Investigations of data visualizations used to maintain bias about gender and race.
Katherine Krcmarik Assistant Professor University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Commonly used visuals such as the United States’ Electoral
College map and the Mercator projection—the most common visual of a world
map—support distortions of reality. In both examples, the use of space, or more
accurately, the misuse of space, distorts our perception of the visual story
and perpetuates long-held biases. These two examples lead to the investigation
of hundreds of data visualizations from which a clear pattern emerged of
hierarchy used to maintain biases about gender and race.
In design, hierarchy serves as a key building block of
practice. The use of space to establish hierarchy is one of the first concepts
we learn and teach in design education and remains one of the most valued tools
for designers. However, hierarchy—vertical hierarchy specifically—relies on the
concept that the amount of space and the location of an image or word occupies
determines the importance of it in relation to all other elements. Hierarchy
allows for the easy access of information but also, whether intentionally or
inadvertently, may reflect gender and race biases in the decisions made when
establishing the hierarchy.
The design profession needs to explore how our basic structures and precepts contribute to the cultural construct to find a new approach to design that eliminates bias. In a vertical hierarchy, one voice, style, right, or reality reigns dominant over all possibilities. Possible solutions to breaking down the biases present in the current vertical hierarchical system may reside in explorations of horizontal hierarchy, heterarchy, and semilattices.
Simulating the working relationship between strategists and creatives.
Kathy Mueller Assistant Professor Temple University
Jennifer Freeman Assistant Professor of Instruction Temple University
This presentation will provide case studies for design
educators to imagine collaborative interdisciplinary projects with their
colleagues in media, communication, and business. It will include an overview
of project structure, process, and outcomes. The presentation will also examine
the advantages and drawbacks to the variety of approaches the presenting
professors have taken to this collaboration. It will illuminate the challenge
of fulfilling the needs of two different student groups.
Examples will be pulled from seven years of
collaboration between an Art Direction class and an Advertising Account
Planning class. Projects were structured to simulate the working relationship
between strategists and creatives—cultivating teamwork and mutual respect among
students using experiential learning. Art Direction students learned the value
of market research and strategy insights. Account Planning students gained an
appreciation for the creative process.
The professors have experimented with modifications to the assignment, to varying degrees of success. In addition to discussing collaboration techniques, this presentation will examine the learnings from teaching with a variety of client approaches—theoretical client assignments; partnerships with student entrepreneur clients through a campus incubator; partnerships with external clients, such as Urban Outfitters Inc.; and most recently, in partnership with a design studio specialized in the non-profit sector.
Proposing a nature-inspired solution to reduce the amount of SAR operations.
Sara Mitschke Graduate Teaching Assistant Texas State University
Every year, thousands of search and rescue (SAR) operations are performed to locate and save lost or missing persons within our national parks. On average, Yosemite National Park’s SAR team responds to approximately 250 rescues per year. Nearly 70 percent of those rescues are to locate lost, missing, or injured hikers. The primary factors contributing to hikers becoming lost or reported as missing include losing the trail accidentally (and then being overcome by darkness), taking the wrong trail, and miscalculating the time or distance of the planned route. In addition, inadequate signage placement, poor typographic design, and lack of signage at decision points are among the many issues when analyzing the wayfinding throughout the park. The purpose of this project and study is to investigate Yosemite National Park’s hiking trail wayfinding system to design an improved solution in order to reduce the amount of SAR operations for lost or missing hikers.
Primary
research will examine trail wayfinding and trail navigation in order to
identify shortcomings with hiking trail wayfinding within our national parks.
On average, Yosemite has approximately 60,000 overnight hikers annually,
therefore, the research will include the impact darkness has on navigating
trails at night. The practice of biomimicry will be used to influence the
overall design outcome through the analysis of nature’s navigational processes
and bioluminescence. Multidisciplinary collaboration with the natural sciences
will be necessary in order to design a nature-inspired and sustainable
solution.
Yosemite National Park is an ideal research environment for this study because observational research has identified multiple areas for hiking wayfinding improvements. Yosemite is also one of the most visited national parks in the United States. The study will conclude with a proposed nature-inspired solution to reduce the amount of SAR operations for lost or missing hikers.
A case study of women in design, voting rights, citizenship, community, and diversity
Kelly Salchow MacArthur Associate Professor Michigan State University
2020 marks the centennial of the ratification
of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote in the United States in
1920. At over 167 million, women make up 50.6% of the American population.(1)
In every presidential election since 1964, more women have voted than men. In
2016, 63.3% of women cast ballots.(2) Graphic design has consistently been
implemented as a powerful tool in politics, with poster design running parallel
to activism and social change for over 100 years. In light of the approaching
2020 election, design educators and practitioners Nancy Skolos and Kelly
Salchow MacArthur, have merged these concepts to create the Women’s Vote 2020
initiative. This presentation will share the case study of this historic
opportunity to catalyze women in design, voting rights, citizenship, community,
and diversity—through a poster design initiative commemorating the milestone
and promoting voter participation.
The potential for inclusivity and increased emphasis on social impact.
Augusta Rose Toppins Associate Professor University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Most graphic design histories conform to a
professionalized, Eurocentric narrative in which prominent works are
progressively arranged along a timeline. While methodologies vary between
Phillip Meggs’, Richard Hollis’, and Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish’s
well-respected texts, these approaches share similarities that suggest a
dominant narrative. In Thinking about History, Sara Maza wrote: “[T]he practice
of history itself and the questions historians ask are transformed and renewed
every time a new set of actors lays claim to its past.” In this Pecha Kucha, I
will present four counter narratives for graphic design history that offer the
potential for inclusivity and increased emphasis on social impact.
First, I will offer a Marxist counter-narrative in which
the history of graphic design is told primarily through its relationship to
labor and class struggle. Second, I will suggest a people’s history of graphic
design, in which the counter-narrative is invested in graphic design as a
universal human activity and a form of cultural production beyond the
profession. Third, I will discuss decolonized counter-narratives, in which
graphic design is delinked from its relationship to capitalism and legacies of
Western centrality. Fourth, I will offer an intersectional counter-narrative in
which gender politics and queer theory are integrated into the history of
graphic design.
For each counter-narrative, I will share a methodology
as well as design objects, ideas, processes, and/or texts that serve as examples.
While none of these approaches will be exhaustively discussed in such a short
presentation, my goal is to spark curiosity about the possibilities of shifting
the conversation.
Image note: Lakota visual language, designed by Sadie Red Wing, 2016. Image courtesy of Sadie Red Wing.
Research in Communication Design. Presentation of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.
The colloquium session is open to all conference attendees.
Design Intervention and Engagement: Design Incubation Colloquium 6.2
There is a presumed canon of visual communication design, one that includes its history, theory, practice, and even the interpretation of its global impact. While it is convenient to take this canon at face value, there are alternative lenses through which we can view the field. In order to continue advancing the discipline in equitable ways, to be inclusive and engage with a variety of practitioners and users, it is important to consider a multitude of alternative viewpoints. Interventions in our attitudes happen in many ways—from envisioning how design alters the world, to methods we use to interpret design in new contexts. This panel will explore such critical interventions, uncovering new ways to re-engage with design education, design practice, and design communities.
Friday, February 14, 2020 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C-1
Co-Chairs
Heather Quinn Assistant Professor DePaul University
Nathan Matteson Assistant Professor DePaul University
Recent advances in technology and improvements of accessibility allow designers to deliver meaningful experiences to broad populations of ages, cultures, abilities, etc.—those who have previously been isolated from the discourse. These rapid changes in technology have also changed the landscape of design practice (for both better and worse) creating the conditions for more collaborative and multi-disciplinary teams who leverage these new or improved tools. This panel will address research projects working at the edge of contemporary technology, across disciplines, and within emerging disciplines. They leverage technological innovation to address issues of representation and access.
Friday, February 14, 2020 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Hilton Chicago – Lower Level – Salon C-1
Co-Chairs
Alex Girard Assistant Professor Southern Connecticut State University
Dan Wong Associate Professor New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Oakland University Department of Art and Art History 310 Wilson Hall Rochester, MI 48309
Design Incubation Colloquium 7.1 (#DI2020oct) will be held at the Department of Art and Art History at Oakland University on Saturday, October 17, 2020, 10:30am-4:30pm. Hosted by Maria Smith Bohannon. 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.
Robin Landa, Distinguished Professor, Michael Graves College, Kean University and Chair, Director of Community Outreach at Design Incubation has been nominated for the Board of Directors of College Art Association (CAA). Please join us in congratulating her for the nomination and vote for her today! She is the only design scholar candidate for this prestigious position.
Jury Commendation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Maria Mater O’Neil, Adjunct Professor, Interamerican University, Fajardo Campus & University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras and Carolina Campus)
Lesley Ann Noel, Professor of Practice in Design Thinking, Tulane University
This article describes the conversation and process between two Caribbean design educators, one from Puerto Rico, and one from Trinidad and Tobago, as they co-developed an appropriate design class for students who were experiencing a catastrophic event. The curriculum built on a design curriculum, developed by the latter for children in a rural village in the English-speaking Caribbean that focussed on promoting equity and empowerment through reflections and critical discussions by the participants. The curriculum was adapted by the former, using her resilience thinking toolbox with her undergraduate students in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María. The aim of the curriculum was to help the Puerto Rican communication design students move beyond merely coping with the impact of the natural disaster, to action and thriving through design. Students were led through several design stages that included reflections, critical discussions, brainstorming around future utopian or dystopian scenarios and proposing solutions. The students were expected to focus on a Puerto Rico in the year 2054 as a strategy of resistance visualization. In this paper, the authors describe the four phases of implementation of the curriculum, as well as the reflections of the students and their own reflections on the collaborative process and its significance.
Featured work by students Yamilex Rodriguez Mojica, Adriana Guardiola, Kathia Carrion. The majority of photos should be credited to Yamilex Rodriguez Mojica from the project Apagados. The notebook and photo by the waterfront is is part of her preliminary work. Adriana’s project was a visualization kit for creating small scale models of possible reuse of fallen trees. Kathia’s project was an ‘Emotional regulator’ a folding poster with different lists of hurricane preparedness tasks. It is meant to be used for families and groups, so tasks can be assigned to each member.
Dr. María de Mater O’Neill is the Head Researcher and Creative Director of Rubberband Design Studio, LLP and a Fulbright Specialist Roster candidate. She is the recipient of a Round Four of the Presidential Design’s Federal Design Achievement Award for Catalog Design (United States), and II Iberoamerican Design Biennal’s BID Prize for Exhibition Design (Spain). Her practice-based doctoral research initiative “Developing Methods of Resilience for Design Practice” is a design model intended to improve real-time resilience thinking for designers working under a variety of types of economic and socio-cultural stressors. O’Neill is a cultural producer; last project was research and exhibition of participatory and community design in Puerto Rico. “Listening to their Voices” research was published in Dialectic (2018, Michigan Publishing) and the project won an honorary award from the 15th Biennial of Architecture in Puerto Rico.
Dr. Lesley Anne Noel is Associate Director for Design Thinking for Social Innovation and a Professor of Practice in Design Thinking at the Tayloe Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University. In 2018–2019 she was a Teaching Fellow / Lecturer at d.school and Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University. She has a Bacharelado (equivalent to bachelor’s degree) in Industrial Design from Universidade Federal do Paraná and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of the West Indies. She completed her doctoral studies in Design at North Carolina State University.
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Omar Sosa-Tzec, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference represented a significant effort to create an inclusive, equitable, and intersectional space that brought together students, educators, researchers, and practitioners to discuss and advance design research. Our nomination in the category of Service is for executing this vision of a hands-on, activity-oriented, inclusive design research conference. Decipher successfully brought together 228 people from 12 countries.
The conference was hosted at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design in September 2018. Decipher united two major and distinct design organizations: AIGA Design Educators Community in partnership and the DARIA Network (Design as Research in the Americas). Decipher 2018 was organized around five crucial themes of defining, doing, disseminating, supporting and teaching research in design disciplines.
To ensure participation from different types of designers with different levels of academic, industry, and/or research experience, we developed an innovative structure for the conference, which comprised the following modalities:
Activity Group: an intensive hands-on session in which all participants collaboratively discuss and ideate on a specific topic to discover emergent themes and issues, develop best practices and guidelines, and gather resources.
Conversation: a relaxed environment to allow participants to discuss the intersection of facilitators’ and participants’ interests through the lens of the conference topics as well as the AIGA 2025 trends (now Design Futures).
Workshop: a more traditional learning session in which one or more facilitators lead participants to engage in a topic within the conference themes. As in a classroom environment, workshop facilitators had specific learning outcomes in mind for participants and were expected to lead the entire session (in contrast to the more collaborative activity group or conversation formats).
Besides these three participation modalities, the Decipher conference included a poster session of research work, a graduate student colloquium, and provided several spaces for networking and discussion.
*Motivation*
People interpret the word design in many ways; when research is added to the mix, the ambiguity increases. Although research has become a critical component of most design faculty’s tenure and promotion requirements, the design research issues addressed at Decipher are still rarely discussed and often misunderstood. Due to a dearth of research discussion and pedagogy in most MFA and similar terminal degree programs in the design disciplines, some experts estimate that close to 90% of those currently teaching design in the U.S. have little or no background in research.
By instigating conversations around these issues, Decipher aimed at causing a ripple effect to advance research agendas for the approximately 11,500 (full- and part-time) university-level design educators in the U.S. Thus, Decipher convened design researchers, practitioners, and educators at all stages in their careers to explore the fusions of research and practice through the ways we accomplish, talk about, and teach design research.
*An Inclusive Submission Process*
We offered a number of submission and participation formats to engage people at different stages and degrees of comfort with design research. Each Decipher attendee submitted one of two types of written contributions: the first was for facilitators, those interested in leading an engaging session for conference attendees around a particular design research subject; the second was for participants, those who wanted to be involved in sessions while bringing a particular research interest into discussions among all attendees.
During the conference, Decipher provided a digital draft of the proceedings that included all facilitators’ and participants’ submissions in order to guide session selection and promote conversations and networking during the conference. Likewise, everyone at the conference, including keynotes, facilitators, and participants had their headshots and biographical descriptions included on the conference website. Due to the democratic nature of our submission process, we wanted these final proceedings to be a permanent record of the various voices of Decipher 2018.
The conference regarded all contributions, regardless of length, of equal value. Because publication is a critical component of academic research, we did not want to restrict publication opportunities to session facilitators alone, as is customary with most other academic conferences. Therefore, the final proceedings, to be published by Michigan Publishing, will include the juried written submission from participants and facilitators alike. In the spirit of equanimity. The forthcoming proceedings will be available online as an open-access publication, and in a print-on-demand format.
Decipher also supported equity and inclusion by offering 10 Scholarships for attendees who identified with backgrounds historically underrepresented in academia. After we conceived of these scholarships, we advocated for them, and obtained funding to support them from Stamps School of Art & Design. We hope that these scholarships will establish a new precedent for future design education and research conferences.
*What we accomplished*
Compared to similar conferences (e.g. Cumulus, A2RU, Design Research Society), Decipher broke the mold with its immersive, hands-on teaching and learning experiences rooted in the five conference themes. We asked facilitators to make all sessions accessible to a wide range of expertise, and did not assume that all attendees came with high levels of design research experience. We also asked them to make the sessions engaging in order to motivate and excite people to engage with design research more deeply while teaching them different ways to foster exchange of ideas and knowledge. This requirement made the sessions not passive as it usually occurs in traditional academic conferences.
Our PDF expands on this overview and includes images and links to additional supporting resources, such as an outcomes video documenting the attendee experience.
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, Assistant Professor, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan
Prof. Murdoch-Kitt is drawn to design through her keen interest in people, systems, and interpersonal interactions. She strives to create effective, socially responsible, and delightful concepts and solutions. Her work and teaching integrate visual communication, interaction, user experience, and service design with behavior change and social engagement. Her current research, in partnership with Prof. Denielle Emans of VCU School of the Arts Qatar, examines and develops design-based methods and tools to promote effective intercultural collaboration, and how related tangible activities and outcomes increase trust and commitment in digital interactions. Murdoch-Kitt and Emans recently coauthored Intercultural Collaboration by Design: Drawing from differences, distances, and disciplines through visual thinking. This book of design-based methods that support intercultural communication and collaboration will be published by Routledge in Spring 2020.
Omar Sosa-Tzec, Assistant Professor, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan
Omar Sosa-Tzec holds a Ph.D. in Informatics with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Design, a MDes in Information Design, and MSc in Computer Science. Prof. Sosa-Tzec has been involved in design practice, teaching, and research for more than a decade. His research lies at the intersection of HCI, Information Design, Semiotics, Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Happiness Studies. Within this space, Prof. Sosa-Tzec studies how the hedonic and eudaimonic qualities of interactive and informational design products shape people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. At Stamps, Prof. Sosa-Tzec teaches Studio 2D, Methods of Creative Inquiry, Sign and Symbol, and Information Design. His practice focuses on communication design, information design, and interaction design.
