Author: Design Incubation

CFP: 2025 Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards

Call for Nominations and Entries for the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards Competition.

Design Incubation announces a call for nominations and entries for the 2025 awards for communication design educators in the areas of scholarship, teaching, service. The aim of the awards program is to discover and recognize new scholarship (creative work and publications), teaching, and service in our broad and varied discipline. We hope to expand the design record, promote excellence and share knowledge within the field.

Nominations and Entries

We ask colleagues and mentors to identify outstanding creative work, publications, teaching, and service being created by design educators in the field communication design and to nominate these individuals for an award. Nominations will be accepted until December 31, 2025 .

Entry Guidelines

Entries will be accepted until (December 31, 2025). Nominations are not required to enter in this scholarly competition. Complete the online entry form (https://designincubation.com/design-incubation-awards-competition-entry-form/) with the following:

Title: Description of project and outcomes (not to exceed 500 words.)

Supporting Materials: (limited to 5-page medium resolution pdf of artwork; web links to websites, videos, other online resources; published documents or visual documents.)

Biography of applicant/s (150 words per applicant.)

Curriculum vitae of applicant/s.

Entry fee: $35.00 USD.

2025 JURY

Steven McCarthy (Chair) University of Minnesota

Leslie Atzmon – https://www.emich.edu/art/faculty-staff/l_atzmon.php

Bernard Caniffe – http://piecestudio.org/case-studies, https://www.design.iastate.edu/profiles/canniffe/

Matt Gaynor – https://www.memphis.edu/artanddesign/people/matthew-gaynor.php

Myra Thiessen –https://www.monash.edu/mada/design/people/myra-thiessen

Leslie Atzmon is a designer, design historian, and design critic. She has published in Eye, Design and Culture, Communication Design, and Design Issues. Atzmon edited Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design (Parlor Press 2011) and co-edited Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury 2017) with industrial designer Prasad Boradkar. Most recently, she edited The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2019) with Teal Triggs of the Royal College of Art. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Central Saint Martins in London investigating the topic of Darwin and design thinking. Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy were awarded a Sappi Ideas that Matter Grant, which supports design that changes lives for the better. For the grant, students rebranded Ypsilanti’s non-profit Riverside Arts Center as a community arts hub. Atzmon recently curated the exhibition Design and Science, and is currently working on a collection also entitled Design and Science (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2020).

Bernard Canniffe is a current professor and former department chair of graphic design at Iowa State University, and has held faculty positions at MICA (Baltimore), MCAD (Minneapolis) and Ringling College of Art and Design (Sarasota), A native of Wales (UK), he has presented and exhibited on a global scale since earning an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999. PIECE Studio, a creative venture he founded in 2006, is an agency that “engages in and with communities, organizations, activists, governments and municipalities and has run projects and workshops that promote social justice and community empowerment internationally,” primarily through the design of identities, publications and posters. 

Matthew Gaynor received his BA and MFA in graphic design from Yale University, and is currently chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Memphis. He has held faculty and leadership positions at University of Kansas, California State University at San Bernardino, University of Cincinnati, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Kansas State University. He also served as creative director for F+W Publications, which published HOW magazine. Gaynor has won numerous awards for his design work, which is focused on the intersection of type and image, and continues his practice of typographic design, as well as an ongoing interest in photographic portraiture.

Myra Thiessen is a researcher and senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and is the program coordinator of the communication design program in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture. She earned a PhD in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading and a Bachelor of Design degree in communication design from the University of Alberta. She has published her research widely, especially about typography and cognition, in the journals Visible Language, Ergonomics, and The Design Journal among others, and co-edited the book The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design. 

Steven McCarthy is professor emeritus of graphic design at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for over two decades. He earned an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from Bradley University. His book The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013. McCarthy’s creative work has been in over 150 juried and invitational exhibitions, and has been awarded inclusion in the AIGA annual, the STA 100 show and in Graphis Poster. He has published in the journals Design Issues, Message, Visible Language, Design and Culture, Visual Communication, and occasionally writes for Eye magazine. In 2017 he was awarded the Minnesota Book Artist Award.

http://stevenmccarthy.design

Call for Submissions, Colloquium 12.1: Virtual, Online

Call for design research abstracts. Deadline: Friday, October 3, 2025.

Submission Deadline: Friday, October 3, 2025.

Event date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Format: Virtual/Online
Location: ZOOM

We invite designers—practitioners, creators, and educators—to submit abstracts of design research, creative investigations, and productions. This is a virtual online event format. Abstracts can be submitted online now for peer review.

Abstract submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed. Accepted abstracts will be published online. Please review the articles, Quick Start Guide for Writing Abstracts and Writing an Academic Research Abstract: For Communication Design Scholars before submitting.

There is a $10 conference fee required upon acceptance of the research abstract for non-members. The conference fee is waived for active annual members. Find out more about our annual memberships.

Researchers will videotape their 6-minute presentations which will published online in advance of the colloquium. The video recording is due by Friday, October 24, 2025. We encourage all attendees to watch the videos in advance of the moderated discussion.

Presentation format is Pecha Kucha. For more details, see the colloquia details and description.

The colloquium is a moderated panel discussion of the research involving the researchers, thought leaders, and Design Incubation members.

Reflections from Past Award Recipients: 2016-2025

Why we do what we do. Design Incubation awards for research in communication design.

Aggie Toppins’ reflections

Unlike many design awards, which tend to judge projects according to aesthetics, Design Incubation takes the conceptual intent and the impact of the work into account. This award means more than “peer approval” — it is national recognition of an educator’s research, teaching, or service-based contribution to the field. This is important for tenure and promotion candidates whose institutions expect evidence of excellence, often through external forms of validation. Beyond this, design and designers benefit from institutions that recognize the full scope of our work. In my case, much of my research and teaching seeks to build bridges between historical research and contemporary practice. Receiving the DI teaching award has helped me communicate the value of design and design history to my colleagues, peers, partners, and potential students.

Taekyeom Lee’s reflection

Some ideas need time, space, and the right community to develop. For my project, that place has been Design Incubation. I am honored to join in celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Awards and deeply grateful to the organization, nominators, and reviewers who continue to recognize and uplift design research, especially work that does not always follow a straight line.

I first encountered Design Incubation at the 2017 UCDA Design Education Summit in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. The founders’ vision, voiced through a panel presentation, made a lasting impression. In 2020, at Colloquium 6.3, I shared an early version of what would become Tangible Graphic Design. That moment gave the project language, direction, reflection, and confidence.

Receiving the Design Incubation Award in 2022 was a meaningful moment of affirmation. It validated not only the outcome of my work but also the process behind it—messy, iterative, and deeply personal. The recognition opened new opportunities, broadened the visibility of my research, and encouraged me to continue asking challenging, yet necessary, questions through design.

The Design Incubation Awards offer more than recognition; they provide a platform for growth. As the program marks a decade of generous and inclusive vision, I invite designers, educators, and researchers to help shape its next chapter. Together, we can build a more expansive, reflective, and impactful future for design research.

Kareem Collie’s reflection

In 2017, I was acknowledged by Design Incubation’s Scholarship: Creative Work Award after finishing my graduate work at NYU. The project was rooted in personal and intellectual growth, not in advancing my career. While I felt fulfilled, I soon realized my questions needed to translate into something meaningful beyond myself. I needed to share a story that others could connect with.

The recognition from Design Incubation marked a turning point. It helped me understand that my inquiry held value, and that I could shape it into something legible to the world. That award gave me clarity at a time of uncertainty, showing me that my work had potential to resonate beyond academia. It transformed what had felt internal and esoteric into something that could live beyond the studio or classroom. It helped me to move forward with more direction and a clearer voice, carrying with me not just the confidence of that moment, but a broader understanding of the impact creative inquiry can have on the world.

Jenn Stucker’s reflection

Design Incubation’s Communication Design Educators Awards for my collaborative projects, The Sit&Tell Project (awarded in 2017) and In The Round (awarded in 2023), in the service category, are meaningful recognitions. A significant mode of my academic work centers around Design as a Scholarship of Engagement, where my creative and collaborative work aims to foster growth in communities, spotlight the value of design, and contribute to the common good of the design discipline and the public. In these works, the designer and communities work together locally, and accolades from such a reputable organization as Design Incubation provide illumination and validation of the project’s impact and significance to extend beyond the project’s regional situatedness. As there are few venues where design educators can receive recognition for comprehensive service work by a jury of academic peers nationally, Design Incubation’s acknowledgment through a service category amplifies value to institutional and community stakeholder investments in Scholarship of Engagement projects and fortifies confidence for future opportunities.

How Do Design Research Journals Evaluate the Quality of Submitted Articles?

“Ask the Expert” is a series looking at various considerations and practices related to design research, scholarship, publication, and other academic topics.

We invited Design and Culture’s Principal Reviews Editor, Maggie Taft, to respond to questions about different aspects of journal publishing. This is the first of a series from Taft, an independent scholar and Director of Writing Space, a community-based writing center for artists and designers.

Question: How do design research journals evaluate the quality of submitted articles?

Answer:

I think of this question as a two-parter: how do journals go through the process of evaluating submissions and what criteria do they commonly use at different stages in that process?

After an author submits a journal article, it moves through many people’s hands before the author hears back with the journal’s decision. Typically, a Managing Editor, who’s in charge of the journal’s day-to-day coordination and administrative work, is the first to review. The Managing Editor confirms that the article abides by the submission standards and style guidelines evaluating, for instance, that the piece meets the journal’s length specifications and that the topic corresponds with the journal’s. (You might be surprised how often that’s not the case!) Next, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief—that’s the person in charge of the journal’s vision—reviews the piece to confirm that it aligns with the journal’s mission and that, broadly speaking, it follows academic publishing standards. For instance, does it include research with citations? If the Managing Editor and the Editor-in-Chief think it looks good, then they pass it on to one of the journal’s Associate Editors. Associate Editors, sometimes called Editorial Board Members, are specialists in various fields who collectively contribute to a journal’s scope in expertise, perspective, and geographic reach. They oversee the next phase of the review process, during which an article receives more thorough attention and feedback from peer reviewers. Typically, peer reviewers do not hold positions on the journal; you won’t find their names on the masthead. Rather, they’re specialists in the article’s subject area and thus are particularly well-positioned to evaluate its argument, methodology, and contribution to the field.

Different journals configure the peer review process differently, and most use either a double-blind or single-blind review process. Double-blind peer review, which is typically the most highly regarded within academia, means that the reviewers will not know who the author is and the author will not know who the peer reviewers are. Single-blind peer review means that the author does not know who the reviewer is but the reviewer does know who the author is.

When a journal sends out an article for peer review, reviewers are typically asked to evaluate a piece using a questionnaire. Every journal has its own version of this questionnaire—unfortunately, they don’t often make them public—but most ask reviewers to assess some or all of the following features—

Scope: How does the article fit within the journal’s purview?

Impact: What is the significance of this article for its field of study? How does it contribute to research on its topic? How and in what ways does it build on existing literature?

Audience: Who is this article’s primary audience? (For instance, practitioners? Design historians? Design studies researchers?)

Argumentation: What is the article’s central claim? Is it clearly presented and well-supported with adequate evidence? Does any part of the paper need to be expanded to make the argument convincing? Is the approach methodologically sound and appropriate for the subject at hand?

Accuracy: Are there any factual errors in the paper? Is anything misrepresented?

Form: Is the writing and its style clear? Is the paper sensibly organized? Are all citations provided and complete? Are images of high quality and adequately captioned?

As you prepare an article, you may find that answers to the above questions feel self-evident. But it’s important to confirm that they are also apparent on the page. To evaluate if they are, I recommend stepping out of our role as author and trying to approach your text as a reader. Reread your article and try to answer the above questions using only the information provided by the text. For instance, does the text name its intended audience? Can you highlight a sentence that states the article’s central claim? If so, is this in a place where a reader could easily find it, such as the introduction, or is it buried in the paper’s middle?

Approaching your text as though you are a reader can provide new insights into how effectively the text presents your article’s argument, methodology, and contribution to the field. These are the key things that your article’s first readers—the managing editor, editor-in-chief, and peer reviewers at the journal where you’re submitting—will be looking for.

Maggie Taft, PhD
Founding Director
Writing Space

Colloquium 12.2: CAA Conference 2026 Call for Submissions

114th CAA Annual Conference, In Person Format.
Deadline for abstract submissions: August 29, 2025.

We invite abstract submissions on presentation topics relevant to Communication Design research. Submissions should fall into one or more of the following areas: scholarly research, case studies, creative practice, or design pedagogy. We welcome proposals on a variety of topics across the field of communication design.

Submit an abstract of 300 words using the Design Incubation abstract submission form found here:
https://designincubation.com/call-for-submissions/

Submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed. Reviewers’ feedback will be returned. Accepted presentation abstracts will be published on the Design Incubation website.

Accepted researchers will be required to produce a 6-minute videotaped presentation that will be published on the Design Incubation channel. The CAA conference session will consist of a moderated discussion of those presentations.

The session will involve a quick 3-minute presentation overview from each accepted submission researcher, followed by a moderated group discussion.

114th CAA Annual Conference
In Person
Hilton Hotel, Downtown
Chicago, IL
February 18-21, 2026
Presentations and Moderated Discussion

Presenters will follow the basic membership and fee requirements of CAA.

We are accepting abstracts for presentations now until August 29, 2025.

Type as Cultural Bridge: An Interactive Fusion of Iranian and American Design

How typography and interactive media can bridge Iranian cultural heritage and contemporary American aesthetics.

Narges Sedaghat
Graduate student
East Carolina University

In an increasingly globalized and diasporic world, the negotiation of cultural identity has become a central concern in design. Scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall have theorized identity not as a fixed essence but as a fluid process shaped by historical and aesthetic negotiations. Visual culture, particularly typography, can play a critical role in reinterpreting heritage within new cultural frameworks. This project explores how typography and interactive media can bridge Iranian cultural heritage and contemporary American aesthetics, contributing to broader conversations around hybridity, migration, and representation.

The project unfolds in two interrelated phases. The first phase focuses on type design as a medium for cultural storytelling. A full English A-to-Z typeface was developed, inspired by ancient Persian motifs, particularly the Achaemenid lotus. This typeface merges traditional Iranian elements with modern typographic forms, reframing Iranian identity not as fixed or nostalgic, but hybrid and dynamic, aligned with Bhabha’s concept of the third space that conceptualizes identity as a process shaped by hybridity and negotiation.

The second phase of the project centers on participation and interactivity. It takes the form of a web-based experience built with p5.js, where users type their names using the custom font. This action triggers a system that algorithmically generates Iranian-inspired motifs. Users can download or print their designs as postcards, transforming the experience from passive viewing to active participation.

By creating a custom typeface, this project aims to bridge Iranian heritage and contemporary design. This typeface serves as a tool for cultural exchange, and by inviting user interaction, the project becomes a participatory platform. It illustrates how design can embody migration, hybridity, and transformation. Ultimately, this research positions visual design not only as a means of cultural preservation but as a forward-looking method for negotiating hybrid identities and fostering inclusive, multisensory storytelling.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs 

By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor 
SUNY Farmingdale

Most design faculty arrive in higher-ed with a portfolio, not a pedagogy. Drawing on fifteen years of teaching—from high-school art rooms to senior BFA capstones—I translate three active-learning structures into designer-friendly routines that make a classroom feel less like a lecture hall and more like a working studio.

• Agency-Style Jigsaw – Students take on specialist roles (art director, strategist, production artist). Each digs into a targeted reading or demo, then teaches the rest of the team before they assemble a full brand campaign.

• Flipped Chapter Exchange – Half the class distills one chunk of the text, half tackles another, and both sides trade five-slide Pecha Kucha briefs so studio time is free for critique and iteration.

• Iterative Think-Pair-Share – Sixteen individual concepts collapse to eight, then four, then one polished solution as teams merge and refine, mirroring the review ladders of an agency.

I’ve run these circuits in typography, branding, and service-design courses; the pattern is consistent. Roles spark accountability, students vet ideas in smaller circles before they ever reach me, and critiques get sharper because everyone arrives as a mini-expert. The shift echoes John Dewey’s claim that learning “is rooted in experience.” By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

The paper positions this toolkit alongside the practice hubs at Stanford’s d.school and Cooper Hewitt, but its tone stays grounded in studio life. I close with a one-page Method Map that pairs common design-course goals with these structures, so any instructor can drop in a project, set the roles, and watch the room light up—no educational jargon required.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Creative Computation in the Age of AI: Reimagining the Boundary of Human Creativity

How negotiated systems encourage relational authorship and systemic sensitivity.

Bei Hu 
Assistant Professor 
Washington University in St. Louis

As artificial intelligence increasingly participates in creative processes, the distinction between human authorship and machine generation grows more complex. Traditionally, creative computation—rooted in open-source culture, conditional design methodologies, and human-authored algorithms—has emphasized transparency, rule-based emergence, and collaborative process. In contrast, contemporary AI models often function as opaque systems, producing outputs that blur the boundary between human intention and machine autonomy.

This paper examines how creative computation can serve as a critical lens for navigating this shifting boundary. It argues for a framework that sustains human agency even within projects that incorporate AI technologies. Drawing on case studies from a Conditional Design course—where students created emergent works through simple rules and collective negotiation—alongside examples from the author’s own open-source creative coding practice, the research explores how negotiated systems encourage relational authorship and systemic sensitivity.

The paper proposes an approach that embraces AI’s generative capacities while reaffirming the importance of process, openness, and participation. Through this lens, creativity is reimagined not as a product of isolated genius, nor as a fully automated output, but as an emergent, co-constructed process shaped through conditions, collaboration, and responsiveness.

By reframing creative computation as a site of critical engagement, the paper advocates for practices that foreground relationality, transparency, and negotiated complexity—offering pathways for sustaining deeply human forms of creativity within an increasingly algorithmic cultural landscape.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus

It can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon.

Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor 
Louisiana State University

N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus, unpublished for over fifty years, is a work that is at once deeply radical and almost impossibly understated. Subtitled “a novel with voices” and described as an “exploded haiku,” it offers the viewer/reader a sequence of textual elements that gradually coalesce into language—only to fracture, detonate, and dissolve back into nothingness. A vital contribution to Black poetics, The Mundus operates on many levels: it can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon. It is the ultimate exploration of what Pritchard described as the “transreal.”

The Mundus was composed through an analog process—Pritchard assembled multiple sheets of typewritten and photocopied text, collaging them together with tape. The result is a visually arresting object, where the mechanical precision of the typewriter is interrupted by the intervention of the artist’s hand. Yet its ultimate form emerges only through an act of transcoding: reinterpreting this typewritten collage as digital typography. Drawing on my experience designing and typesetting The Mundus, I will examine how this act of typographic transcoding is not just a technical process but a crucial extension of the work’s meaning—one that activates the text’s latent potential and intensifies its formal and semantic resonance.

This act of transcoding allows The Mundus to exist across multiple frameworks simultaneously. In contemporary discourse, visual communication is often framed as a dichotomy between two poles: maximalist expression versus minimalist restraint. Pritchard’s work resists this binary, offering instead a vision that holds both extremes in tension. The Mundus creates a space where presence and absence, language and silence, structure and fragmentation coexist—where nothing and everything unfold at once.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design

Typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vision disabilities rank among the top 10 most common disabilities in the United States. The World Health Organization reports that approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide experience some form of vision impairment. With an aging population, the prevalence of vision-related disabilities is expected to rise. Additionally, learning disabilities affecting reading have a significant societal impact, with the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimating that approximately 20% of the population experiences dyslexia. Given the number of people affected by some form of vision-related disability, communication design, especially type design, must respond by developing and utilizing typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

The history of type design often focuses on aesthetics and form, with readability and legibility viewed more through the lens of reproduction and technology. Historically, type designers demonstrated no concerted effort to explore accessibility meaningfully, and even now that we understand accessibility, few center these concerns. Instead, typography functions similarly to an outdated structure needing retrofitting, using legibility testing for typefaces to determine if they meet accessibility standards. Just as retrofitting buildings for accessibility often fails to meet the needs of disabled individuals fully, using typefaces designed without considering accessibility fails to meet the needs of those with reading and vision disabilities.

Despite its ableist history, the field of type design shows promising signs of change. This presentation will explore three typefaces—Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Luciole—demonstrating the potential of centering disability needs in developing a typeface without sacrificing aesthetic concerns. The emergence of such typefaces is a beacon of hope, signaling a potential future where collaboration with the disabled community can integrate accessibility without sacrificing aesthetics, challenging misconceptions about accessible design, and paving the way to expand accessibility practices in design.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.