Karina Infante – First Recipient of Nate Berkus Scholarship for Socially Conscious Design
Infante brings her lens as a former educator and case manager for children in foster care to every design she creates.
“This scholarship makes me feel like there is a lane for me in the big world of design.”
Karina Infante ’21 (MFA1)
NYSID’s leadership has named Karina Infante the first recipient of the Nate Berkus Scholarship for Socially Conscious Design. Infante is an MFA1 student in her final year, a first- generation American of Dominican descent, and a former case manager for children in the foster care system. Trustee Kelly Williams and The Williams Legacy Foundation established the scholarship in 2019 in honor of Nate Berkus, a proponent of socially conscious and charitable work in design. The scholarship is intended for interior design students pursuing a course of study with a demonstrated emphasis on improving the human condition, which Infante, emphatically, is.
Upon hearing she won the scholarship and became the first Nate Berkus scholar, Infante felt her winding path to interior design had been justified. She says, “It feels really good to have my passion for socially conscious design validated. I feel more confident that it might be possible to blend my desire to help people with my creative abilities. This scholarship makes me feel like there is a lane for me in the big world of design.”
When Infante graduated from her BFA program, she wanted to do good in the world and thought she might become a counselor. Her first job out of college was as a youth educator in an afterschool program called Child Center NY, working for underserved children in the NYC public schools. Even as she tutored, she found herself moving around furniture and decorating the walls of her classroom. She was tuned into the way the environment impacted her students’ learning. Her second job was as a case worker for children in the foster care system (Child Protective Services) through a nonprofit called New York Foundling. In this job, Infante found herself laying awake at night, worrying about the children she was charged with helping. She was disturbed by the home environments some of the children were living in. She says, “Working in foster care, I saw the conditions people were living in. The home is so important. It became apparent to me how much the environment impacts a child’s development and education.” Infante began to wonder if there was a way she could help people besides counseling and case work; she dreamed about changing peoples’ physical environments.
“I decided to unleash my creative side and go for it—full time—at NYSID,” she remembers. Infante loved her design courses at NYSID, but noted that in the traditional sense, the discipline is focused on “abundance and the sensibilities of the art world.” She was extremely grateful that NYSID’s curriculum included opportunities to help people in need through design.
Over the summer of 2019, she participated in NYSID’s Service Learning studio, working with a team of peers guided by faculty member Terry Kleinberg to provide design plans for the offices and counseling center of a nonprofit organization called Safe Horizon, which provides shelter, therapy, and advocacy for victims of violence. Infante worked on the counseling rooms, and her past experience as a case worker colored the way she saw the redesign. “I have a lot of empathy for people in caretaking and counseling roles,” she says. When she visited the original space (dreary, overstuffed, and run down), she immediately thought about the impact on the staff’s morale. She wanted to provide details that helped calm and restore the social workers, because she understands that people in counseling jobs often experience secondary trauma and “empathy fatigue.” She thought the chaos caused by the lack of storage was one of the biggest problems with the existing space, so she came up with a way to use the spaces under the windowsills as bookshelves. Her team also brought soothing elements of nature into the counseling spaces. She says, “In school, there are really no limitations on your designs because there are no real client demands or budgets. Service Learning was different. I liked having a strict budget because it taught me I could do a lot with a little.”
Rendering of proposed counseling room in the Safe Horizon Staten Island community program office, 2019.
Now in the planning phase of her thesis, Infante understands that this is an opportunity to dream about what interior design can be, and to express her values as a designer. She is still enmeshed in her research, but has enough direction to say that it will be an orphanage based in Puerto Rico. Infante is the child of Dominican immigrants, born and raised in Queens. She’s visited the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and is extremely attuned to the way natural disasters like hurricanes, landslides and earthquakes displace children, robbing them of their homes, and sometimes their parents and protectors. She sees the project as a way to synthesize her knowledge of child psychology, education, and design. She says, “Natural disasters have increased the displacement of children throughout the world and recently, this has been a huge problem in Puerto Rico. According to UNICEF, this is happening by the thousands. My hope is that my design for a stable, environmentally friendly orphanage can be part of the solution.”