Research in Communication Design
Deadline: October 15, 2014
The 2014 autumn colloquium will be the next event to be held by Design Incubation at CityTech, CUNY. We invite all Communication Design researchers to submit abstracts for consideration by our panel of peers.
For more details, see the Submission Process description.
Event Date: Friday, October 31, 2014
11am-2pm
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
300 Jay Street
Room N119
Brooklyn NY, 11201
Please RSVP if you plan on attending.
Hosted by M. Genevieve Hitchings & Dan Wong
Friday, October 31, 2014
11am-2pm
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
300 Jay Street
Room N119
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Please RSVP if you plan on attending. Presentation lists to follow.
Mathew Bethancourt
Assistant Professor
Media Design Programs Team, Visual & Performing Arts Unit
Hostos Community College, CUNY
Andy London
Lecturer
Media Design Programs Team, Visual & Performing Arts Unit
Hostos Community College, CUNY
Sarah Sandman
Assistant Professor
Media Design Programs Team, Visual & Performing Arts Unit
Hostos Community College, CUNY
Rees Shad
Chair of Humanities Department
Media Design Programs Team, Visual & Performing Arts Unit
Hostos Community College, CUNY
Monika Maniecki
Adjunct Lecturer
MFA in Illustration
Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
Irina Lee
Design Director
Bureau Blank
Adjunct Lecturer
School of Visual Arts
Department of Visual Communications: Art + Graphic Design
SUNY Farmingdale
Ryan Hartley Smith
Assistant Professor, Graphic Design
Art Department, Queens College, CUNY
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Conference Room, Klapper Hall
Queens College
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Queens, NY 11367-1597
Definining Practice, Redefining Education: Five Case Studies
Juliette Cezzar
Associate Director & Assistant Professor
BFA Communication Design
Parsons the New School for Design
Reality Check: Learning About the Difference Between Design and Designer
Yue Chen
Art Director
Office of Visual Communication
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Engaging the Campus Community with Design Thinking
Andrew DeRosa
Assistant Professor
Queens College, CUNY
Juliette Cezzar
Associate Director & Assistant Professor
BFA Communication Design
Parsons the New School for Design
The last decade has brought with it a fragmentation of the design field, where the work of the graphic designer is publicly being defined as limited to artifacts (magazines, posters, advertisements) while “new”fields of interaction design, digital product design, service design, and branding are distancing themselves as rapidly as possible. At the same time, schools have moved away from prioritizing concept and theory, emphasizing the teaching of skills instead, oftenblaming the demands of the technological marketplace.
The result has been a suite of technology-based skills courses that are tacked onto existing curricula, making many students’ transcripts read as comma-separated lists of various subfields without preparing them for the field they are graduating into.
This presentation demonstrates five ways faculty can incorporate the teaching of technology into the fundamentals of graphic design and carry them through into subsequent “non-technology” courses such as editorial design. The aim is to bring technology into concept, methodology, and theory, not just technique – then to bring those three things back into our programs.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.1: Queens College on Tuesday, August 26, 2014.Andrew DeRosa
Assistant Professor
Queens College, CUNY
Design thinking often involves small trans-disciplinary teams working together to tackle complex problems for communities using ethnography, prototyping and co-design. Translating this process into an academic course creates a number of challenges and opportunities. I’ve chosen to approach this challenge by using the campus as laboratory and engaging the campus community. I’ve created an introductory course that brings together upper-level students from different areas of study to practice design thinking. Students learn experientially. They organize and conduct field research, and participate in a range of studio-based design processes. They work together on all phases of the project. We use the campus as our laboratory to use design thinking to identify and solve community-based problems. The course is structured around a semester-long project exploring ways to improve the lives of other students by designing new or modified services, experiences, and interactions.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.1: Queens College on Tuesday, August 26, 2014.Yue Chen
Art Director
Office of Visual Communication
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Design critic Ralph Caplan wrote: “Learning how to write is not the same as being a writer.” The same principle holds true when it comes to design, and yet this simple truth is often forgotten in the classroom. While students are expected to learn how to design, many have failed to realize that technique alone does not automatically make them designers—attitude and work ethnic are just as important. In this presentation, I will discuss a few real-life lessons I developed to help students become more aware of the choices they make as designers, and how those choices can, for better or worse, affect their own lives and the well-being of society.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.1: Queens College on Tuesday, August 26, 2014.Thursday, June 5, 2014
2:30pm-4:30pm
AIGA
Minnesota conference room, 3rd Floor
164 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010
RSVP required, limited seating
ABC’s of Type Design
Liz DeLuna
Associate Professor of Graphic Design
St. John’s University
Using Printmaking Techniques to Teach Metacognitive Skills to Design Students
Sharon (Libby) Clarke
Assistant Professor
Advertising Design and Graphic Arts
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Design Considerations for Low Literacy Audiences: A Case Study
Kathryn Weinstein
Associate Professor of Graphic Design
Queens College, CUNY
The Unique Challenges of Defining Research and Scholarship for Communication Design Academics
Dan Wong
Assistant Professor
Advertising Design & Graphic Arts
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Design Bravery: Managing Fear and Facilitating Development through Collaboration
Lisa J. Maione, Art Director / Designer
Adjunct Professor, Queens College CUNY
Part-time Lecturer, Parsons The New School for Design
Service-learning: A Natural Fit in Design Education?
M. Genevieve Hitchings
Assistant Professor
Advertising Design & Graphic Arts
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
M. Genevieve Hitchings
Assistant Professor
Advertising Design & Graphic Arts
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
College level design courses can provide students with opportunities to work effectively in collaboration with actual clients. Such projects, undertaken jointly by faculty, students, and clients, develop student skills not only in design, but also in research, and in communicating with the public. Carefully chosen projects can also be of benefit to society, and offer advantages over work confined to the classroom. Since a large part of what we do in communication design is geared at problem solving for clients, service learning seems a natural fit in design education; and presents students with unique opportunities to work on projects focused on critical social issues. And yet when put into practice ethical dilemma can arise that are not so simple to navigate when teaching a class. This presentation highlights difficulites faculty-contemplating bringing a client into a design class may encounter.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA on Thursday, June 5, 2014.Kathryn Weinstein
Associate Professor of Graphic Design
Queens College, CUNY
This presentation describes a case study of the re-design of the Inwood House Resident’s Handbook. Inwood House is a short-term residence for pregnant young women in foster care. Considerations for the design of the handbook included the age, gender and the average literacy level (3rd grade) of the residents; and the communication objectives and legal obligations of the institution.
Research from the Institute of Medicine, National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has demonstrated that design decisions can impede or assist comprehension for readers with minimal literacy skills. This case study presents best practices for designers culled from existing research —including recommendations for layout, use of color and graphics, and analysis of text — to be used to maximize the effectiveness of materials designed for low-literacy audiences. The case study presents spreads from the Inwood House Resident’s Handbook to illustrate the prescribed best practices for designers and two assessment tools from the Harvard School of Health were utilized to predict the effectiveness of the design for the residents of Inwood House.
PRESENTATION: DesignConsiderations_K_Weinstein6_2014
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA on Thursday, June 5, 2014.Liz DeLuna
Associate Professor of Graphic Design
St. John’s University
Every typeface has a story, and many typefaces have life cycles and histories that span centuries. These histories and stories reveal tales of historical and cultural context, modes of production, changes in production technologies and rationales for the emergence of styles and trends. This lecture examines the evolution of three distinct digital typeface designs, from research through design and production. My first foray into typeface design began when I discovered a late 19th century stone wall plaque in the Bowery Mission meeting room in downtown Manhattan. The letterforms on the plaque were carvings that had been done by hand, each one individual and unique. Excited by this discovery, I made rubbings of the letterforms. A desire to turn these eclectic letterforms into a typeface propelled my further explorations into typeface design. This journey eventually led me to the typeface design program, Type@Cooper. The process of designing a typeface requires a diverse and interdisciplinary skill set; relying on a web of historical, cultural, and technical understanding, as well as the more formal aesthetic and form making skills. The type designer inhabits a world somewhere between designer and engineer. My ongoing research explores the overlap between digital typeface design and traditional graphic design outputs.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA on Thursday, June 5, 2014.
