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& Then has a new look and reorganized content! Class Notes are now integrated on the main page  (an archive of Class Notes prior to September, 2012 can be found just above the post archive in the right-hand menu). We’ve developed new icons denote whether a post is a feature story or a class note:

 

 

 

We’d appreciate feedback about our new look, please email your comments to Sara at schadwick@suffolk.edu.

We’re thrilled to announce that our Interior Design student group, under the leadership of Nancy Hackett, Interior Design program Co-Director, was the winner of the Best Design Show entry for schools at the IIDA Fashion Show on October 25th. This year’s theme was Audacity and our entry certainly fit that bill! Pictured in costume are, from left to right: Sarah Whalen (MA), Luke Tanguay (BFA) and Julie Jaenicke (MA), along with BFA students Krista Osipovitch, Sarah Gosson and Heather Kology. For additional information on the fashion show, please visit the Interior Architecture/Design blog at http://sites.suffolk.edu/interiordesign.

2012 – Rebecca Goldstein (Interior Design), who went to work for Winter Street Architects in Salem (MA) immediately after graduation (well, she went to Europe on vacation first, but then started at Winter Street) has moved to Salem to shorten her commute. While she finds working there “a lot of work” and “still pretty cool”, she admits to missing Europe “almost daily. My current dream for later in life is to live in Barcelona with a vacation home in Capri. Not bad right?” Until then, she’s working on multiple projects for Harvard Medical School, along with a few office spaces. You can get in touch with her at rsgoldstein90@gmail.com.

 

2009 – Christina Watka (Fine Arts), who had been Display Coordinator for the Anthropologie in Natick, has relocated to New York. Having decided to move to New York in order to further her career, Christina worked with Anthropologie on a transfer position but, “when the time came to move, there were no positions open in NYC, so I moved anyway and planned to keep in touch with Anthropologie until a new position opened. Then I was contacted by an old manager at Anthro who is now the Regional Visual Manager for Free People (a sister company, on the rise!). She had heard that I couldn’t find a job in NYC right away and said she wanted to hire an additional District Display Coordinator for Free People. I obviously accepted!! I couldn’t be happier. I ended up getting a promotion out of taking the scary leap into NYC without a job…. I took two months off to discover the city, visit family and move in completely. I start with Free People tomorrow [October 22nd] when I will spend the entire week in Philadelphia prototyping the new holiday display. As far as I know, I am one of six District Display Coordinators and I will be based in NYC (Soho specifically), overseeing three specific stores as well as travelling to do store openings and workshops.”  For more information, email Christina at christinawatka@gmail.com.

 

2001 – Nicole Wang (Graphic Design) posted on the NESADU Facebook page an item announcing the “new look to The Bold Italic, an online magazine about San Francisco, for San Francisco, and contributed [to] by San Francisco talents. I feel especially honored to have worked with a brilliant team on the redesign: UI Developer KC Oh and Creative Director Tyler Walseth, who actually cares about typography. And it’s just gratifying to design something for the community! ;-)” Check out The Bold Italic at http://www.thebolditalic.com and get in touch with Nicole through Facebook or email her at nwang@macbox.com.

 

2001 – Stephanie Rossi (Interior Design), Principal of Spazio Rosso Design, has been chosen to re-design the master bath in this year’s Junior League of Boston Show House, the Potter Estate in Newton. Renamed by Stephanie “La Sala da Bagno: The Bathing Room”, the master bath, as Stephanie says, “houses the famous ‘Needle Shower’ and apparently has already garnered the nickname ‘The 50 Shades of Grey Bath’. I had nothing to do with that unofficial title but, if it gets people talking, then who am I to judge?” Featuring 35 designers chosen from 100 applicants, the roster of Show House designers is heavy with NESADSU talent: Elizabeth Benedict (Decorative Arts 2007) is redoing the “lady’s den”; Hilary Bovey (Fashion Illustration) a guest room; Laurie Gorelick (Interior Design 2000) a third floor studio (the “Mommy Time-Out Room”); Jeanne Finnerty (Interior Design 1995); and former student Dianne Ramponi. Another former student, Kristen Rivoli, is on the show house advisory committee. The Show House, a Second Empire Victorian on the campus of the Jackson Walnut School, is open to the public until November 18th and is located at 71 Walnut Park, a short hop from the Newton Mass. Pike exit. For ticket information, visit www.jlboston.org. You can get in touch with Stephanie at srossi@spaziorosso.com, with Elizabeth at  lizabethhomedecor@yahoo.com, Hilary at boveysteers@aol.com, Jeanne at jeanne@finnertydesign.com, Laurie at lg_interiors@comcast.net, and Dianne at dlr@dianneramponi.com.

 

1968 – Lorna (Finch) Sussman (Interior Design), who was profiled in the September Class Notes, sent us another update on what she’s been doing since NESA. “After graduation in 1968, I moved to Toronto and had no problem finding a job. I worked for a small residential interior design company, [for] a well-known senior designer and her architect husband. They had a very well established business doing beautiful stately homes in the Forest Hill neighborhood. My experience of living in Boston and studying the art and architecture there gave me such an appreciation of tradition, history and elegance and the importance of preservation. At a later date I worked as an assistant designer at a Yorkville interior design and custom lamp company, later leaving to get married. Nowadays, with four grown children, six, soon to be seven, grandchildren, and three step-grandchildren, there is little time for my chosen career but the enrichment and life skills it provided me, including a love of fine art and furniture-making, was invaluable.” You can get in touch with Lorna at lorsuss1@rogers.com.

 

2012 – Jacquelyn Schaab (Graphic Design) has followed a tradition of some years by landing a job at Digitas in Boston, where she’ll be working with Matt Adams (Graphic Design 2011) under Tony Capozzi (Graphic Design 2001). “I start October 29th [and] I’m really excited!” Jackie added, in an email to Graphic Design Program Director Laura Golly, “I just wanted to thank you again. NESAD really gave me the skills that I needed to set myself and my work apart and allowed me to get the job! Even the fact that I am working with two NESAD alumni just reinforces that as well!”  Email congratulation to Jackie at jaschaab@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on what’s happening at NESADSU, check out all of these:

NESADSU is on Twitter! Follow updates @SuffolkNESAD

The Interior Design and Graphic Design blogs will tell you everything you need to know about what’s going on in those programs, from exhibitions to faculty news to awards won by our students. There’s even more alumni news there as well. In addition the Fine Arts and Interior Design programs, have current student bloggers who are writing about their experiences, as students and as fledgling artists and designers. Check out all of these at www.suffolk.edu/nesad and click on “blogs”” in the upper left-hand corner. While you’re at it, take a look at the NESADSU website itself. You’ll find out all kinds of things you didn’t know!

 

Kate McLean (Graphic Design 2004), our Overseas Correspondent in the print version of & Then, is taking her life-long fascination with maps to new heights. Having created tactile maps for the blind, topographical maps from strange substances like lard, and fictional but not unimaginable maps, such as The City of the Eternal Itinerant, she has recently moved to mapping cities using smell. Paris, Edinburgh and Glasgow have all come under her nose and, as she’s not an artist who confines her parameters in any way, she has moved on to the States.

This summer, after much research, Kate created the first smell map of Newport, RI, a small city whose non-nasal signatures are many (think of sailing, the Gilded Age mansions, beaches, fishing). Enlisting the noses of Newporters, on bike rides and smell walks, and with the, first, concurrence and then, enthusiastic support, of the Discover Newport Visitors Center, she created a visual representation of the signature smells of the city and then fabricated the smells to go with it. Here’s the story:

Hello. My name is Kate McLean and I graduated from NESADSU in Graphic Design in 2004. I now research urban smell landscapes (smellscapes) and create and design smell maps.

But why?
To sensitize tourists and visitors to a new place to use a largely-ignored sense in their perception of that place.

But why smell?
Because smell has a “do not enter brain processing” connection with our emotions, making smell the supreme retainer of memory over our other senses. We have 100% smell recall after one year but only 30% sight memory after three months. The first time we smell a new scent we automatically associate it with whether we like it or not (positive or negative) and we associate it with the location where we smell it. Therefore I propose that smell can be used in tourism marketing to foster lasting memories of a place.

But why a map?
Because maps are an old graphic device of data visualization. Maps show proximity, range, location – all characteristics of smell that are difficult to explain verbally in any kind of a coherent way. Moreover I have been fascinated by maps since I was a small child. My first book memory is of the map at the start of Winnie-the-Pooh that depicts his small world and I grew up thinking that all books had a map as the end paper. I wanted to make maps but realized, at ten years of age, that the world had already been discovered. So, if the physical, geographical world has been represented then I just had to discover a new territory – my landscape is the smellscape.

Where have you “Smell Mapped”?
I started with Paris because it has astonishing emotion-inducing scents. The Paris smell map is a virtual dérive, a collection of perfumes placed on shelving on a board showing Parisian streets. Audience members walk a pace at a time to sniff as they “wander” the city’s streets. I moved on to Edinburgh. That city has one pervasive smell – identified as malt extract from the breweries – which sweeps the city’s streets, but the secondary smells are equally evocative. For Edinburgh I developed a visual language expressing how the smells move in the prevailing south-westerly winds. In the summer of 2011 I did a swift sniff of New York’s smelliest block and created a different visualization. Representing the larger scale of a couple of blocks instead of a whole city demanded I rethink how the smells move and interact with each other. I moved on to Glasgow, researching in the winter of 2011-2012. Glasgow is only 40 miles from Edinburgh but it has its own damp microclimate which affects how its smells linger in the air and this changed the visual language once again.

Do the maps smell?
The maps themselves do not smell; instead I make up individual scents using only natural ingredients that best reflect the smells I have selected to depict visually. Each scent is stored in its own bottle which is stored in a small cabinet underneath the map. I prefer to keep the contents of the bottles hidden so that the audience cannot rely on visual cues to identify the smells. For this reason I do not label the smells. I make most of the smells myself, trying to capture and hold elusive scents in the small bottles. I have learned how to distill rose petals, to create a perfume of stinky cheese, to depict the smell of penguins at the zoo without harming a single penguin. I can fabricate the smell of a building site and of boy’s toilets in primary schools. Stabilizing the scents but keeping them volatile enough to sniff is another art of the smell mapper and I’m keeping a recipe book to publish when I am famous!

Where in the U.S. did you decide to smell map?
For my first U.S. smell map I approached the tourist board of Newport, RI. While my previous smell maps have been exhibited in science museums, science festivals or art spaces, I want to test the possible links to tourism, to see whether tourists in a visitors’ center would take the time to “explore” a smell map. In a museum setting people are generally willing to engage and participate; there is, in fact, an expectation that they will do so. In a visitors’ center, the role of which is, of course, information synthesis and dispersal, there is no such expectation. Discover Newport’s Vice President of Marketing, Kathryn Farrington, was, after a very brief period of skepticism, incredibly supportive, a rock throughout the summer. Refuting that kind of skepticism is a key skill in a smell map proponent.

How do you research?
Each project varies slightly as I amend my methodology. Initially I decided on the smells based on personal experience. Then I started asking local residents of the city in question to provide me with the smells that they associate with their environments. This progressed to asking for comments via my blog and to asking local media to help solicit responses. Overall there is nothing to beat talking to local people, and in Newport I took time to devise a couple of smell walks and a wonderful smell bike ride. Bikers are keen sniffers! The resulting conversations revealed a vast amount of data including numerous descriptions of the ocean smell from the bikers (ocean, salt, weed, brine, home, fog) and a collection of urban aromas that combined the smell of homes, transport and business with the overall heady aroma of freshly frying bacon just outside the Newport police station.

What does smell mapping show?
I regard each map as a sensory portrait of its city. Smell maps depict a combination of history, biology, meteorology, geography, sociology. Edinburgh’s smell map is a series of dichotomies: urban and rural, rich and poor, historical and modern. The smell map of Glasgow illustrates the city’s ability to constantly re-invent itself. Newport’s smell map indicates the close relationship the city has with the ocean, both recreational and as a source of food.

What, or where, next?
First of all, I need to analyze how the Newport Smell Map is received, find out the general public’s response, and ask the staff of the Visitors’ Center what they observe over the three-week period during which the smell map in on display. This will have a direct bearing on whether I continue to work with the smell maps applied to tourism or whether I treat them more as graphic design/art projects. I have three variations in my mind for the future. One is to create a series of seasonal smell maps for a city based on discovering how the smellscape varies over the course of a year. The second is to create a smell map in every continent working with the tourism industries of either Morocco or Rwanda in Africa, and with cities in Asia, South America, the Arctic or Antarctic and Australasia. The third project is a thought about developing a participatory website of global smells, but first I have a new job as a full-time lecturer in Graphic Design at a university in the U.K. Thankfully I will still have time to research, just not as much as in the past couple of years!

Kate

Email: mcleankate@mac.com
Web: www.katemcleandesign.com
Twitter: @katemclean
Blog: http://sensorymaps.blogspot.co.uk

Photograph of Kate courtesy of Meg O’Neill.