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, 2×4 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.

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