Author: Design Incubation

Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University

Friday, October 25, 2024
9:30AM – 2:30PM
Boston University
808 Commonwealth Avenue

Hosted by Mary Yang and Kristen Coogan, College of Fine Art, Boston University. Design Incubation Colloquium is a part of BUGD’s Design Week.

Keynote: YuJune Park

Thursday, October 24, 2024
5:00PM
808 Commonwealth Ave
Room 410

Colloquium 11.1

Friday, October 25 , 2024
9:30AM–2:30PM
808 Commonwealth Ave
Room 409 and 410

9:30AM–10:00AMCoffee and Refreshments
(4th floor lobby)
Welcome/opening remarks
10:00AM–11:30AMSessions
Design + Translation (Room 409)
Design + Subversion (Room 410)
11:30AM–1:00PMLunch break
1:00PM–2:30PM Sessions
Design + Performance (Room 409)
Design + Methodology (Room 410)

MFA Open Studios

Friday, October 25, 2024
5:00PM

Register on Eventbrite

Design Incubation Colloquium Sessions

Design + Translation

Moderators: Kelsey Elder & Liz Deluna

The Design + Translation panel aims to recenter perspectives and prioritize inclusivity by representing a wider range of voices that build design community.

Typography as Racialization: Euro-American Craft and Asian Labor
Chris Lee
Associate Professor
Pratt Institute

Visualizing Faculty Salary Inequity: A Study of Salary Compression and Inversion and Its Impact in Higher Education
MiHyun Kim
Associate Professor
Texas State University

Design + Visual Translation and Cultural Bridging
Shuang Wu
Assistant Professor
Virginia Tech

Drawing Water: A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Representing Water Performance
Eugene Park
Associate Professor
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Jessica Rossi-Mastracci & Matt Tierney
University of Minnesota

A Sequence of Multiplicity
Moon Jung Jang
Associate Professor
University of Georgia

Kaithi Script’s Revival: An Intersection of Design and Cultural Inheritance
Anmol Shrivastava
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Design + Subversion

Moderators: Ash Yuxuan Wei & Dan Wong

The Design + Subversion panel is a space to critique the status quo through forms of intervention, disruption, subversion, and truth-telling.

Drawn Together: Exploring the Intersection of Image-Making and Community-Building
Grace Preston
Lecturer
Texas State University

Advancing Design Practices: Assessing the Impact of New Technologies and Sustainable Innovation
Caitlin Lu & Maidah Salman
Graduate student
Boston University

Designing for Mental Health and Wellbeing: Integrating Mental Health Support into UI/UX Design Course
Ting Zhou
Assistant Professor
University of Connecticut

Exploring Identity through Curatorial Practices: Gráfica Latina
José Menéndez
Assistant Professor
Northeastern University

Tatiana Gómez
Assistant Professor
Massachusetts College of Art and Design

In Search of Feminism and Identity in Asia
Wanjing Li
Designer and Artist
Boston University

Design + Performance

Moderators: Halim Lee & Cat Normoyle

The Design + Performances panel engages the senses through action and experience. It encompasses activities that unite communities and ideas.

Design + Computation + Performance + __________
James Grady
Assistant Professor
Boston University

Sensory and Ambient Interfaces
Jonathan Hanahan
Associate Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Accessibility and Creative Authorship in Design Theory Through Multimodal Learning and Metacognitive Reflection
Molly Haig
Adjunct Professor
University of Europe for the Applied Sciences
Berlin, Germany

Dr. Till Julian Huss
Professor
University of Europe for the Applied Sciences

Pedagogical Workshops and Collaboration
Chen Luo
Lecturer
Boston University

Design + Methodology

Moderators: Claire Bula & Camila Afanador Llach

The Design + Methodology panel presents insights on new design tools, systems, and processes found through innovative research frameworks.

User-Centered Design + Generative AI Research Tools: Usability Testing and Implication
Yi-Fan Chen
Assistant Professor
Farmingdale State College

Design + History Methodology Slam
Brockett Horne
Lecturer
Boston University

A New Framework and Database for Exploring Works of Experience Design
Nicholas Rock
Associate Professor
Boston University, School of Visual Arts

Emotional Engagement in Design: Traditional vs. Art-Based Approaches
Violet Luczak
Associate Professor
McHenry County College, Crystal Lake, IL

Design + Cultural Heritage: The Guano Rug, A Cultural Heritage Under Extinction
Maria Isabel Paz Suarez
Assistant Professor
Universidad San Francisco de Quito

Design + Co-Creation: Engaging Audiences through Cross-Disciplinary Co-Curation
Bei Hu
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Faith and Fiction — The Impact of AI on Spirituality and Design
Nika Simovich Fisher
Assistant Professor
Parsons / The New School for Design

DI News: 2025 Design Writing Fellowship

Three Tracks: Books, Academic Articles and Book/Exhibition Reviews

Do you have an idea for a book? Are you working on an article? Are you a new design writer trying to figure out where to publish first? 

The Design Writing Fellowship (formerly the Design Incubation Fellowship Program) has three tracks: Books, Articles, and Reviews. Participants take part in a 3-day virtual writing workshop, during which they receive feedback, learn about the publishing process, and commit to working on their writing projects for 3-6 months. 

Applications will be accepted until December 1st. The Fellowship Workshop will be held May 28-30, 2025.

For more information and how to apply: https://writingspacechi.com/design-writing-fellowship

Colloquium 11.2: CAA Conference 2025 Call for Submissions

113th CAA Annual Conference, Hybrid format.
Deadline for abstract submissions: August 29, 2024.

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 (indicating preference for virtual or in-person session):
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.

A 6-minute videotaped presentation is required for participation. The video is due on January 15, 2025. It will be published on the Design Incubation YouTube channel.

The 113th Annual CAA conference session will consist of live presentations plus a moderated discussion.

113th CAA Annual Conference
Virtual and New York City
February 12–15, 2025
Live presentations and moderated discussion in a hybrid format.

Presenters are required to follow the basic membership and fee requirements of CAA.

We are accepting abstracts for presentations now until August 29, 2024.

10 Years of Design Incubation’s Colloquium Presentations: A Journey Through the Keywords Defining the Past Decade

From the desk of the Director of Peer Review

Camila Afanador Llach
Associate Professor
Florida Atlantic University

Every year since 2014, Design Incubation has hosted public colloquia for communication design academics and practitioners to share and discuss their research and creative practice. The titles, abstracts, and keywords for these presentations are published and archived in the Design Incubation website. This archive contains a portion of the story of communication design research during the last decade mostly in the United States through the work of professors, adjunct faculty, grad students, and practitioners that have participated in the colloquia. Education, design pedagogies, collaboration, research, design theory, design history, and many other topics are part of this archive. Each abstract’s keywords provide an overview of the focus of each presentation. What can these keywords tell us about the field of communication design research in the past 10 years? Using text analysis tools, this presentation will give an overview on the most common research topics in the field year by year during the last decade.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

On the Consideration of a Black Grid

Keynote Address: Tenth Anniversary Colloquium

Silas Munro
Partner at Polymode
Artist, Design Author, and Design Educator

From the funky, fresh Black modernism of the Johnson Publishing Company’s headquarters designed by John Warren Moutoussamy with Arthur Elrod and William Raiser to the expressive graffitied grids of Adam Pedelton’s monumental canvases in black and white, there lives a wide-ranging matrix of possibilities for what I consider to be a Black Grid. The renowned design scholar Audrey G. Bennett’s text, “Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images“, traces a lineage of fractal ingenuity in the Sub-Saharan Cameronean palace of a Chief in Logone-Birni that likely influenced Egyptian, North African Temple architecture, linking to Italy through the mathematician Fibonacci know for his so-called “golden ratio” that then informed European ideals of beauty circulating in the infamous Bauhaus art school. Bennett’s postulations connect to my meandering search to see myself as a Black designer, artist, and unexpected design historian in a sea of pedagogies that don’t represent me or my lived experience. This brief visual essay charts a series of experimental meditations on how grids can shape Black liberatory forms. My Polymodal design investigations set a curious space that asks, What might be a Black Grid?

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Copy, Transform, Combine: Extrapolating from 19th Century American Wood TypeOld World, New Forms: Extrapolating 19th Century American Wood Type

The repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation

Javier Viramontes
Visiting Lecturer
Rochester Institute of Technology

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” refers to a 2017 University of New Haven exhibition of historically significant Swiss posters from the private collection of Tom Strong, with the aim of deepening the historical/practical education of graphic design students with a more immersive material and contextual experience. The title of the exhibition outlines a methodology of using archives in an experiential manner to engage history, not as a static memory, but rather as an experience that allows students to revisit design history through their own perspectives, allowing them to copy, transform, and combine new works based on historical exemplars.

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” can also serve as a unique way to rethink historical preservation. For this presentation, we will discuss the repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation of Aldine Expanded, a 19th-century American Wood Type design, first manufactured by The Hamilton Mfg. Co., Two Rivers, Wis. As indicated by the research of David Shields, Associate Professor, Department of Graphic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, 19th-century letterforms such as Aldine Expanded were produced in a time without standardized classification systems. Furthermore, without notions of intellectual property or copyright, 19th-century movable wood type designs were often plagiarized, altered, or expanded without a sense of attribution. This typographic revival aims at mapping and classifying Aldine’s various copies and offshoots into a single digital Variable Opentype font file sourced from various design archives.

This presentation will discuss the early and middle stages of this experiment. We are interested in engaging design educators looking to engage archives through preservation, remixing, and the study of historical visual culture through contemporary design technologies.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Revitalizing Symbolic Urbanism: Digitalizing the Vernacular Visual Language of Detroit’s Urban Landscape

Where technological advancements continually redefine the human experience of urban spaces

Dho Yee Chung
Assistant Professor
Oakland University

Detroit is the epitome of the urban development crisis in the United States. Although it’s a city with a rich history in the automobile industry, it faces significant infrastructural challenges and urban decay. As the automobile industry decentralized from Detroit, the city’s booming metropolis experienced abandonment and neglect. Accordingly, the once-thriving industrial engine and the various signages that shaped Detroit’s urban landscape disappeared into its history. The symbolism in these signages is significant because it represents the visual artifacts of respective eras. Recognizing the importance of preserving this visual heritage, my project aims to create a digital archive that revitalizes Detroit’s vernacular visual language.

To ground a framework for symbolism in urban landscapes, this talk revisits Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s seminal work, Learning from Las Vegas, which suggests a new paradigm in the urban landscape—communication over space. While Venturi and his colleagues focused on the context of Las Vegas in the 1960s, my project extends their ideas by bringing them into the present, where technological advancements continually redefine the human experience of urban spaces. With the advent of GPS platforms and self-driving cars with LiDAR technology based on real-time data, the traditional reliance on physical street signs has diminished. However, digital space suggests a new opportunity to transfer the lost vernacular language of the past into a digital archive accessible by any user.

My project seeks to bridge the gap between past and future by acknowledging forgotten history while enriching visual communication relating to Detroit’s urban landscape. This talk is expected to contribute to ongoing dialogues surrounding the intersection of technology, urban development, and visual communication, ensuring that the city’s rich heritage remains an integral part of its future trajectory.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Fuzzy Modes, Clear Communication – Radio as a Process, Tool, and Language for Graphic Design

An experimental practice that bridges the gap between radio and design

Matthew Flores
Graphic Design Fellow, School of Design
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

How can you use an inherently non-visual and immaterial medium to generate, communicate, and disseminate ideas visually? This presentation will explore the first phase of an experimental practice that bridges the gap between radio and design – in particular, the use of “fuzzy modes”, a term coined by Murray Greenman (call sign ZL1BPU) to describe radio formats which employ digital transmission but human-readable reception.

Humans navigate a digital world with an analog toolbox of sense and perception, a fact made complicated when most contemporary methods of communication are intended to be read, interpreted, and translated by a computer. Fuzzy modes exist in the unusual space between machine and brain, leveraging technology for transport, but relying on a human user for interpretation. In practice, I express images and text through a variety of fuzzy modes (in particular, radio facsimile, Slow Scan TV, and Hellschreiber), allowing the idiosyncrasies of each form to become manifest in the message. In this way, noise and artifact highlight the literal and conceptual distance between broadcast and reception, and the act of transmission becomes a collaborative conversation between designer, medium, and receiver.

Transmitting visual information via fuzzy radio mode is full of contradiction: it’s non-visual by nature, yet produces a very particular graphic aesthetic; it’s immaterial, yet reception is bound by a specific physical space; it’s obsolete and niche, yet it creates an opportunity to interrogate our interaction with the digital world. Because of this unique position, I propose that adopting fuzzy modes as a tool for graphic production can refocus our relationship to digital interfaces, underscoring the importance of human perception when communication is necessarily mediated through technology. By turning my design practice fuzzy, I demonstrate that these techniques are more than a dusty set of protocols for ham radio operators, and can become a distinct and compelling means of graphic experimentation and expression.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Federico: Embracing Outside Influences

A typeface modeled after the sign making practice of a solitary World War II veteran

Kyla Paolucci
Assistant Professor
St John’s University

Federico is a typeface modeled after the sign making practice of my grandfather, a solitary World War II vet who drafted his progressive philosophies in electrical tape for all those who passed his home. His practice employed humble materials to create hopeful messages despite his own economic poverty. I’ve recreated his methods with the tools readily available to me to design a spirited typeface that features a range of styles.

As a graphic designer and educator, I am intrigued by how ethnographic approaches to design can enrich commercial outcomes. By refocusing type design on analog practices, the materials used when creating work can reflect relational experiences and unveil new visual languages for future applications. Tape is an inexpensive material that is admired by many designers and my use is one of many recipes. Its properties enable diverse constructions across various contexts. As a tool for type design, characters are engineered rather than drawn, allowing for quick reconfiguration and expansion of weights and styles.

Type design has become more accessible over the years with free software and online instruction. Federico, however, is an analog process that must leverage desktop tools to exist in a predominantly digital market. Serving not only as a typeface, Federico is a system that connects me to my generational roots as a designer by embracing traditional methods while adapting to modern tools and technologies.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Data in Motion: Storytelling with Data and Motion Graphics through a Graphic Design Practice & Pedagogy

Students were trained in preparing the dataset through cleaning and enriching it with other relevant metadata

Eugene Park
Associate Professor
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

This paper proposes a forward-thinking pedagogical approach that brings motion graphics into the practice of data visualization within a graphic design studio classroom. The intention behind this pedagogical approach is to address the need to effectively communicate complex data through visual narratives that enriches design research and practice with data literacy and storytelling.

At the heart of this exploration is a case study that tasked junior and senior graphic design students with creating a one minute video to explain a selected topic. Students had to utilize open source data published by government agencies and nonprofits. By working with these datasets, they were trained in preparing the dataset through cleaning and enriching it with other relevant metadata to enhance their intended narrative. In addition to using common analysis tools like Tableau, machine learning algorithms written in Python were also utilized for specialized datasets (i.e. textual data).

After the analysis stage, students proceeded to storyboard their animations using the graphs they generated. Along the way, they were challenged to design their scenes with the text-to-graph relationships in mind, and strategically plan out their scenes to optimize information retention and minimize cognitive overload. Afterwards, the final animations were created using After Effects. Due to the focus on the analysis, visualization, and animation, there wasn’t time to explore how sound can enhance the animated experience.

This project challenges graphic design students to engage in statistical analysis and apply dual-coding theory where both written text and accompanying images are utilized in creating an explanatory visualization. It also equips students with the skills and insights necessary to create clear, engaging, and informative visual narratives with both traditional practices and modern design tools. Ultimately, this reinforces the importance of graphic designers to expand visual communication beyond the static mediums in order to make complex information accessible.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.