I can never quite get across to outsiders how wonderful studying at SVA has been. The program is comprised of a carefully curated group of faculty and students, whose interactions serves to expand our understanding of design, and our roles in it. The faculty I converse with day-to-day are brillant in ways I can’t express.

Part of why the program works is due to that careful curation. The conversations simply would not work as well if the classes had a hundred students, instead of the current dozen. Nonetheless I always wish that I can transport my friends inside our classrooms, if only to eavesdrop on the conversations we are having.

This is why I thought it was a brilliant idea when Nick suggested, “Dude, you should blog your classes at SVA, Blake Masters style.” Blake Masters is a Stanford student who blogged each and every class he had with Peter Thiel. His blog gave the rest of the internet a rare glimpse into Thiel’s class on startups. The posts spawned multiple hacker news threads and stirred quite a bit of discussion outside the classroom.

With Blake’s blog as a model, and in the spirit of learning in public, let me introduce you to The Common Class Project:

The Common Class Project is an exploration into what happens when you take exceptional university content and give it to the world. We believe knowledge is a public good. The more people that have access to it, the better.

This is our version of the commonplace book, which once comprised the collected knowledge of a group of people, whether that was a town, a village, a place of worship, or a family. You could say it was an early form of social reading. You could also say it’s a microcosm of what the Internet has become.

- About The Common Class Project

The project will follow classes from universities around New York. My friend Sonia Saraiya will be blogging the Entrepreneurial Journalism class at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. I will be blogging Karen McGrane’s Design Management class at SVA. We have at least one other class in the pipelines as well. Stay tuned.

For my blog of Karen’s class, my primary goal is to to capture and distill the gist of the conversations in class. I will also be experimenting with Branch a bit to see if we can put some interesting discussion together. Things are still very fluid - I suspect we’ll be doing some improvising as we go along. My hope is that you will get a glimpse of what makes the interaction design program at SVA so special.

As always, I’d love to hear from you, especially if you have suggestions to make things better. So check out commonclass.org, ping Nick, Sonia or I, and say hi!