One of the great things about the new tools and technologies is just how quickly somebody  can get into them and be able to make something that actually goes or works, lights up or tweets out. . . New platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are allowing people to get into sensors and outputs and code quickly in a way that frankly they had never dreamed of.”