Author: Design Incubation

Developing Design Curriculum Assessment Goals and Student Learning Outcomes; A Case Study: Typography

Walk through the process of project creation to meet learning outcomes, evaluation of success, and mapping outcomes to student learning.

Andrea Hempstead
Assistant Professor
Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi

No matter your design school pedagogy, the need for defined and executed assessment and student learning outcomes is important for institutional and programmatic accreditation. This can seem a daunting task for most educators, and particularly so for those teaching in creative disciplines. When academics hear “assessment” and “learning outcomes” they often become angry. This anger, is often fueled by fear that the “institution” is trying to control classrooms, or worse, justify teaching positions and approaches. Ultimately, these institutional measures have the best interests of the student at heart. Done correctly, assessment and defined student learning outcomes help to guide instructors to create and revise curriculum to meet student needs and are flexible enough to allow for unique classroom experiences.

Assessment models favor a tiered approach to learning. Typically, there are touch points throughout curriculum where student learning outcomes are introduced, reinforced and mastered. Ideally, outcomes are not addressed solely in one course, but built upon as the student learns and progresses through the program. Once developed and implemented, these learning outcomes can be assessed to evaluate where student learning could be improved, but also can reinforce successes and program strengths. Additionally, program assessments can serve as documentation to reinforce the need for program funding to improve areas of weakness. Assessment documents can serve as justification for improved facilities, software purchases or even faculty lines.

This case study walks through the process of project creation and implementation to meet course student learning outcomes, evaluation of student success regarding course outcomes, and mapping these outcomes to how program student learning outcomes are introduced, reinforced and mastered. Assessment of the project includes analyzing student course outcomes and progression of overall program student learning.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

In Restless Aesthetic Pursuit: Recontextualizing Typography

Finding new ways to inject creativity, typographic expression, and a sense of play into typography.

Maria Smith Bohannon
Assistant Professor
Oakland University

Communication and aesthetic resolution are primary considerations in solving design problems. Good, solid typography skills are critical for students, and for practicing designers. But once the typographic skills are honed, what’s next? This study takes a look at how we can inject more creativity, more typographic expression, and a sense of play into typography through analog and digital means, and how that might manifest creative growth.

Expressive forms of design and typography have gained favor at various points throughout design’s history, and two that struck a chord for this project include Futurist poems and Weingart’s typographic studies that intentionally sought rule-breaking. One of the propelling goals of this project was to find new ways to recontextualize typography—modifying letterforms—through physical slicing, cutting, rearranging, stabbing, altering and generally modifying portions of the text, whether it was taking cues from the written words or by analyzing an entire page. The idea of play is an overarching theme, as well as Robert Bjork’s “desirable difficulties”—more difficult tasks will slow down the learning process, but create better retention of the information.

Visual examples include interpretative typographic studies from students, as well as a series of personal studies based on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait. These examples explore typographic methodologies that follow traditional typographic hierarchies and communication goals, as well as designs that break rules, push creative norms, practice self-directed expression and explore personally motivated designs—with the simple goal of discovery and creative expression.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Reading Color: Type in and on Color

A synthesized, inductive approach using Itten’s contrast of extension and Albers’s experimental color studies in application to the visual gestalt of typography.

Jeanne Criscola
Assistant Professor
Central Connecticut State University

Much has been theorized about the transformation of communication from cave paintings to written language and how humans employing materials and technologies impacted their evolution. In 1493, Johannes Gutenberg’s technologies marked a milestone for communication and its distribution with the mechanization of movable type printing. The transition from hot type that went obsolete in the 1950s, to cold type that met its demise around 1985 with desktop publishing, was short-lived. Now, digital typesetting technologies offering myriad configurations of size, font, and layout—in seemingly infinite spectrums of color—present limitless opportunities for the practice of communication design.

This fusion of type and color presents challenges for pedagogy and discourse in the fields of typography and color where they have historically been considered separately in books and in coursework. In typography books, examples typically use letterforms in varying degrees of sizes and contrast to demonstrate colors’ influence on legibility. In books on color theory, the properties of color are often demonstrated with pie-shaped diagrams, color wheels, grids, and in continuous bands. Each pedagogy falls short of modeling today’s communication technologies where typography and color are intrinsic, inseparable, and synergistic.

Methodologies that facilitate the study of typography and color in context and in situ would be welcome by educators and professionals alike. For educators, infusing color theory into the study of typography has advantages for curriculum and course development. For the design student, learning color theory with letterforms integrates their study and practice.

This paper sets out to initiate a synthesized, inductive approach using Johannes Itten’s contrast of extension and Joseph Albers’s experimental color studies in application to the visual gestalt of typography.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Place Matters: Design for Regenerating Under-Utilized Spaces

An investigation of the affordances of a local theatre and an escape room in Ohio to seek for opportunities of under-utilized space design.

Yi-Fan Chen
Assistant Professor of Interaction Design
Farmingdale State College

Jerald Belich
Assistant Professor
Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies
Miami University

Yashodhan Mandke
User Experience Consultant
Fusion Alliance

This design research project began with an investigation of the affordances of a local theatre and an escape room in Ohio to seek for opportunities of under-utilized space design. The participation observations were conducted and found that people, community, content, and environment made positive user experience and increase the users’ loyalty to the spaces. When people co-create a meaning of the spaces, they are likely to make the spaces “their own” and bring their social networks to the spaces.

Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism provides this project with a theoretical framework for the design process. Dramatism analyzes human relationships and has been applied to a broader range of cultural productions. Design researchers and scholars are seeking opportunities to apply Dramatistic Approach to analyze and create designs. For examples, Sadler and Bellew (2009) propose to utilize Burke’s perspectives to analyze and understand a usability situation of design whereas Bowie (2015) proposes to employ Dramatism to examine design products, processes, and discourses. Moreover, Bemer (2010) utilizes Dramatism to design a computer lab for an English Department. According to Burke (1945, 1950, 1968), just as in any plays, the acts in life are keys to revealing human motives. Dramatism provides researchers a method to examine the relationship among human, text, and environments.

A prototype was created by combining empirical research findings and Burke’s (1945) pentad, including act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose, to build positive user experience and increase the users’ loyalty to the spaces. The space design includes three phases, before during and exiting the space. Each phase tells stories that focus on how users see, touch, hear, smell, and feel. Additionally, the design is hoping to change the under-utilized space into a new community space. The users could make the space to their own and revisit the space often with their social networks.

References

Bemer, A. N. M. (2010). The rhetoric of space in the design of academic writing locations. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Utah State University, Logan, Utah. Retrieved from  https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/752

Bowie, A. (2015, April 22-24). Exploring the rhetorical orientations of design trends: A Kenneth Burkean approach. In L. Valentine, B. B. de Mozota, J. Nelson, S. Merter, and P. Atkinson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th International European Academy of Design Conference. “The Value of Design Research”, Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Retrieved from https://ead.yasar.edu.tr/conferences/ead-11-france-2015/11th-ead-proceedings/?csrt=9122487017854515442

Sadler, V., & Bellew, K. (2009, July). Introducing rhetoric into usability: Applying Burke’s pentad. In 2009 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

The Hamden Hunger Project

Addressing the often-overlooked issue of food insecurity in our local community.

Courtney Marchese
Associate Professor of Interactive Media + Design
School of Communications
Quinnipiac University

Amy Walker
Assistant Professor
Journalism
Quinnipiac University

Michaela Mendygral
Design, Journalism Student
Quinnipiac University

https://www.hamdenhungerproject.com/

Over the past year, an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students from the School of Communications have worked to address the often-overlooked issue of food insecurity in our local community of Hamden. Members of the journalism and graphic design programs have been using a combination of listening booths, two-way texting, billboards, flyers, surveys, and data visuals to build a dialogue with the community. That dialogue has helped raise awareness of hunger in Hamden, and guide those in need of food to available resources near them. Through this project, we also designed a comprehensive report with the United Way of Greater New Haven to help share key findings with the town, news outlets, and government figures.

The project is part of a broader endeavor to not only “design for good,” but to embrace all that is possible in a School of Communications. Our goal is to make important data and stories more accessible–aesthetically, strategically, and verbally–while teaching students to be collaborative, informed citizens.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Teaching Procedural Rhetoric: Some Lessons

Challenges of analyzing and designing artifacts that presume to use interactivity for communication.

Ian Bellomy
Interaction Designer

This presentation will summarize lessons learned from studio coursework that incorporated Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric — an idea about how interactive artifacts make claims, i.e. communicate, by way of their behavior. I incorporated the topic in response to observing multiple senior communication design capstone students treat interactivity as a kind of generic value-add opposed to a space for making communication-affecting decisions. My hope was that the concept would lend students a better conceptual scaffolding for engaging the general challenges of analyzing and designing artifacts that presume to use interactivity for communication.

Results were mixed.

Crafting procedural rhetoric requires crafting emergent phenomena, which is difficult even absent communication goals. Moreover, my initial attempt to simply this challenge by having students design analog artifacts instead of digital ones only replaced the student need for programming competency with a non-trivial need for analog game design competency.

Moderately successful solutions did occur however and project development often showed some movement towards solutions that better integrated visuals and interaction in support of some subject matter. A few students also formulated sophisticated procedural insights about their project’s topic, indicating some systems-thinking growth.

Unexpected positive outcomes also manifest. Some students discovered solutions that worked, in a sense, despite not fitting the procedural rhetoric structure. This helped me formulate alternative strategies for interactive communication in general. I also learned I could isolate components of the procedural rhetoric concept in ways that afforded valuable learning opportunities about causal relationships. I incorporated these insights into later projects.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Guns ARE Alive: How Design/Technology Literacy is Missing From the Gun Debate in America

Design illiteracy affects the gun debate by obscuring how firearms fit into our culture.

Glenn LaVertu
Professor
Parsons, The New School

Gun rights advocates often use arguments like “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” or “Cars kill people, too.” These arguments expose a serious design illiteracy issue: that we either ignore or misunderstand the process, evolution, and purpose of weapon design and industrial design in general. Design illiteracy affects the gun debate by obscuring how firearms fit into our culture as well as how they have shaped our history.

Philosophical issues in fields such as aesthetics, technology and ethics greatly affect the gun debate in America in three distinct but overlapping areas: first, as a historical recognition of the gun and its presence as an emblematic container of a legacy of violence, death and power; second, for guiding gun control legislation via a determination and consequent categorization of firearm technology as being appropriate or inappropriate for civilian use; and third, by creating a set of ethics that considers the gun an active and animate object, complicit in the phenomenon of human violence.

This presentation will feature research on six pivotal technological innovations in gun design and the historical contexts for which new firearms features were created, and how an understanding of these design intentions can reshape the political discourse. I will also examine arguments made within the gun debate and how a better understanding of design can change our perception of guns as more than mere objects to become physical extensions of ourselves, reshaping the ethics from which they are considered.

We rarely consider the role which design plays in our lives and in the things we use, let alone as part of the discussion about guns; and in those rare instances when we do, we prove that we don’t know much about design, or guns. The analysis here will show that design, while an important and foundational facet to the debate, is an area of knowledge we are sorely lacking.

Whatever your stance on the gun issue, better design knowledge can raise more nuanced questions and can steer the argument in more positive ways. Perhaps by broadening the debate to design we can find a new consensus or allow for compromise. It is crucial at this moment, with so much gun violence at the center of our lives, that we give it a try. Lives are at stake.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Colloquium 6.3: Fordham University, Call for Submissions

Call for design research abstracts. Deadline: Saturday, December 28, 2019.

Fordham University Manhattan Campus
Saturday March 28, 2020

Submission Deadline: Saturday, December 28, 2019

Design Incubation Colloquium 6.3 (#DI2020mar) will be held at the Visual Arts Department at Fordham University Manhattan Campus on Saturday, March 28, 2020, 10:00am-5:00pm. Hosted by Abby Goldstein. This event is open to all interested in Communication Design research.

We invite designers—practitioners and educators—to submit abstracts of design research. We recommend reviewing our white paper on best practices for writing an academic research abstract.

Presentations format is Pecha Kucha.

For more details, see the colloquia details and description. Abstracts can be submitted online for peer review.

A Day of Writing

Come spend an uninterrupted day working on a writing project.

Quinnipiac University
School of Communications
Room CCE140
October 6th 2019
10:00am –4:00pm

Design Incubation is proud to be able to partner with Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut to offer a Day of Writing. Join long-time author Robin Landa and spend an uninterrupted day working on a writing project of your choice. This event will be held the day after the Design Incubation Colloquium at Quinnipiac University.

Participants will spend the day writing or conducting preliminary work on a writing project. The Day of Writing is open to design faculty and to those working in related fields.

Using the online registration system (see below), applicants should submit a 150-500 word synopsis of the project they intend to work on along with their title and institutional affiliation. The cost is $30 for the day. A total of 12 seats are available for this event.

Optional Event at 9:00am 

Start the day early and get your creative juices flowing with a short hike on Sleeping Giant Tower Trail. Host, writer and fellow hiker Courtney Marchese will lead the group to the stone tower and overlook (3 miles total). The hike starts directly across from the main QU entrance and is rated as “moderate” and appropriate for all skill levels.

Applications will be considered immediately upon submission and they can be submitted through September 30th, 2019. Official letters of acceptance can be provided to allow attendees to request funding from their institutions.

Parking

Parking is available in either the Admissions Visitor Lot or the School of Communications lot. Security will be notified and can help to direct attendees. Both of these lots are on Mount Carmel Ave. across from Sleeping Giant State Park.

Quinnipiac Day of Writing Application Form

Complete the form below and submit online. Payment will be required upon acceptance to secure the seat.

  • 200–500 word description of the writing project.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
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CFP: The Fellowship Program at Design Incubation 2020

Call for Participation: 3-day academic design research and writing workshop. Application deadline, October 15, 2019.

Application deadline: October 15, 2019

Fellowship dates: June 4–June 6, 2020

Location: St. John’s University, Manhattan Campus, 51 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003

Target Audience: Design academics in one or more of the following areas: graphic design, information design, branding, marketing, advertising, typography, web, interaction, film and video, animation, illustration, game design. Full-time tenure track or tenured faculty are given preference but any academic may apply.

Format: All Fellows accepted into the program participate in the Fellowship Workshop as part of the overall experience. The Fellowship workshops offers participants the opportunity to share and develop ideas for research and individual writing projects while receiving constructive feedback from faculty mentors and peers in their field.

Fellows arrive with a draft of their writing and work on this specific project throughout the various sessions of the Fellowship Workshop. Each meeting includes a number of short informational sessions and a session devoted to analyzing and editing written work. The remainder of the 3-day workshop will be focused on activities which allow participants to share their projects with peers and receive structured feedback. Between sessions, Fellows will have time to execute revisions, review others participants work, and engage in discussions. Initiation of and work on collaborative projects is encouraged.

For more further details visit:
The Fellowship Program at Design Incubation

To apply visit the application details and online form:
Fellowship Program format and online application process

For Frequently Asked Questions visit the FAQ page:
Fellowship Program frequently asked questions