Author: Design Incubation

Design Incubation Colloquium 1.1: Queens College

Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Conference Room, Klapper Hall
Queens College
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Queens, NY 11367-1597

Presentations

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

Attendees

  • Liz DeLuna, Associate Professor, St. John’s University
  • M. Genevieve Hitchings, Assistant Professor, CityTech—CUNY
  • Lisa Maione, Adjunct Lecturer, Parsons—The New School, Queens College—CUNY
  • Grace Moon, Assistant Professor, Queens College—CUNY
  • Aaris Sherin, Associate Professor, St. John’s University
  • Ryan Hartley Smith, Assistant Professor, Queens College — CUNY
  • Kathryn Weinstein, Assistant Professor, Queens College—CUNY
  • Dan Wong, Assistant Professor, CityTech—CUNY

 

Defining Practice, Redefining Education: Five Case Studies

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.

Engaging the Campus Community with Design Thinking

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.

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

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.

Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA

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

Presentations

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

Attendees

  • Mary Ann Biehl, Chair, Associate Professor, CityTech—CUNY
  • Anita Giraldo, Assistant Professor, CityTech—CUNY
  • Tanya Goetz, Assistant Professor, CityTech—CUNY
  • Joel Mason, Professor, CityTech—CUNY
  • Joe Moore, Assistant Professor, City College—CUNY
  • Jane Pirone, Assistant Professor, Parsons—The New School
  • Susan Spivack, Program Director, Associate Professor, Kingsborough—CUNY

 

Service-learning: A Natural Fit in Design Education?

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.

Design Considerations for Low Literacy Audiences: A Case Study

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.

ABC’s of Type Design

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.

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

Retrospective summary
Prepared July 2026 from the presenter’s slides and speaker notes. No abstract was submitted for this presentation in 2014. Colloquium 1.0 was by invitation; abstracts were not peer reviewed.

Communication design academics are evaluated for promotion and tenure against research standards developed in other disciplines, while the field has few scholarly journals of its own and no accepted definition of what its research is.

Communication design practice, in and of itself, is research.

This presentation tests communication design against definitions of research drawn from federal guidelines, arts and humanities research councils, and university policy, on the premise that knowing where a discipline fits determines what it does. It situates communication design within a taxonomy of the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts, then distinguishes it from adjacent design fields: unlike industrial, interior, or fashion design, it cannot conceptualize in a vacuum, having no purpose absent a need to communicate. Drawing on Charles Owen’s mapping of disciplinary activity, it argues that extending practice toward research moves the field from synthetic and real activity toward the analytic, contributing to knowledge rather than only drawing on it. It then examines the fine art model, where exhibition functions as peer review, and advances a parallel for design: client selection as review, with professional credentials — experience, budget accountability, demonstrated return on investment — constituting reviewer qualification.

Against the empirical apparatus of the sciences — hypothesis, subjects, controlled trials, statistical analysis — the presentation asks whether research in design should instead be a natural result of practice. Institutional criteria already recognize a completed design project as research when it extends the field’s knowledge base, is open to peer review, is documented in writing, and has its methodologies described.

Practice satisfies the first of those conditions. The remaining three are matters of documentation and venue rather than of method — infrastructure the discipline has yet to build, and the condition on which recognition of practice as scholarship depends.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA on Thursday, June 5, 2014.

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

As we educators wrestle with the shifting significance of print in our classrooms, we risk losing equipment, space, and funding for printmaking techniques that are seen as being no longer relevant. This study works to prove that techniques including relief printing, letterpress and lithography can be instrumental in bridging the gap between the haptic and the conceptual for poorly performing students. It strives to demonstrate that printmaking lessons are ideal for teaching the bedrock metacognitive skills so many low-performing or disadvantaged students lack when they come into our classrooms. These observations are posited to help cement printmaking’s continued place in our institutions and our curricula.

This year-long study focuses on the application of current educational theories through printmaking lessons to help beginning students improve markedly in a college setting. Specifically, metacognitive strategies are taught through printmaking projects in order to reach and support the lowest performing students in a variety of design classes and art workshops. The problem-solving skills inherent in printmaking makes it a particularly good medium to help students overcome difficulties to find connections to new material, thereby providing them with the confidence and context they need to succeed academically.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA on Thursday, June 5, 2014.