Yvette Chaparro
PhD Candidate 2020-23
Born in Washington, DC and raised in Bogotá, Colombia; Yvette Chaparro received her degree in Industrial Design from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. After moving to New York, she studied film and directed a documentary called “Designers on Design”. The film, which included interviews with some of the most influential designers of our time, was screened at the Tribeca Grand in New York and was shown around the world with the exhibit: “Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life” by the Walker Art Center.
Through her own studio she has worked for a number of different design firms and companies, designing exhibit spaces, signage, retail fixtures, furniture, lighting, bathroom fixtures, faucets, tabletop, housewares, hardware, accessories, and more.
Yvette completed her Master’s degree in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, her thesis dealt with the concepts of Modularity and Morphology in the context of families of objects, as a way of teaching design through exploration and discovery.
She teaches at Parsons in New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Product and Industrial Design, she is currently serving as the director of the MFA Industrial Design programme.
praxis statement
Yvette continuously tries to understand basic concepts through experimentation and making as research. Starting with past experiments on modularity and morphology, trying to understand families of objects [Master of Industrial Design thesis topic], she is now exploring new concepts such as typologies, the programme, and growth systems, the questions translate into formal experiments that can help answer initial questions and ideally will identify new questions that can move the exploration along.
If one is able to organize the exploration and the questions in a method for discovery, one can use the method to help others discover what design is and how they can further their own inquiries, therefore, learning through making and discovery.
Her professional practice can be considered an extension of her research, where she has worked on various families of objects. She believes that being a practitioner, a researcher, and an educator will help on each of the other areas.
research interest
By exploring and pushing the boundaries of basic concepts of Industrial Design such as typology, morphological manipulation, formal relationships, materiality, production processes, the programme, etc. one might be able to deconstruct the discipline into its basic abstract components or concepts.
While understanding these basic concepts, or the essence of an object, one can look at the analysis of opposing forces of the programme and morphological experiments that can allow for both disciplined rigor and discovery. Phenomenology and abstraction considered opposites could be brought together.
She continues to ask the questions of learning and teaching through making as discovery.
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