Author: Design Incubation

Response and Adaptation for Online Teaching 1.0

A Moderated Discussion for Educators
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
1pm EST (10am PST)

Wednesday, March 25, 2020 
1pm EST / 10am PST

Hosted by
Lisa Hammershaimb
Associate Dean of Curriculum
Independence University

Are you new to online and remote instruction? Do you have questions or concerns? Join a live Q&A Session with educators who have experience working in both synchronous and asynchronous online learning environments. Ask questions and learn about best practices. Hear about the range of tools these educators use to create engaging online design courses. Join our community and connect with other educators as we discuss the tips, tricks and challenges of working in the online learning environment. 

Who should attend: 

Educators who are transitioning to a fully online learning environment for the first time. Those of you who have taught online or hybrid classes in the past are encouraged to take part and share tips and tricks. Think you may have to start teaching online? Come and hear what others have found to be helpful. All are welcome!   

(Chat discussion can be found here: https://social.designincubation.com/topic/259-response-and-adaptation-for-online-teaching-10/ )

Panel participants: 

Lisa Hammershaimb

Dr. Lisa Hammershaimb is a visual designer and design educator whose research investigates community, presence, and the porous borders between here/there + digital/physical.A 2018 graduate of the EdD program in Distance Education from Athabasca University, Lisa’s dissertation focused on how design educators use the internet to decentralize and extend studio pedagogy. Through her work, Lisa aspires to inspire design educators to be brave in the face of complexity and to build inclusive structures, where all participants can learn how to navigate and thrive in an increasingly information-abundant world.

Alex Girard

Alex Girard is a graphic designer and design educator who believes in the power of design to connect people to ideas, visually. His recent work focuses on developing meaningful assessment practices that define and help to constructively evolve curriculum, rather than exclusively evaluate it. Throughout his career, he has worked to adopt technology at the forefront of the field, and is currently exploring virtual course management systems and other online tools in an effort to create virtual collaborative spaces. Alex coordinates the Graphic Design program at Southern Connecticut State University, and serves as the Director of Peer Review for Design Incubation. 

Aaris Sherin

Aaris Sherin is a design educator, researcher and writer. She is a professor of graphic design at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Her teaching focuses on using blended hybrid models of instruction in FTF classes as well as teaching courses in a fully online learning environment. Sherin’s newest teaching strategies include adding synchronistic modules to online courses as well as working with course management tools and other software to create innovative frameworks for critique in online studio and lecture style courses.

Mitch Goldstein

Mitch Goldstein is a designer, artist, and educator based in upstate New York, where he is an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, teaching in the College of Art and Design. He has a fine arts practice focusing on a variety of digital and analog materials and both writes and speaks about art and design education, pedagogy, and creative practice. His courses frequently mix analog and digital making, as well as using both in-person and online teaching and critique tools and methods. He received his MFA in Design/Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, and his BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently pursuing another Master’s Degree in Furniture Design from RIT. 

Dennis Cheatham

Dennis Cheatham is the Graduate Director of xdMFA, a transdisciplinary distance-learning MFA in Experience Design at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has been teaching online and hybrid courses in experience design and design research since 2016. Dennis has implemented pedagogical tools to facilitate highly engaged distance learning, including Experience Points, the Risk Bonus, single-point rubrics, Slack, and PACES: A Multiple Intelligences Model for Design Education. Dennis has used his background in web development and audio/video production to develop accessible, responsive templates for Canvas LMS and engaging feedback videos and tutorials to simulate the face-to-face experience for learners.

Ideas for Interactive Online Design Instruction

Distance Learning Curriculum Development

If you are looking for some tips on how to use Blackboard effectively for design instruction, including structuring your course, and tools for interactive group critiques, check out the videos below.

Here’s a great resources list published by AIGA DEC:

Design Education Resources and Considerations for dealing with COVID-19

If you have content or recommendations for online design instruction, please let us know. We can add it to our Youtube channel, or post it here.

For an open discussion on the topic and your experiences, please join us here…

https://social.designincubation.com/topic/252-teaching-online-resources-experiences-tools-recommendations/

Teaching Design Team Collaboration Through Group Projects

Two case studies will be shown that demonstrate embedding best practices for team collaboration in the classroom.

Christine Lhowe
Assistant Professor
Seton Hall University

At the introduction of group projects in my undergraduate graphic design courses, students in various levels of their education often ask if they will be able to present the project in their portfolio to potential employers. Being that it was conceptualized as a team and multiple designers participated in the outcome, they express concern in presenting work that doesn’t exclusively belong to them. However, the design profession is largely collaborative and creatives often work on projects in teams. This presentation will showcase how I’ve utilized group projects to foster understanding of the collaborative nature of the design industry to intermediate and advanced graphic design students in a liberal arts University. 

I have embedded two learning outcomes within the course material. The first is team conceptualization. Creative teams commonly work together in developing original concepts in brainstorming sessions. The purpose of the sessions are to collectively generate ideas where value is placed in working together.Ownership of a concept may become ambiguous as some may be merged together or built on by team members. The second is entering a creative project post conceptualization. Designers are often asked to develop new creative assets while upholding an existing aesthetic for a brand, which raises the question, “was this my idea?”

Two case studies will be shown that demonstrate embedding best practices for team collaboration in the classroom. In the first, students worked together in an advanced Brand Evolution course to develop and maintain a brand across multiple digital and physical touch points. Secondly, in an intermediate Web Design course, students implemented a design system to collectively create the user interface of a large scale website. 

Teaching Online? Please Share Your Experiences

How have you adapted a class or course for remote instruction or online learning?

https://social.designincubation.com/topic/252-teaching-online-resources-experiences-tools-recommendations/

Have you created an online class or entire course? Please share your recommendations and experiences on our bulletin board. Click on the link above to join the discussion.

If this is the first time visiting our discussion forum, create a profile, and once approved, you can post freely anywhere on the website.

If you have questions or recommendations, please let us know at info@designincubation.com.

Call and Response | Equitable Design Frame Work

We turn the design into a tool to ask questions and pose solutions.

Omari Souza
Assistant Professor
Texas State University

Gabriela Disarli, Graduate Candidate, Texas State University
Dillion Sorensen, Graduate Candidate, Texas State University
Leslie Harris, Graduate Candidate, Texas State University

Traditional design projects typically include the paying client and professionals within related industries. The paying client will often use the services of the designer to attract a targeted audience to a product or service, but what if we transition the members of the audience from passive recipients in the solution to the active contributor. While there may be times when informing is a necessary part of the process, we believe that real impact is often made when we intentionally build up a person’s capacity to contribute at higher levels. Call and response is a form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which responses from the audience punctuates the speaker’s statements (“calls”). If we view the caller as a user, and the designer as a responder, we turn the design into a tool to ask questions and pose solutions.

This presentation explores how a group of nine graduate communication design students explored how design can be used to create behavioral and systemic change by using the participatory design process. The final deliverables explores the idea of problems as proverbial calls with the designer and audience as equitable participants in the response, or the means to a solution. We explore various calls, including calls for advocacy on behalf of marginalized social groups, calls for self-reflection on the design field itself, and calls for the future that speculates about potential directions within the field of design.

Tangible Type with 3D printing

The first phase of a research project to develop and find the place of the emerging technologies in typography

Taekyeom Lee
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Technology and design have been in a symbiotic relationship, and the demand for the typography with 3D printing has already arrived. Like the digital revolution with the introduction of personal computers generated radical changes in typography, the new digital fabrication techniques urge designers and educators to embrace the new possibilities. As 3D printing has become more refined, efficient, and accessible, what designers can do with the new printing technology? This project is the first phase of a research project to develop and find the place of the emerging technologies in typography.

Designers can use a variety of printing techniques to produce visual materials and to solve visual problems. 3D printing can change the notion of printed text and how we experience materialized type since the tangible type does not lie on the static surface or live on-screen as a mirrored image. 3D printed tangible type acquires characteristics such as dimension, structure, materiality, and even physical interactivity. For this project, various conventional and unconventional materials in 3D printing were used to explore both the challenges and potential for typography. 3D printed tangible type not only amplified visual but physical interactions. The tangible type provides engaging tactile experiences, which would be more intuitive, expressive, and memorable. It also became relatively challenging to ensure the legibility of the written text and write a long text. More investigations should be followed as the technology will get more refined. This project could be inspirational for both professional practices and educational settings, such as typography, graphic design, and digital fabrication courses. As the outcome provides three-dimensional experience and substance, a new application of this design could be used for spatial typography and developed for people with vision impairment.

Deconstruct + Reconstruct: The Value of Mimicking Reverse Engineering in UI/UX Pedagogy

In order to truly understand how something works, you have to take it apart and put it back together again.

Dave Gottwald
Assistant Professor
University of Idaho

Reverse engineering has long been practiced in lab courses in computer science and high technology development. The concept is rather simple—in order to truly understand how something works, you have to take it apart and put it back together again.

In my introductory course in UI/UX design, students are assigned three projects which mimic a reverse engineering process. For Deconstruction they choose an existing mobile app, propose a conjectured user persona based on their own use, and then document user flows of interactive functionality, using their phones to capture every screen. Organizing these screens into flows facilitates a direct approach in understanding navigation, visual hierarchy, and functionality. In this students attempt to “map” the product and speculate on why certain design directions were taken. For Reconstruction students find an app to redesign. User interface and user experience are considered equally; deficits in both aesthetics and functionality are addressed. At this stage students move beyond speculation and begin to integrate actual research into the development of their product and user personas as they design screens and document user flows.

Finally, the last half of the term is devoted to their own unique app product. Construction builds on the first two projects, yet with a more thorough research and testing phase. Students are tasked with building a live prototype designed with industry-standard software and conduct formal user testing in a group setting. Ideation and development time for this final project is noticeably accelerated, as they’ve already undergone the process twice before. Mimicking a reverse engineering process also provides a detailed structural comprehension of interaction design. By approaching apps from the inside out, students report a greater understanding of their mobile devices as designed content systems, and they are better prepared for more advanced interaction projects.

Design, Food and Human Connection

A research project with the intent of understanding the parallels between chefs and designers

Nicholas Rock
Assistant Professor
Boston University

Design is present in visible and invisible ways in contemporary society such that the term “design” has permeated everyday language—resulting in a situation where everyone knows what design is and no one knows what design is. Design is becoming further integrated with business, and socio-economic demands require a constant pursuit of data and technological advances while leaving behind the personal and social side of those same topics. Design is altering our human experience under the illusion of increasing our connectedness.  

We have begun an examination of how design can enable a return to more meaningful connections with people. Since design as a concept is becoming increasingly universal, we are looking at it through the lens of something as culturally ubiquitous as food. How can our relationship with food inform our relationship with design in society? How might we improve our approach to how we both practice and teach design by investigating practitioners of gastronomy and culinary arts? 

Our studio began this research project with the intent of understanding the parallels between chefs and designers—hoping to learn from the creative process of chefs pushing the limits of their profession as a way of advancing our own. Through a series of interviews and collaborative experiences, we have held conversations with designers, architects, chefs, restauranteurs, food historians, and farmers to better understand both a historical and contemporary relationship between food, design, and culture. We encountered a shared philosophy of creating opportunities for human connection. Using this insight, we are forming new design methodologies and altering our approach to design education.  

We need to reinforce our connection to each other as human beings. If we return to this as a core principle in design practice and education, then we can create new opportunities to bring people together instead of driving people apart.

Redesigning an Appropriated Brand Identity in a Complex Polarized Culture

A convergent mixed-methods pragmatic approach to the redesign of the Chief Brand Identity

Clinton Carlson
Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Chief Industries has utilized an appropriated image of a Native American for over forty years. External factors pushed for a shift in their use of this symbolism, however, in the design research process it was discovered that internal contingencies strongly opposed the elimination of the symbol. Chief’s third-generation CEO faced a dilemma in how to respond to these pressures.

A transitional brand identity system that invested in establishing a broader and more consistent brand identity could allow Chief to navigate the internal and external political environment; minimizing internal corporate cultural disruption, while also taking tangible steps toward a more appropriate and ethical brand identity system.

In working with Chief Industries and my collaborative partner Huebner Integrated Marketing, we utilized a convergent mixed-methods pragmatic approach to the redesign of the Chief Brand Identity. Interviews and surveys of corporate leadership, employees, partners, and customers gave insight into perceptions of the Chief brand and corporate culture, while a brand audit helped identify deficiencies and opportunities in the current brand architecture and applications across touchpoints.

Chief Industries has seven North American brands, eleven divisions on three continents, and 1,400 employees. The family-owned company was founded in 1954 and is currently lead by the grandson of the founder.

The research process identified 1) a fractured brand architecture and identity system, 2) gaps between corporate and division leaders in the perception of the Chief brand, and 3) risk to dramatically shifting the brand identity among some divisions and their employees. The transition to a new generation of leadership factored into the decision to build an identity system that would establish clearer brand architecture, build equity in elements outside of the Native American icon, and allow for the eventual elimination of the Native American icon.

This presentation looks at how one designer navigated a polarized setting and strove to provide an ethical design direction with an understanding of the complex systems in which their client existed. The presentation will discuss the role of designers as advocates and the ethical dilemmas faced when working with commercial clients. It will raise questions such as: How should we balance our role as advocates with the responsibilities of serving clients? Should we balance these two? Is incremental change enough?

Breaking Down Biases with Toys: An Interdisciplinary Design Project

Courses from three different schools collaborated on the project: Applied Infancy Development, Machine Design, and Graphic Design 3.

Nancy Wynn
Associate Professor
Merrimack College

Nicholas Paolino
Undergraduate Design Researcher
Merrimack College

Much child development research is biased towards privileged, white, mid-socioeconomic cultures. For example, data suggests mothers should use child-directed speech to promote language development (Rowe, 2008). Yet, recent evidence shows this type of talk is not promoted universally (Rowe, 2012). As a result, educational and clinical practices​, as well as policies​, ​may not address the needs of non-white, under-privileged populations. During the spring semester of 2019, three Merrimack College professors created an interdisciplinary project to promote positive development in infants/toddlers. The project’s goal was the development of a toy prototype that addressed specific developmental domains and considered various populations.

Courses from three different schools collaborated on the project: Applied Infancy Development, Machine Design, and Graphic Design 3. Students enrolled in discipline-specific courses were divided into eight groups, each consisting of one Graphic Design student and multiple students from Education and Mechanical Engineering. The modes for assessment were completion of the toys, marketing materials, and the development of collaboration skills.

Education students were the researchers and “clients.” Engineering students created the toy prototypes. Graphic design students designed marketing materials including branding, packaging and advertising. Throughout the semester, students met in large group meetings, virtual group meetings, made oral presentations, and publicly demonstrated their final designs. The pedagogical plan was to adopt a peer model whereby students could teach their peers what they learned in their respective disciplines and work together to synthesize their ideas.

Despite some challenges, the teams completed their prototypes and branding with much success. Afterwards, project assessment included: What changes should be implemented? Were the virtual meetings beneficial? Who might gain from inclusion—business students and marketing faculty? Additional funding?

The project captured the professional world of toy design quite well, and the faculty members are planning for round two in 2022.