Sven Travis Edit 3

I sat waiting for Sven Travis in a small, grey waiting room next to the water cooler on the 5th floor of the Parsons 66 5th Ave building.

After 30 minutes lapsed after our initial meeting time I checked in again with the baby faced secretary. After a brief phone conversation the door opened and a large, tall man emerged to call my name.

This is the man I’ve heard compared to Moses in the world of academic administration. “If a building was falling down he’d know exactly what to do, and he’d be right,” said Charlie Pizzarello, Director of Operations for the School of Art, Media, and Technology. He has just the right amount of swagger, accentuated with two gold hoops through his ears. I believe Charlie.

After being waved and ushered into a room with large windows and numerous houseplants populating each table. He immediately excused himself for a cup of a coffee while I'm left alone to count the plants (there’s about ten).

Sven Travis is a busy man to catch. Last week he was in Asia, and although he is back he is never in one place for long. That is to be expected if you are a dean of a school like Parsons, where it is almost required to work around the clock.

According to the Parsons website, “Travis is spearheading several current AMT research projects, including ENGINE (a social technology platform), SALTED/UNSALTED (a virtual fabrication laboratory built on game consoles), YACHT CLUB (a new media collaboration)…Travis is [also] the mastermind behind the annual CDT ski trip.”--only a portion of the projects that make up his schedule.

It has been 30 years since Travis began his career at Parsons. He founded the Design and Technology department in the late 90’s when he was only one of about twenty fulltime faculty members. Now the Design and Technology department has evolved into the School of Art Media and Technology—which features design based programs from graphic design, illustration, communication design to fine arts.

Travis admits he had never originally planned to stay at Parsons, now occupying the role of Dean of the School of AMT. “Perhaps, I was too outspoken about my ideas and they were just like, here you do it! I never planned to be here for this long, that’s not how life works,” Travis said, ”It just happened.”

One of those ideas being a global design program that would not be centered anywhere specifically but among ten or twelve locations. He is active in China (traveling there a couple times a year), one of the countries to be featured in the newly developing program.

Travis counts, as if on his hand, the many features that constitute his role, “I solve lots of problems, get along with people, I’m really good at initiating new projects, but my biggest job is to be a primary advocate, and be a visionary to a great extent.”

Travis still manages to find time to teach his classes despite which country he may happen to find himself in. “I was holding a Skype class in Seoul, Korea last week. I didn’t think about it until I realized ‘shit. I have to stay up all night.’ I would be teaching the class 3:30 AM my time.”

The time difference didn’t put a damper on his class as he proceeded to give them a tour of his presidential suite—“I mean what is a presidential suite?”—and tell a joke regarding the time he had been spending in Asia.

“Eyeglasses are cheap in China,” he said. “So I asked my class, ‘You may have been wondering what I have been doing in Asia?’ And then I put on my red [rimmed] glasses!”

Despite traveling frequently and spearheading new projects, Travis prefers to stay close to home. Married for 21 years, and living in Brooklyn for 30, Travis is deeply rooted to his adopted home—almost 1000 miles away from his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin.

Travis never expected to live in Williamsburg (moving there decades before it became the hipster metropolis it is today), especially after being cautioned by a friend, “Don’t. Under any circumstances go to Brooklyn.”

It was soon after this warning, Travis emerged from the subway station onto the corner of N 7th and Bedford, only to immediately double back for the next train heading back to Manhattan.

“People [were] standing on corners of all backgrounds and races. A very typical Brooklyn street, not what it is now,” said Travis. “‘Oh my god! This is so horrible!’ I remembered [thinking].”

After another day of fruitless apartment hunting in Manhattan, Travis rode the subway again into Brooklyn, and walked the seven blocks to the loft that would become his residence for the next thirty years.

Travis pauses for a moment reflecting on his time Brooklyn and how it corresponds to his time spent working for Parsons. “You got to go with the flow. Got to have confidence in your beliefs. I could be second-guessing myself but I don’t,” he said. “I’m sure I’m wrong a lot, but I think that’s the point is to do what is weird—no, what the weirdest thing possible is—until someone says nu-uuuh.”

Travis hasn’t taken a sip of his coffee yet, it now only wafting faint steam. After a short pause he continues, “There’s a great Talking Heads song that goes ‘If your job isn’t what you love than something isn’t right.’