Author: Design Incubation

Designing Your Research Agenda (DYRA) 4.2

Fulbright Scholar Edition

Designing Your Research Agenda (DYRA) 4.2
Friday, March 7, 2025
2:00PM EST
Virtual Event

Designing Your Research Agenda (DYRA) is a panel discussion and open forum for design scholars and researchers to discuss aspects of their research agendas. We aim to open a dialog regarding the challenges of discovering one’s design research inquiry. DYRA is a design research webinar series.

This event focuses on Fulbright scholars in our Communication Design community. 

Panelists

Sarah Edmands Martin
Assistant Professor
University of Notre Dame

Natalia Ilyin 
Professor
Cornish College of the Arts and VCFA

Natacha Poggio
Associate Professor
University of Houston–Downtown

Join Us!

If you would like to join us but find the cost a challenge, please reach out for access: info@designincubation.com

Step 1 of 4

Ticket to attend the online event.
Design Incubation is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Become an annual member, and you will receive free access to our colloquia and webinars (including this event) for a year.

Donate a ticket so others to attend the online event.

Some of the questions we will discuss with panelists include:
  • How did you determine your research agenda (high-level timeline of your career/trajectory)?
  • If you were going to position your work within a category, would you say your research addresses: design theory, design history, design practice, design research (traditional graphic design, speculative design, UX, UI, typography, AR, VR, creative computing, design solutions, etc.), design pedagogy, or something else?
  • What led you to pursue a Fulbright? 
  • What are some highlights from your Fulbright experience?
  • How has the Fulbright affected your creative/research trajectory?

Moderators

Jessica Barness
Kent State University

Heather Snyder Quinn
DePaul University

Biographies

Sarah Edmands Martin

Sarah Edmands Martin is Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the University of Notre Dame where her practice unfolds at the intersections of speculative design, digital storytelling, and media aesthetics. She has received fellowships that include a 2024 Fulbright, a 2023 Design Writing Fellowship at Chicago’s Writing Space, and a 2021–22 Research Fellowship at the Institute for Digital Arts + Humanities. She has published in books and journals such as CounterText, Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives, Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices, and AIGA’s Eye on Design. Her current book projects include Beautiful Bureaucracy: A Design Brief for Civic Life (MIT Press, 2025) and Otherworldly Games: An Atlas of Playable Realities. Her design work has been recognized and published by PRINT, Graphis, the Paris Design Awards, London International Creative, and the Creative Communication Awards. Her industry-facing work spans clients from Citibank to AMC’s The Walking Dead.

Fulbright Scholar to the Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

Natalia Ilyin 

Natalia Ilyin teaches design history and criticism, design for social activism, and transition design at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. She and her former co-teacher Liz Patterson created the Parallel Narratives curriculum and published the Parallel Narratives anthology. These are extensive annotated historical bibliographies created by third-year undergraduate students on topics not covered in the contemporary canon of design history. A second volume is in production. Natalia is also Founding Faculty for the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she advises candidates in histories, criticism, and critical writing. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, The Cooper Union and the University of Washington, and has acted as Critic for the MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University and at Rhode Island School of Design. Her most recent book, Writing for the Design Mind, is available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Her new book will be available in 2027 from the same publisher, should no new thing arise.

Fulbright Scholar to the Brno University of Technology Architecture Program in Czech Republic. 

Natacha Poggio

Natacha Poggio is an Associate Professor of Design at the University of Houston-Downtown, inspiring socially responsible citizens through design. In 2008, she founded Design Global Change, a collaborative focused on planet-centered solutions for global health, environmental, and social justice issues, impacting communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A three-time recipient of Sappi’s Ideas that Matter award, she has secured over $76,000 in funding to support design for social good. In 2022, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholarship for a marine conservation project in Ecuador. A 2013 TEDx speaker and advocate for social impact design, she lectures internationally, judges competitions, and volunteers with the Winterhouse Institute Council. She holds an M.F.A. in Experience Design from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the University of Buenos Aires. Originally from Argentina, Natacha considers herself a global citizen.

Fulbright Scholar to the Universidad de las Artes del Ecuador, in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Gender, Transgression, and Ritual Torah Preparation

The highly scripted ritual performances, material processes, and acts of mediation that characterize the Torah scribing process.

Leslie Atzmon
Professor
Eastern Michigan University

According to the editors, Sami Sjöberg, Mikko Keskinen, Arja Karhumaa, the volume The Experimental Book Object considers how “historical and contemporary experimentation… has challenged what books are and could be from the perspectives of materiality [and] mediation.” Separating holy artifacts from mundane objects is one the most crucial mediations within most cultures—and it typically involves design. This mediation of materials commonly takes place through an elaborate series of ritual performances, some of which end up with a freshly designed sacred object.

In my chapter for The Experimental Book Object, “Gender, Transgression, and Ritual Torah Preparation,” I focus on the creation of a kosher Torah scroll. I am particularly interested in the highly scripted ritual performances, material processes, and acts of mediation that characterize the Torah scribing process.

This rule-bound undertaking—which involves interactions among the mundane materials used to make a kosher Torah scroll, the bodily and cognitive actions of its scribe, and the environment in which it is created—transforms a set of quotidian materials into a singular holy book object. Because the creating parameters are so strict, one could argue that a kosher Torah is not an experimental book. But I maintain that it is.

Making a kosher Torah scroll that is fit for ritual use is traditionally believed to be prohibited for women. I argue that this is due to women being considered contaminated two weeks out of every month due to menstruation. In this chapter, I use The Women’s Torah Project (2010)—which produced the first Torah written and embellished by an international community of women—as a test case for the role that gender or the gendered body might play in creating an experimental book.

I have long been fascinated by how designers use embodied thinking and making processes to transform raw materials into functioning objects. I have also been fascinated by the processes for making objects that are ostensibly imbued with holiness, such as a kosher Torah scroll. Exploring the relationship between these parallel processes taught me something about design and embodiment. Considering the role that bodily contamination plays in the Jewish bias against female Torah scribes, and realizing that the Torah scribing script is inherently ungendered, gave me new insights into how critical embodiment is to making processes. It also revealed that embodied making or ritual can be exclusive—or inclusive.

Writing this chapter also tested my response to the question “what makes an experimental book?” In The Open Book Project (2014) (https://infinitemiledetroit.com/The_Open_Book_Project.html), Ryan Molloy and I argue that experimental books challenge the definition of what a book can be, and that those who make experimental books interrogate aspects of book-ness. By this definition a Torah scroll is not an experimental book. In her Afterword for The Experimental Book Object, Johanna Drucker writes: “Leslie Atzmon’s discussion of the Women’s Torah Project…offers a significant insight into the way an act as basic as participation in the scribal production of a sacred text can be profoundly transgressive” (Drucker 2024, 306). By understanding making as an embodied process that involves the interplay of the scribe, materials, and environment, I argue that the transgressive act of a female Torah scribe challenges the making process and does interrogate book-ness. In this way, a Torah scribed by one woman or a group of women is indeed an experimental book.

Excerpt

Leslie Atzmon, “Gender, Transgression, and Ritual Torah Preparation” in The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design, Sami Sjöberg, Mikko Keskinen, Arja Karhumaa, eds., London: Routledge, Copyright (2024), 216-217. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. 

The guidelines for the Hebrew letter beit … illustrate the meticulous process to be used for drawing each letter, as well as the critical traditional relationships between each letterform and the other letters (Hebrew letter names are in italic):

Beit: One should take care that the part which protrudes behind is square, so that it will not resemble khaf. If it resembles khaf, it is invalid, and if it is unclear, one shows it to a child (as explained in siman 6). Ideally the right-hand side of the roof has a little prickle pointing to the right and the left-hand side has a little prickle pointing upwards. According to the kabbalah [mysticism, or tradition] it has a thick heel at the bottom so that it resembles a dalet in the throat of a vav; if so, it must be squared at the top to resemble dalet, and have a substantial heel at the bottom which would be the head of the vav. Its height and width should both be three nib-widths, and the gap in the middle should be one nib-width wide (Darkhei Moshe) (Keset Ha Sofer as quoted in Taylor Friedman).

Each letter has specific detailed scribing rules like these ones for beit. Each letter must also have a certain amount of white parchment showing around it. The white spaces within and between letters are analogous to the white fire of the primordial Torah discussed in the previous section, and this letterspacing is integral to a Torah being considered kosher.

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards winning recipient in the category of Scholarship: Publication.

Biography

A designer and design historian, Leslie Atzmon writes on both experimental books and design and science.

In 2014, she edited The Open Book Project book, featuring a critical Introduction by Atzmon, a related exhibition catalogue, essays on the book, and an experimental book design workshop section. Currently she investigates the intersections between design and science.

In 2016, Atzmon was in the UK on a Fulbright fellowship at Central Saint Martins, UAL doing research on Darwin and design thinking.

In 2019/2020, she curated the exhibition Design and Science, which ran at Eastern Michigan’s University Gallery and The Esther Klein Gallery/Science Center in Philadelphia. Atzmon also edited a collection entitled Design and Science (Bloomsbury 2023). This collection examines overlap between design and science through visual metaphor and modeling; biomimicry and biodesign; makers and users; and data manifestation. Atzmon is working on a biodesign textbook with Professor Diana Nicholas of Drexel University.

Mashq Conference 2022 on Arabic Type and Typography 

Seasoned pioneers in Arabic typography to emerging younger practitioners and academicians.

Yara Khoury Nammour
Assistant Professor
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Khajag Apelian
Lecturer
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Mashq 2022 conference was held on October 20–21, 2022 at the American University of Beirut [AUB]. It was the first event dedicated entirely to Arabic type and typography. Organized by AUB’s Arabic Type Unit, a research body committed to advancing Arabic type and typography, the conference marked a groundbreaking milestone in the Arab region.

AUB has long been at the forefront of design education. More than thirty years ago, it pioneered the first graphic design program in the Arab world and was the first to integrate the graphic use of Arabic script into its core curriculum. Building on this legacy, the Arabic Type Unit was established in 2018. Naturally, Mashq 2022 served as an extension of these efforts that provides a platform to explore the historical evolution, current practices, and future directions of Arabic typography in the region.

The organizers made sure that the event spotlighted regional expertise that has long been overlooked, with more than 80% of the speakers being of Arab origin while talks by non-Arab speakers were curated to focus exclusively on Arabic type and typography. The team also made sure to design and develop a dedicated conference bilingual website [www.mashqconference.org], with a strong emphasis on Arabic, further reflected the conference’s dedication to its cultural and linguistic roots. All conference talks were made freely available on the Arabic Type Unit’s dedicated YouTube channel [www.youtube.com/@ATU_org], to extend the event’s reach to a global audience. A summarized video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcNUw5HOgH4&t=17s

Attendees and Participating Institutions

Mashq 2022 succeeded in attracting over 400 attendees, including students (62%), professionals (38%), and professors (13%). Participants mostly came from Lebanese universities such as the Lebanese American University, Notre Dame University, Middle East University, Lebanese University, and Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts. International attendees included those from Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates.

Speakers and Sessions

The conference featured presentations from 15 distinguished speakers, with a diverse spectrum, from seasoned pioneers in Arabic typography to emerging younger practitioners and academicians. This mix fostered a rich exchange of perspectives, blending deep-rooted expertise with fresh, innovative approaches to Arabic type design and visual communication.

Among the speakers, Kameel Hawa’s presentation, “The Spring of Arabic Type,” showcased his innovative efforts to rejuvenate Arabic script through type design and calligraphy, reflecting on its potential for both tradition and modernity. Lara Assouad discussed the graphic visual expression of language and its alphabet, offering insights into how typographic design can shape visual communication. Hatem Imam analyzed the relationship between cultural production and graphic arts, proposing methods to bridge the gap between these two domains. While Onür Yazıcıgil explored the history of Ottoman naskh and its spread beyond the borders of Istanbul in order to contextualize the influence of these typefaces on Turkish and Arabic printing and publishing in Beirut and Cairo. Naïma Ben Ayed also presented collaborative new research that aims to expand Arabic type design pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of ‘self-organized knowledge’ under the School of Commons.

Exhibitions and Workshops

The conference hosted two exhibitions: 100 Best Arabic Posters which celebrated contemporary Arabic poster design of 2021-2022, while the Granshan Type Design Competition Winners exhibition highlighted award-winning Arabic typefaces from 2019 and 2021/2022.

Complementing the exhibitions, workshops were also planned to provide participants with hands-on learning opportunities. Azza Alameddine guided attendees through the complexities of harmonizing Arabic and Latin scripts in logo design during her workshop, “Arabic/Latin Logo Matchmaking.” Georg Seifert introduced participants to the creation of Arabic fonts using Glyphs software in his workshop, “Introduction to Glyphs.”

Diversity and Inclusion

The organizers made it a priority to amplify diverse voices within the Arabic typography community. They took special care to give a platform to the older generation of Arabic typographers and designers, many of whom had not previously been afforded the opportunity to share their work on such a prominent stage. This effort ensured their invaluable contributions and experiences were recognized, preserving their legacy while inspiring a new generation of practitioners.

Additionally, the speaker lineup reflected a wide range of experiences and expertise, spanning seasoned pioneers to emerging practitioners and academicians. This intentional curation fostered an inclusive dialogue that bridged generations and enriched the discussions with diverse perspectives.

Sponsors and Support

Sponsors contributed a total of $12,000 from different entities in the profession and the educational sector. Their contributions were essential to the success of the event. Key sponsors included:

  • Gold Sponsor: Commercial Type
  • Silver Sponsors: Glyphs and TypeTogether
  • Brass Sponsors: Rosetta Type, ISType, Koein, and Morcos Key

Impact and Reflection

Mashq 2022 challenged the dominance of Eurocentric design paradigms by fostering a space where Arabic typography and regional practices took center stage. It offered a compelling alternative to the often homogenized global design landscape. The conference highlighted the possibilities of moving beyond standardized, Westernized approaches in design education and practice, encouraging attendees to rethink the role of cultural identity as an intrinsic element in the creative process rather than a background influence.
Through it all, Mashq demonstrated how design can transcend corporate functionality to serve as a medium for personal narratives, cultural preservation, and regional storytelling. It explored the potential for a design philosophy rooted in local visual culture.

Mashq2022-241211Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner up recipient in the category of Service.

Biography

Yara Khoury Nammour — Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Arabic Type Unit, AUB

Yara is a graphic and type designer, author and educator. She is an assistant professor of graphic design at the American University of Beirut and an independent designer since 2017 after a long-standing career of 20 years as design director at Al Mohtaraf design house. Her work is published in several international books and has authored a book titled ‘Nasri Khattar: A Modernist Typotect’ from Khatt Books. She heads the Arabic Type Research Unit and co-organizes the biennial Mashq conference on Arabic typography at AUB.

Khajag Apelian — Part-time Lecturer of Graphic Design, AUB

Khajag is a lettering artist, type and graphic designer. Khajag has developed typefaces in various scripts, including Arabic, Armenian, and Latin. He designed Arek, a typeface that was awarded the Grand Prize at Granshan 2010 Type Design Competition, and was among the winners of Letter.2, the 2nd international type design competition organized by the Association
Typographique Internationale. He currently operates under the name “debakir” Armenian for “printed type”. He …. and co-organizes the biennial Mashq conference on Arabic typography at AUB.

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories 

A workshop that promotes the teaching of local design archives.

Dr. Christopher Dingwall
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Bess Williamson
Professor
North Carolina State University in Raleigh

Dr. J. Dakota Brown
Visiting Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Chicago

Amira Hegazy
Adjunct Assistant Professor
University of Illinois Chicago

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories is a workshop that promotes the teaching of local design archives in studio and classroom instruction at the college level. First held in June 2022, the workshop provides a dynamic forum for university teachers to develop more inclusive approaches to teaching design history in a variety of pedagogical settings and through a range of disciplinary lenses. For its second iteration in June 2024, we welcomed fifteen participants from around the country to explore methods of archival pedagogy in Chicago. In two virtual meetings afterward, participants developed teaching materials to bring design archives into their own classrooms.

Chicago Designs joins a broader movement of scholars and practitioners who are expanding the definition of design history beyond established canons that emphasize the commercial output of mostly white or European men. Because the teaching of design history is not yet firmly established in either design schools or humanities departments in the United States, we organized the workshop to help teachers gain facility in archive-based pedagogy: the art and craft of using archival materials to make history come alive. Combining hands-on archival exercises, seminar-style reading discussions, and peer mentorship, the workshop provides a rare opportunity for teachers in design and in the humanities to learn from each other while modeling community-based design research.

The interdisciplinary approach is represented by the workshop organizers: two historians who study design (Williamson and Dingwall) and two designers who center historical research in their practices (Hegazy and Brown). Together we led site visits, discussions, and exercises at major museums and libraries as well as community arts organizations. At each site, participants explored the significance of design to Chicago history from its rise as a hub of global consumer capitalism to the level of everyday neighborhood life. Ranging from themes of labor activism in printing trades to the typographic politics of graffiti and commercial sign painting, our five days of activities showed participants design histories from the bottom up while surveying the city’s rich landscape of archival collections and practices.

Our institutional host and base of operations was the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where we met the first morning to discuss readings that set the intellectual and practical agendas for the week. What is design history? What does it mean to make that history inclusive of diverse design cultures? How can archival materials advance those goals in the classroom? In our afternoon session, we visited the Newberry Library — a major repository of Chicago social and cultural history – where J. Dakota Brown and curators Paul Gehl and Jill Gage led a workshop on the labor history of print culture in the city. On Tuesday, we visited the Jane Addams Hull House Museum where Bess Williamson led a discussion on accessible teaching followed by a tour of the museum and critical discussion about historic house museums as an archive for design and immigration histories. On Wednesday, Amira Hegazy led a visit to Pilsen Arts and Community House focused on the history and impact of Chicago gang writing and printing with graffiti writer Sir Charles, followed by an afternoon exercise in neighborhood-based design study. On Thursday, Bess Williamson led a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago for discussion of design and library management with curator Leslie Wilson followed by a gallery teaching exercise with curator Elizabeth McGoey, followed by an afternoon visit to Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection to examine its zine collection. On Friday, Chris Dingwall led a visit to Hyde Park Art Center where textile design and fabric artist Robert Paige and curator Allison Peters Quinn guided us through Paige’s exhibition (The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige), followed by an afternoon visit to the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of African American History where Dingwall and archivist Beth Loch modeled an archival exercise featuring print culture from Chicago’s Black Renaissance.

Building a cohort was one of our major ambitions and accomplishments. Selected from an open application call, our fifteen participants consisted of university teachers in design schools and humanities departments as well as museum educators. After the week in Chicago, we reconvened twice virtually to share and develop curricular projects that connect archival materials with their teaching goals. Projects include:

  • Design history modules based on artifacts that represent diverse racial and ethnic histories
  • Field-based observation exercises connecting with neighborhoods, local media, and non-human species communities
  • Study trips and out-of-class experiences for art and design students in Chicago, Baltimore, Fresno, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia
  • Critical theory and research modules on community-based design and artifact interpretation
  • Classroom and public engagement projects in identity design, interactive exhibition design, and accessible media

We envision the workshop as a living resource. The teaching projects are publicly available as an online resource hosted by the Design Museum of Chicago. It is a resource for educators to understand how to effectively utilize collections and engage in communities where they teach. These projects applied the workshop’s themes to their own teaching environments internationally and in online communities. In addition to the teaching resource, the website features a scholarly bibliography as well as descriptions about each of the sites visited during the workshop with the goal of raising their profile for design history study.

Chicago Designs is an effective model for supporting the teaching of design history by providing educators a space to learn new teaching methods, develop teaching materials, and build professional networks. Thanks to funding from the Terra Foundation of American Art, each participant received a stipend of $250, as well as support for travel up to $600. We prioritized supporting contingent faculty and graduate student participants by providing them with an additional stipend to offset the costs that are generally covered through academic salary research benefits. Our application review process was centered around ensuring a diverse cohort with at least one third of the participants coming from non-tenure track positions to be able to emphasize and build mentorship and professional development opportunities.

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories

This project was the 2023 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Teaching.

Biography

Dr. Bess Williamson is a historian of design and material culture and Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the NC State University in Raleigh. She is the author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (2019) and co-editor of Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (2020). Her work explores diverse histories and practices of design that extend expertise to users and communities, and challenge designers to address access and power in their work.

Dr. Christopher Dingwall is Assistant Professor of Design History in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a historian of American and African American culture, with interests in material culture, political economy, and race. He is currently working on Black Designers in Chicago (for the University of Chicago Press), a chronicle of African American artists and craftspeople in the American design industry during the twentieth century. This project began as an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2018 and is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Dr. J. Dakota Brown teaches and writes on the intertwined histories of design, labor, and capital. After studying graphic design at North Carolina State University, he completed an MA in visual studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, he graduated from Northwestern University’s PhD program in Rhetoric and Public Culture. He is currently a visiting associate professor at the UIC School of Design. Dakota’s writing has appeared in Jacobin, Post45, and the edited volume After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy. A short collection of his essays was recently published in Portuguese translation by Brazil’s Clube do Livro do Design.

Amira Hegazy is an artist and design historian investigating the relationship of design artifacts to memory, belonging, and community identity. Trained as a printmaker and book artist, Amira earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches design practice and theory at the University of Illinois Chicago as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. She is the curator of Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types at the Design Museum of Chicago supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition centers the typography in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods to illuminate design legacies and their contemporary echoes, especially alternative modernisms and love as an organizing principle in design. Amira has exhibited her visual work at the International Print Center of New York, The Grolier Club, The William King Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Bird Show Chicago, and other venues internationally.

Mitigating Youth Violence: The Futuring Project: Audacious Narratives & Enduring Voices 

An arts enrichment program aimed at addressing youth violence in South Bend, IN.

Neeta Verma
Independent Scholar
Associate Professor (retired)
University of Notre Dame

“The Futuring Project: Audacious Narratives & Enduring Voices” is the design, and implementation of an arts enrichment program aimed at addressing youth violence in South Bend, IN. The program was implemented at a detention facility serving at-risk youth aged 14-22 who had been exposed to violence. It combined art and design instruction with the goal of empowering these youth to take ownership of their stories, inspiring them to be catalysts for change in their communities.

The arts enrichment program provided much-needed engagement, equipping participants with valuable, translatable skills in art, design, and technology. Youth worked with software like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and GarageBand. The curriculum covered various disciplines, including drawing, painting, music composition, digital design, choreography, collage, and mask-making. This creative process served not only as a skill-building exercise but also as a form of healing and therapy, fostering self-expression, self-reflection, and personal growth.

In collaboration with law enforcement, city agencies, grassroots organizations, and community leaders, the program created structured workshops that sustained creative engagement while promoting articulation, self-expression, and technical skill development. This gave the youth unique tools to help them succeed as they re-enter society with fresh perspectives for a brighter future.

The project on youth violence started in June, 2020 and concluded in June, 2024 of which the arts enrichment program ran for a period of 18 months from January, 2022 through July, 2023.

PROJECT RESEARCH

The design of the arts enrichment program was informed by a combination of data, literature reviews, and field research:

1. Data: A comparative analysis was conducted using statistical data from South Bend, three similar cities, and two larger cities to understand the problem of youth violence.

2. Literature Reviews: Research focused on positive youth development, especially in youth psychology. The potential of creative expression as therapeutic intervention was explored within cognitive and behavioral psychology.

3. Field Research: Interviews and focus groups were conducted to understand perceived causes of youth violence. We also collected data on socio-economic indicators, law enforcement, and geographic/environmental factors.

4. Analysis & Synthesis: Key findings included a lack of structure, predictability, and enrichment among at-risk youth. Additionally, there was a significant correlation between single-parent households and increased exposure to violence. These insights led to the development of the arts enrichment programming titled, “The Futuring Project: Audacious Narratives and Enduring Voices.”

FUNDING

The project was funded by four grants awarded by the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, City of South Bend, and the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame.

The project would not have been possible without the support of the following institutions. Collaborators for the project include The Jessie Ball duPont Foundation; the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County; the City of South Bend, and the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame (UND), Office of Research (UND), Office of Procurement (UND), Arts and Letters Computing Office (UND), the Center for Social Science Research (UND), Department of Development (UND), Robinson Community Learning Center (UND), Notre Dame Psychological Services Center, ND Studios and Teaching & Learning Technologies, DePaul Academy; Venues, Parks, & Arts, City of South Bend; Charles Black Community Center; Goodwill Industries; Office of Innovation & Technology, City of South Bend; South Bend Police Department; Center for the Homeless; Mamas Against Violence; Connect 2 Be the Change; River Bend Quilting Guild, Midwest Photographics.

To my collaborators: Connie Mick, Senior Associate Director Center for Social Concerns; Ike Shipman, Program Director, DePaul Academy; Denise Linn Riedl, Chief Innovation Officer, Office of the Mayor; Maurice Scott, Director of Community Initiatives, Office of the Mayor, Aaron Perri, Executive Director of Venues Parks & Arts; Jordan Gathers, Deputy Director of Venues, Parks, and Arts; Lisa Shaffer, Executive Director, South Bend Museum of Art; Krista Hoefle, Senior Curator, South Bend Museum of Art; Cynthia Taylor, Director, Charles Black Community Center; Laresha Johnson, Manager, Charles Black Community Center.

THE ARTS ENRICHMENT PROGRAM

The arts enrichment program was structured around modules that covered various creative disciplines. These modules included drawing (charcoal, pencil, and pastels), painting, music composition (using GarageBand), digital design (Adobe Photoshop), collage, poster design (Adobe InDesign/Illustrator), and mask-making.

The semester was divided into 12-week units, with each module running for 2-hour sessions. The program served approximately 22 students each week, with attendance ranging from 17 to 24 participants. The first session of each semester was dedicated to introducing the program, getting to know the participants, and setting expectations. As the semester progressed, participants explored their interests and selected modules that aligned with their projects. At the end of each module, participants presented their work to peers.

COMMUNITY AFFILIATIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

The workshop was designed to run within an institution, The DePaul Academy, that is part of the Juvenile Justice Center in South Bend. The institution is a private secure program serving male youth between the ages of 14 and 22 with a history of delinquent behaviors, mild mental health issues, abuse, neglect, and trauma needs, as well as students who did not thrive in less restrictive settings. The institution’s program offers an academy model residential treatment that promotes diverse social and educational interactions essential to the competency development of students. Audacious Narratives and Enduring Voices, was offered as an arts enrichment program to youth at this facility on a semester system basis. The design project was launched in February of 2022 and was completed in May of 2024.

RESPONSE to the ARTS ENRICHMENT PROGRAM

The program achieved high attendance, with over 45 students served throughout its duration. Participants consistently demonstrated deep engagement, often exceeding expectations in their creative outputs. One confidential evaluation noted, “Ms. Neeta has brought something extremely positive into the institution. Watching the young men engage in something they love has been truly inspiring. Her ability to maintain order and her fearlessness are greatly appreciated by both the boys and staff.”

The workshops fostered a safe, creative environment that encouraged self-reflection, self-expression, and critical thinking. This was evident in the vibrant and imaginative work produced by the youth. This expanded their portfolios to include both the work and proficiencies that served as a validation in their capabilities as these students reassimilated in the community and applied for placement opportunities and jobs.

In August 2023, the project was featured in the Audacious Narratives & Enduring Voices exhibit at the South Bend Museum of Art, running from September 22 to November 12, 2023. The youth participated in the opening reception on November 3, where they had the opportunity to discuss their work with the community and share their creative journey.

MitigatingYouthViolence_DIA_2024Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner up recipient in the category of Service.

Biography

Neeta Verma situates herself within the porous discipline of Visual Communication Design whose work explores design as a tool for social equity. Her research focuses on systemic social issues examined through the lens of power and privilege. It expands the canon of the discipline to include pluriversal shifts within design discourse. She earned her MFA from Yale University. She served as an Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design at the University of Notre Dame. She is the recipient of the Nehru-Fulbright Fellowship. Awards include the SEGD 2024 Educator Award, 365: AIGA Year in Design Award, Design Incubation Teaching Award, Core77 Award for Social Impact, A’Design Awards, International Design Award, and Rev. William A. Toohey Award for Social Justice. She has presented her research at national and international conferences. She serves on the SEGD Academic Taskforce and is a member of the Pluriversal Working Group of the Future of Design Education.

The People’s Graphic Design Archive

A crowdsourced digital archive of inclusive graphic design history.

Louise Sandhaus
Professor
California Institute of the Arts

Mary Banas
Lecturer
Tufts University

Brockett Horne
Lecturer
Boston University

Alan Caballero Lazare
Assistant Professor
George Mason University

Briar Levit
Associate Professor
Portland State University

Alberto Rigau
Designer
Studio Interlínea

Morgan Searcy
Art Director
Morgan Searcy

Bobby Joe Smith III
Special Faculty
California Institute of the Arts

The People’s Graphic Design Archive is a crowdsourced digital archive of inclusive graphic design history. The project was first realized in 2020 as a prototype built in the off-the-shelf wiki software Notion; in September 2022, the permanent custom platform was launched. The motivation for PGDA was a belief that much of graphic design history was going unrecognized because it didn’t fit into the established canon or understanding of graphic design. Lack of preservation was also due to few archives for preserving graphic design; thus, much material ended up in dumpsters. Offering a virtual graphic design archive provided a means of preserving a record of this material. It allowed anyone interested to contribute, consume, and discuss what they argue is relevant and vital. The outcome reflects a wide range of cultures and interests — an expansive, democratized, decentered reflection of history. Contributions by individuals or teams can be a single image, a link to an existing archive, documents, interviews, essays, a small collection, or an entire research project. Formats include jpegs, pdfs, tiffs, and audio and video formats.

A Growing, Unique Resource

Visibility of the PGDA takes place through social media and participation in educator events and conferences, contributing to the Archive’s steady growth and knowledge of it as a valuable resource. Today, it boasts over 12,000 items in the collection and users from across the globe. Contributed material includes Roshanak Keyghobadi’s extensive research and collection of Iranian graphic design and designers, which includes a special sub-collection of women graphic designers— of particular value and relevancy given the recent Women, Life, Freedom revolutionary movement. The collection also includes extensive activist material, such as Geoff Kaplan’s thousands of hi-resolution images documenting alternative press from archives across the United States; Daneille Aubert’s research on cooperative printing in Detroit; and many short-form research projects by students all over the world, including The University of Florida, Massachusetts College of Art, CalArts, and George Washington University.

Add-a-Thons

Add-a-thons are events that allow groups to work collectively to add material of common interest to the Archive. These gatherings have included themes such as Latinx Design, Indigenous Design, and Southeast Asian design. Anyone can host an online Add-a-Thon event. During these live and lively 90-minute sessions, with the PGDA team on hand, attendees research and upload material to the Archive. One recent example is the Radical Scholarship Add-a-thons held by Jessica Barness and Amy Papaelias resulting in a multitude of materials that show the visual forms that scholarship has taken when trying to reflect alternatives to status quo scholarly journals.

Blog

Contributions to our blog enhance our understanding of the value of PGDA to different communities and offer critical perspectives. Posts range from curating a collection to highlighting a particular contributor to short essays offering critical perspectives on graphic design history. These include the recent posting by Choctaw-Apache designer and educator Sebastian Ebarb, unraveling the thread between typography and Native American beadwork. A post by Tanvi Sharma offered her favorite items from the Archive and a unique story about her family’s collections of stamps from Ghana. Among the reflective essays are Susan Yelavich’s Value(s) Added: Amplifying The PGDA, in which she asks us to contemplate work on what makes something preservation-worthy, inviting the community to share their finds and, most significantly, their reasoning for adding items to PGDA.

Value for Educators

Although many who are curious about design, often looking for inspiration, delight in the PGDA, the largest user group is educators, who use PGDA extensively in the classroom for a variety of purposes. The site encourages students to become producers of historical narratives rather than just consumers of history, gives those teaching design history an expansive repository of examples of work made from different cultures in different periods, and even provides resources for creative projects. Examples of how the Archive is used in the classroom include:

An archive-to-archive project for University of Georgia faculty Julie Spivey, who integrated archive-based learning for teaching typography. Students would identify material from archives in their school library that those interested in graphic design would find of interest, then document these works, giving consideration to the tagging and data that provided relevancy through the work’s graphic form.

Animating The Archive. For a Kinetic Typography course at Boston University, students are asked to animate a favorite item from The Archive. Guided by faculty members Mary Yang and Brockett Horne, students offered an analysis of the grid, typography, and imagery from their selections to create storyboards that were developed into looping animations.

Analyzing Local Graphic Design History with the PGDA. For Christina Singer’s undergraduate Design Research class, students at UNC Charlotte investigated local graphic design history and researched ways of making social movements and graphic design history to contextualize their artifacts in local and graphic design history. Over 185 items, the stories about them were added to the PGDA.

Actively changing the narrative of graphic design history. For Robert Finkel’s Graphic Design History course, students collected artifacts that they thought merited inclusion into the historical canon and added those to the PGDA. At the end of the project, the teams were challenged to identify a unified theme and narrative for their collection.

PGDA_DesignIncubation24Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Service.

Biography

Mary Banas’s independent creative practice YES IS MORE includes research, teaching, and design. Mary develops conceptual and informed designs for brands, institutions, and people. She collaborates with artist Breanne Trammell as BMTMB where they embody “friendship as practice” and mine archives and contemporary collections to create new ephemera that responds to the existential crisis of contemporary American life. She has been a resident for Design Inquiry and led design workshops at OTIS College of Art & Design (Los Angeles, CA), and the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA). Banas received her BFA from University of Connecticut and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She currently teaches TYPE AS IMAGE in the undergraduate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and serves as a working board member of the People’s Graphic Design Archive.

Brockett Horne, co director, is a designer, educator, and writer. She serves on the faculty at Boston University, where she teaches studio and theory courses. Her creative work encourages audiences to question their own ways of consuming design. Clients include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Johns Hopkins University, Decentering Whiteness working group, and Harvard University. She has won multiple design awards and presents her work internationally. She is Co-Director of The Peoples Graphic Design Archive, a crowd-sourced online platform that enables new and expanded stories about graphic design history. This experimental project asks each of us to write history instead of reserving narratives for only those with special training or access to exclusive tools. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center.

Alan Caballero LaZare is a Colombian American designer, artist, and educator. His work is focused on community engagement and reimagining design history pedagogy to be more inclusive, plural, and empowering for a new generation of design students. Alan is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at George Mason University where he teaches Graphic Design History and Visual Communication Theory + Practice. His essay, “The Road to Flores de María,” was recently published in SHIFT{ED}, Dialogue: Proceedings of the AIGA Design Educators Community Conferences. It illustrates how he used design to collaborate with community leaders in a remote village in Colombia, near where his family has lived for generations, to crowdsource medicine, toys, and clothing for local schoolchildren. Alan began his career as a graphic designer with Michael Graves. He is a recipient of the Writing Space 2024 Design Writing Fellowship and also serves as a board member of the People’s Graphic Design Archive. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Rutgers University.


Briar Levit, co-director, is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. Levit spent her early career in publishing as Art Director of the magazine, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, as well as an independent book designer. In 2017, Levit released the feature-length documentary Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production, which follows design production from manual to digital methods and looks at both the social and formal implications this transition had for the graphic design discipline. In 2021, Princeton Architectural Press published Levit’s edited volume of essays, Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Design History. In 2018, Levit joined Louise Sandhaus’ journey to realize The People’s Graphic Design Archive. The Archive is a crowd-sourced virtual archive that aims to allow for new and expanded stories about graphic design history.

Louise Sandhaus, co-director emerita, is the founder and Co-Director Emerita of The People’s Graphic Design Archive, a pioneering crowd-sourced platform dedicated to diversifying and preserving graphic design history, and is faculty at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). She penned and designed the lauded book Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires, and Riots: California and Graphic Design 1936-1986 (2014), which won the Palm d’Argent at the International Art Book and Film Festival (FILAF). With Kat Catmur, she co-authored A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer (2019), published by Princeton Architectural Press. Louise’s contributions to the field extend to her roles as a board member of Letterform Archive and a former board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), where she also chaired the Design Educators Community steering committee. In 2022, she was honored with the AIGA Medal for her exceptional impact on the design community.

Alberto Rigau was born and raised in Puerto Rico, Alberto is a seasoned designer based in San Juan. With nearly two decades in the field, his versatile practice spans many design projects, including branding, publications, exhibits, wayfinding systems, and environmental graphics. This work enables him to engage with initiatives that seek to advance and impact the design discipline. Alberto is a passionate advocate for design education and community involvement. As a Board Member of Puerto Rico’s Casa del Libro, he promoted the collection’s use for academic research. As Co-Chair of AIGA’s Design Educators Community, he collaborated with educators nationwide to create programs and resources supporting academic research and design teaching. Locally, he serves on the steering committee of the Design Dinners community, where he works to strengthen Puerto Rico’s design scene by fostering new connections. Recently, he joined the core team of the People’s Graphic Design Archive, where he aims to support and build specialized design communities. Beyond his studio practice and volunteer endeavors, Alberto has taught graphic design at several universities in both Puerto Rico and the United States.

Morgan Searcy, co-director, is a creative lead, researcher, and strategist with a background in graphic design and progressive politics. Morgan’s work balances nonprofit and commercial sectors. Her creative practice focuses on finding sustainable and practical solutions that center design. She supported design and creative strategy for the NY State Democrats and the DNC in 2024; political campaigns: Warren for President and Jon Ossoff for Senate in 2020; and has served as Brand and Creative Director at Rock the Vote. In 2023, she launched The Politics Project, an initiative supporting research that uplifts Gen Z and bipoc voices in progressive politics. Morgan has recently led creatives with Instrument and collaborated with Wieden+Kennedy. She is a Co-Director of The People’s Graphic Design Archive, where she collaborates to promote equitable collection of histories.

Bobby Joe Smith III is a Black and Indigenous graphic designer and media artist living on the unceded ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash peoples in Los Angeles, California. His creative practice is a poetic discourse on the utilization of art and design to further anti-colonial movements and achieve decolonial outcomes. He studied graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Post-Bacc) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA), and received an MFA in Media Art from the University of California—Los Angeles.

Variable

The course uses the metaphor of building cars (fonts) to drive/cruise to unexpected and new (typographic) destinations.

Kelsey Elder
Assistant Professor
Carnegie Mellon University

Variable is an elective that is the pedagogical manifestation of my research and creative practice surrounding typographic technologies, from the historical precedent to socio-cultural impact to the prosodic and practical potentials of formats today. It is part critical seminar and part experimental form laboratory. The course uses the metaphor of building cars (fonts) to drive/cruise to unexpected and new (typographic) destinations. Variable is divided into five mini-projects culminating in a final 5-week self-directed study project. Students investigate the socio-cultural impact of typographic technologies through embodied experiences and social activities. Talks and readings support by providing contextual history and future speculation to the world of typographic technologies. The projects allow students to learn and practice conventional techniques (letterpress) and novel techniques (variable fonts plus scripting) to design, render, and document glyphic forms. The course began as a graduate-level elective at the Rhode Island School of Design. It most recently ran as an undergraduate elective open to all majors at Carnegie Mellon University.

In the first project, Balance Bike, students learn about foundry type, printing, and type design foundational skills in Glyphs 3 through a collaborative alphabet prompt. This component-driven digital lettering exercise is then translated ‘type-high’ to letterpress by using a custom 3/4″ MDF and Lego Kit set up inspired by Pedro Neves’ “LegoType” letterpress printing course at UIC. In the second project, Kit Car, students practice drafting and basic type design practices (drawing, spacing, testing) through a component-driven workflow. Students are encouraged to observe the world around them and distill a kit of shapes from their insights. These sketches are turned into a digital set of parts (components) used to create a font; letters, icons, and/or patterns. This project picks up metaphorical and generative speed in project three, Gravity Racer, which introduces variable fonts and the generative potential of variable font workflows. Students expand their Kit Cars by adding one, two, and three axes through a series of workshops. They are also introduced to troubleshooting in font workflows, including scripting. Project four, Paint Booth, introduces color. The project introduces color font formats, including SVG, COLR/CPAL, color variable fonts, and layered font workflows. Students explore using these complex formats on the web, in print, and in interactive mediums they are already familiar with, illuminating each format’s opportunities and challenges. The final low-stakes project is titled Dune Buggy. In it, students remix, hack, and/or alter an existing open-source font through OpenType Feature writing, scripting, and developing programs/tools that can render their fonts. Students explore writing positional features, substitution features, and scripts that can manipulate vector data both in Glyphs 3 and outside of it (web, Processing, P5.js, Python). For the final 5-weeks, students can expand/revise/combine prior explorations into a culminating final self-directed study project titled Grand Prix.

While there have been necessary updates to the prompts due to the advancing nature of font technologies, the overall pedagogical methodology remains the same. The methodology is designed to reduce barriers related to typeface design, variable/color fonts, and programming. One significant barrier to learning typeface design is drafting. This is even more significant in variable fonts, where compatibility across drawings (masters) is a technical requirement. Another barrier is the need to craft/make rendering environments that allow these complex formats to flourish, often requiring a bit of ‘off-roading’ (code). The combination of these barriers commonly dissuades design students from engaging with typeface design and tool-making because there is a prevailing notion that it is ‘too technically difficult.’ Stemming from my research into patterning principles found across typographic technologies, I began exploring how to leverage the modular affordances of typeface design software today to reduce the barriers of access to the design sub-discipline. In foundry type, type founders used modular methods to reduce engraving (drawing) time via counterpunches. This allowed forms to be replicated easily; the same ‘counter’ of a /n/ could be used for /h/m/n/ and flipped to make the /u/. Digitally, ‘components’ do the same. Components are commonly used by type designers today not for counter-shapes but for language support—combining letters with marks via anchors. A liberal use of components to instead build letters from, akin to a pixel, when teaching variable fonts minimizes the complexity associated with drawing for master compatibility. One change in the component shape is immediately cascaded across all glyphs that use it. Instead of spending the majority of time resolving incompatible masters across hundreds of glyphs, students could more easily focus on developing their conceptual ideas and engaging the expansive design space of variable fonts and their generative possibilities when combined with computation. Scripting and programming custom tools are similarly broken into bits that successfully combine. Students begin by learning simple Python commands to troubleshoot their font. Then, OpenType Features, scripting, and basic custom program/tool making. Finally, they can combine and expand these skills towards their final project idea.

While access to type design technologies has perhaps never been easier, there remains a significant gap between the rate at which font technologies are developing in the field and the access to these emergent workflows in design education. Young designers must be given the ‘right to repair’ the linguistic tools of today and should be empowered through their education and lived experiences to create the ones of tomorrow. After all, type designers are responsible for stewarding the language traditions of our elders past, present, and future… and innovating new forms of communication. One of the most potent and effective ways of making the future of text-based communication more equitable is to have more type designers–or at least designers who have some typeface design experience and skill. This elective seeks to contribute to this future by providing access to conventionally exclusive design subdisciplines of typeface design and programming. The course offers a way of teaching at the intersections of typographic technologies, computation, and language to be more elastic to meet the needs of the languages of our lands where they are. Its materials are open for all to use, remix, and share.

kelseyElder_evidenceOfOutcomes-25Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Teaching.

Biography

Kelsey Elder is an educator, typographer, and type-technology enthusiast based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching communication design, typeface design, and critical studies. He has previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Purchase College (SUNY), and Virginia Commonwealth University. Elder holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, with additional studies at the University of Reading and the Plantin Institute of Typography. His research on typographic technology’s socio-cultural impact and pedagogical practices has been presented at conferences like TypeCon, and by invitation for institutions including the Herb Lubalin Center, Museum Plantin-Moretus, and LAABF. His workshops on type design, including variable/color fonts, have been held at ATypI Brisbane and other venues. When he’s not teaching, crafting letters, or tinkering on a press, you’ll find him hanging out with his cats.

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships

A practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio.

Meaghan Dee
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech

Jessica Meharry
Visiting Assistant Professor
Institute of Design at Illinois Tech

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships is a book for design students and educators seeking to integrate real-world client projects into their curriculum. Born from extensive research, interviews, and the authors’ years of experience running a successful student-run design studio, this book offers practical advice, tools, and frameworks for navigating the complexities of client-based learning.

The studio is a core strand of design education, and working with real clients is one of the most valuable ways for students to develop their professional design practice skills.

The book is a practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio – how to collaborate with and connect to communities, find and retain clients, and manage real-world design problems.

The book is structured in four parts:

  1. Why: Establishes the pedagogical value of client projects, emphasizing their role in fostering industry connections, experiential learning, and student empowerment.
  2. What: Focuses on the practicalities of community engagement, client selection, and structuring studio experiences to achieve learning goals.
  3. Who: Examines the roles and responsibilities of students, faculty, and clients, highlighting the importance of effective communication, collaboration, and articulating value.
  4. How: Offers guidance on launching and managing a student-run design studio, including financial management, operational logistics, and planning for long-term sustainability.

This is the book Jessica and Meaghan wish existed when they were thinking about starting a design studio and took over a design studio (respectively). This book addresses a critical gap in design pedagogy literature by providing a comprehensive resource for educators seeking to bridge the gap between academia and professional practice.

Key contributions include:

  • Practical Guidance: Offers concrete advice and actionable strategies for implementing client-based projects, from finding clients to managing budgets to assessing student learning.
  • Diverse Perspectives: Incorporates insights from numerous interviews with design educators, students, and industry professionals, representing a range of institutional contexts and pedagogical approaches.
  • Emphasis on Ethics and Community Engagement: Provides a framework for ethical client interactions, emphasizing the importance of designing with communities rather than for them.
  • Focus on Student Empowerment: Highlights the role of client projects in fostering student agency, leadership, and professional development. (Chapter 3 of this book also features Najla Mouchrek’s Model for Empowerment in the Transition to Adulthood)
  • Support for Student-Run Studios: Offers dedicated chapters on launching, managing, and sustaining student-led design studios.

This book aims for design educators to:

  • Integrate client-based projects into their courses.
  • Develop effective strategies for finding and managing clients.
  • Create meaningful learning experiences that foster student growth and professional preparedness.
  • Build and sustain successful student-run design studios.
  • Promote ethical and socially responsible design practice.

The book also hopes to empower design students to:

  • Confidently work with “real world” clients and community partners.
  • Be more prepared to graduate and enter industry.
  • Understand dynamics of client interactions.

By providing students and educators with the necessary tools and knowledge, this book will contribute to a more engaged, impactful, and relevant design education that better prepares students for the challenges and opportunities of the professional world.

Methodology

The book used a mixed-methods approach, combining:

  • Literature Review: Synthesized existing research on design pedagogy and experiential learning.
  • Surveys: Gathered quantitative data on client-based practices in design programs across the country and around the world.
  • Interviews: Collected qualitative insights from design educators, students, and industry professionals.
  • Case Studies: Via interview, examined successful examples of client projects and student-run studios.
  • Authors’ Expertise: Leveraged the authors’ years of experience in design education and running a student-led studio.

Overall, this book represents a culmination of the authors’ passion for design education and their commitment to preparing students for successful and meaningful careers. It is a resource they wish they had when they first embarked on their journey. They hope it will serve as a valuable guide for fellow educators and their students and contribute to a more vibrant and impactful design education landscape.

Chapter 1Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Scholarship: Publication.

Biography

Meaghan A. Dee is an Associate Professor and Chair of Graphic Design at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Her work centers on connecting communities through storytelling and immersive design experiences and by fostering collaboration between students, faculty, and industry professionals. Meaghan sees design as a tool for engagement, communication, and innovation.
In addition to her role at Virginia Tech, Meaghan is a docent emeritus for the Letterform Archive in San Francisco and served as co-chair for the AIGA Design Educators Community (AIGA DEC) Executive Board—a group dedicated to supporting and connecting design educators across the world. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jessica Meharry is a designer, researcher, and educator who develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. She teaches courses in the politics of design, critical contexts of design, and the philosophical context of design research. Jessica received a PhD from the Institute of Design (ID), an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a bachelor of science from Northwestern University. Jessica’s cross-disciplinary research interests focused on designing for equitable economies, strategizing processes that frame equity as an innovation driver, and developing inclusive design management pedagogy. Jessica’s current research projects include the development and testing of an anti-oppressive design framework focused on information and communication technologies. She is also a collaborator on a research project led by Hillary Carey, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, in which they’re using design methods to explore anti-racist futures in organizational contexts.

Riveted in the Word 

The true story of a writer/historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke.

Warren Lehrer 
School of Visual Arts (SVA);
Purchase College 
SUNY (Professor Emeritus) 

Riveted in the Word is an electronic book inspired by the true story of a writer/historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke. Written and designed by author/designer Warren Lehrer, the multimodal book app uses writing, a custom interface, kinetic typography, and an original soundtrack to place the reader inside the mind of a retired American history professor as she recalls her journey with Broca’s aphasia. The interface toggles between columns of text that readers navigate at their own pace, and animated sections that evoke gaps between perceptions (thoughts, memories, desires) and the words needed to communicate.

Most of the inner monologue takes place while the fictionalized protagonist, Norah Hanson, PhD, is lying in bed thinking about her 20+ year rehabilitation, hopeful for the day ahead, which turns out to be a breakthrough day for her. The interface is often bifurcated down the middle, in a way that mirrors the two hemispheres of the brain, which get affected differently by a stroke. The reader witnesses Norah’s sense of humor, determined spirit, and seemingly fragmented-but-intelligible thoughts as they shift from present to past, and toward her upcoming public lecture, the first she’s given since the stroke.

BACKGROUND/METHODOLOGY

I first met and interviewed Willie Lee Rose, a historian of the American Reconstruction period, two decades after she suffered a massive stroke. She was 71-years-old at the time. Willie’s stroke affected the left hemisphere of her brain, which gave her the kind of aphasia that affects the use of language. Like many cases of Broca’s aphasia, she retained the memories and intelligence that she had before, but she suddenly didn’t have the language to communicate. Willie’s difficult but triumphant rehabilitation inspired me to write a fictionalized interior narrative of a scholar and stroke survivor—that takes place over the course of a few hours of one day.

The first iteration of Riveted in the Word was published in my 2013 illuminated novel, “A LIFE IN BOOKS: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley,” as an excerpt of one of my author-protagonist’s 101 books. In 2018, Willie Lee Rose died, at the age of 91, and a few years after that I decided to adapt Riveted into an electronic book, and dedicate it to Willie.

For the past twenty years, I’ve been enhancing my solo and collaborative printed books (non-fiction, fiction, and poetry) with animations, short films, and interactive media. I’ve also been focusing more and more on making work that helps create greater understanding of and empathy for neurodivergent and other human conditions such as Dyslexia, Alzheimer’s disease, displacement, trauma, and loss. So, I had the idea of developing Riveted in the Word as my first fully electronic book as a way of creating an immersive experience that could help readers have more awareness of the interior experience of this little understood condition.

In 2019, I had the good fortune of meeting Artemio Morales, a web developer with a literature background and passion for multimedia books. After deciding to work together on the Riveted in the Word ebook, we brainstormed about creating an interface that would in some ways split the difference between watching a movie and reading a book. Several months later, I sent him a 1,200 page storyboard, which he began translating into code using Unity. I also brought composer/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Griffin into the project because of the phenomenal job he did creating soundtracks for the animations of my and Dennis Bernstein’s “Five Oceans in Teaspoon” project. The three of us worked on “Riveted in the Word” for five years while juggling other projects.

OUTCOMES

Riveted in the Word launched in June, 2024 as a book app made for iPads, iPhones, and Mac computers, available for sale on the Apple App store, for $4.99. We are currently adapting it to work on Android and Windows devices and online through web browsers. The book app is co-produced and co-published by my non-profit arts organization EarSay, dedicated to nurturing and portraying stories of uncelebrated individuals and communities, and Artemio’s production lab, AltSalt, dedicated to publishing and promoting innovative works of electronic literature.

So far, we’ve had two official book launches to over-capacity audiences, one at the Center for Book Arts in NYC, one in Blue Hill Maine, in conjunction with the Maine Writers and Publishers Association’s “Word Festival.” Launches included real-time projection of the app with reading/performances by actress/author and my EarSay partner Judith Sloan, and Q&A with collaborators Andrew Griffin, Artemio Morales, medical professionals, and stroke survivors.

Over the past several months, we also presented performance/readings of Riveted at Torn Page, Art New York Studios, Topaz Arts, NYU Tish, Pratt Institute, the University of Wisconsin/Madison, and as part of the Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference/NY Art Book Fair, and the Electronic Literature Organization National Conference in Orlando, Florida/online.

Riveted was a featured title of the May, 2024 Print (Magazine) Book Club, along with another book that I wrote and designed, “Jericho’s Daughter.” That hour-long conversation was hosted by Debbie Millman and Steven Heller.

Riveted was the subject of a segment on New York Public Radio with me and Dr. Laura Boylan, a neurologist at Bellevue Hospital and faculty at NYU School of Medicine.

I also discussed Riveted in an hour+ interview with Carson Grubaugh on the Living the Line video podcast which features makers of graphic novels and visual literature.

In addition to receiving positive receptions from the design and electronic literature communities, I’m most hearted by the reception Riveted is receiving from health care professionals and stroke/aphasia survivors.

The National Aphasia Association (NAA) has endorsed Riveted and is featuring it on their Recommended Reading list.

Upcoming presentations include performance/readings at two New York medical schools and I’ve been invited to be a keynote speaker at an Art & Health Symposium in Tennessee.

In the attached Evidence of Outcomes doc, I’ve enclosed press quotes and other testimonials that attest to ways Riveted in the Word is innovative and contributes to the field(s) of design, electronic literature, and narrative medicine.

Riveted-in-the-word-OPTDownload

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Scholarship: Creative Works.

Biography

Warren Lehrer is a designer and writer known internationally as a pioneer of visual literature and design authorship. His work is acclaimed for its marriage of writing and typography, capturing the shape of thought and speech, and reuniting oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations, and performance. Honors include: Ladislav Sutnar Laureate, Center for Book Arts Honoree, Brendan Gill Prize, Innovative Use of Archives Award, International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, and fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, Tate Gallery. Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. https://warrenlehrer.com/

2024 Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards

2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards competition in 4 categories: Creative Work, Published Research, Teaching, Service

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2024 Communication Design Educators Awards!

Scholarship: Publications

Winner

Gender, Transgression, and Ritual Torah Preparation
Leslie Atzmon
Professor
Eastern Michigan University

Runner-up

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships
Meaghan Dee
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech

Jessica Meharry
Visiting Assistant Professor
Institute of Design at Illinois Tech

Scholarship: Creative Work

Winner

Riveted in the Word 
Warren Lehrer 
School of Visual Arts (SVA);
Purchase College 
SUNY (Professor Emeritus) 

Teaching

Winner

Variable 
Kelsey Elder
Assistant Professor
Carnegie Mellon University 

Runner-up

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories 
Christopher Dingwall
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Bess Williamson
Professor
North Carolina State University in Raleigh

Dr. J. Dakota Brown
Visiting Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Chicago

Amira Hegazy
Adjunct Assistant Professor
University of Illinois Chicago

Service

Winner

The People’s Graphic Design Archive
Louise Sandhaus
Professor
California Institute of the Arts

Mary Banas
Lecturer
Tufts University

Brockett Horne
Lecturer
Boston University

Alan Caballero Lazare
Assistant Professor
George Mason University

Briar Levit
Associate Professor
Portland State University

Alberto Rigau
Studio Interlínea

Morgan Searcy
Art Director

Bobby Joe Smith III
Special Faculty
California Institute of the Arts

Runner-up

Mitigating Youth Violence: The Futuring Project: Audacious Narratives & Enduring Voices 
Neeta Verma
Independent Scholar
Associate Professor (retired)
University of Notre Dame

Runner-up

Mashq Conference 2022 on Arabic Type and Typography 
Yara Khoury Nammour
Assistant Professor
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Khajag Apelian
Lecturer
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

2024 JURY

Steven McCarthy (Chair)
University of Minnesota

Douglas Kearney
University of Minnesota

Doug Barrett
University of Alabama at Birmingham

Basma Hamdy
Virginia Commonweath University—Qatar

Kali Nikitas
University of Southern California in Los Angeles