Killeen Hanson

In this course, reading, discussion and exercises focus on analyzing how design shapes – and is shaped by – everyday experience. Primary emphasis is placed on introducing skills in strategic or motivated observation – that is, on looking at the world as a designer. The course is also writing- and reading-intensive, and encourages students to develop strength in close reading and analysis, critical thinking and academic writing.

Spring 2021 Syllabus - Inclusive Design
Fall 2020 - Designing Objects/Designing Environments
Spring 2020 Publication - Encyclopedia of Everyday Experience
Spring 2020 Syllabus - Thing Theory

The New School / Parsons School of Design / School of Design Strategies

In the second term of this two-semester course, students are required to demonstrate an iterative design and development approach to proposed strategies for creative business-inflected intervention. Students opting to continue project work initiated during Senior Project 1 will engage in deeper inquiries to develop their investigations, ventures, or campaigns through further field work involving prototypes and testing, refinement of insights and development of robust and defensible strategic direction around all aspects of the project. Students opting not to continue work from Senior Project 1 will engage in the same set of activities, structured by a client brief provided by the program. In both instances, project design, development, and implementation strategies are expected to actively engage critical stakeholders in a rigorous, thoughtful and professional manner.

Spring 2021 Syllabus

Oscar Wilde reminds us that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing… Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

In 1774, Mother Ann Lee and eight “Shaking Quakers” landed in New York Harbor and embarked on one of America’s greatest social experiments. Over the next two centuries, the spiritual utopian communities founded by the Shakers made way for secular successors including the Fouriers, Oneidans, Drop City, Rajneeshpuram, among many others. Regardless of underlying ideology, each American utopia was founded in direct response to particular social, political, and economic stressors of the times: the spiritual prosecution of the 18th century; the industrial revolution in the 19th century; and the international conflicts, civil unrest, and culture of consumption that took hold in the 20th century. The prototype nature of each new visionary project captured the American imagination, speculating that small, planned communities might be the ideal mechanisms with which to remake the world. With today’s unprecedented wealth gap, a looming climate crisis, and a increasing disconnect between our physical lives and the expectations of digital culture, now seems a time ripe for new utopian prototypes. Students will spend 15 weeks investigating the ideal of utopia through critical theory, hands-on making, and a weekend design/build residency at the Hancock Shaker Village Museum (Pittsfield, MA). Students will have unique access to Shaker artifacts and archival materials and will use these primary sources alongside works of art, literature, and social history to examine the history of utopias and the ways in which ideologies take shape in designed objects, spaces, and social systems. Students will then turn a designer’s eye to today’s social, technological, environmental, economic, and political landscape to design and propose speculative objects, spaces, and systems for a future utopia.

Fall 2019 Syllabus

Informed by a wide range of thinkers, students examine culture as a set of practices realized in and through various types of objects and quasi-objects; map productive, perhaps unexpected exchanges between art, craft, design, architecture, media, and technology; and develop criteria for thinking about emerging applications that reconfigure these domains. Throughout, we will be interested in exploring contemporary relations between hand and mind, human and machine, making and thinking, objects and systems, materiality and abstraction, and the ramifications of their interaction for perception, sensibility, and intelligence.

Spring 2018 Exhibition: Boxing Practice
Spring 2018 Syllabus

This project-based course introduces information theory and the various means of visually representing the world with the intention of uncovering hidden realities and effects. Throughout the course, students explore, analyse and reconfigure quantitative and qualitative data and use fundamental graphical principles to present their findings. Students hence engage with mapping as a creative activity that sets the stage for the planning of design interventions.

Fall 2020 Syllabus

The New School / Parsons School of Design / School of Design Strategies

This project-based course introduces information theory and the various means of visually representing the world with the intention of uncovering hidden realities and effects. Throughout the course, students explore, analyse and reconfigure quantitative and qualitative data and use fundamental graphical principles to present their findings. Students hence engage with mapping as a creative activity that sets the stage for the planning of design interventions.

Fall 2020 Syllabus

The New School / Parsons School of Design / School of Design Strategies

This project-based course introduces information theory and the various means of visually representing the world with the intention of uncovering hidden realities and effects. Throughout the course, students explore, analyse and reconfigure quantitative and qualitative data and use fundamental graphical principles to present their findings. Students hence engage with mapping as a creative activity that sets the stage for the planning of design interventions.

Spring 2020 Syllabus
Fall 2019 Syllabus
Spring 2019 Publication - Notes for Future Anthropologists
Spring 2019 Syllabus
Fall 2018 Syllabus
Fall 2017 Syllabus

The New School / Parsons School of Design / School of Design Strategies

Through a combination of lecture, critique, and hands-on learning, students will gain an understanding of what it takes to make an interview a successful one. Students will be exposed to advanced work and engage in critical discussions about what makes interviews effective, and how they can be used for powerful storytelling. The course will provide students with a foundation in identifying interviewees, researching and preparing questions for the interview, sensitive listening, and follow-up questions. Lessons included “Identifying the Story,” “Listening for the Why,” and “How to Ask the Right Questions,” among others.

NW Documentary

Kids, cameras, science, and fun! We learn about nature by going out in nature. From the high deserts of Oregon to the Redwood Forests, we explore tide pools and abandoned homesteads, canoe estuaries, and hunt for thunder eggs. Along the way, we learn from the people who live and work in these remote regions, such as forest fire fighters, naturalists, and Native Americans. Films created in our camps have won the coveted Student Production Awards presented at the Northwest Regional Emmy® Awards. In collaboration with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry - OMSI.

Summer 2013 Films
Summer 2012 Films
Summer 2011 Films

NW Documentary

In Recording Resilience, we work with teenagers who have recently suffered the tragic loss of a loved one. In partnership with the Dougy Center, we create a supportive, healing opportunity for the participants to create their own personal film under the direct guidance of professional filmmakers. The workshop results in the teens each creating a personal documentary about their loss, and then sharing the film at a public screening, online, in NW Documentary’s library, and within larger support groups at The Dougy Center.

Summer 2012 Films
Summer 2011 Films

NW Documentary