Author: Design Incubation

An Argument for Including the Banal in Design Histories

It is critical to understand how basic design efforts are explicitly world-building

Gabi Schaffzin
Assistant Professor
York University

Too often, design students are not given access to design histories that go beyond the hero-centric survey course that focuses on canonical figures responsible for forging a new path in the field or becoming household. In design, there are perhaps a few dozen of these individuals whose work will be indelibly stamped onto the brains of our undergraduates by the time they enter the workforce. That said, what those young designers do after graduation will most likely not feel terribly revolutionary as they sketch a user interface, layout a newsletter, or prepare a PowerPoint for their manager. As I will argue in this talk, however, it is critical to understand this type of work as explicitly world-building. 

We must as design educators help our students recognize how complicated these seemingly banal artifacts are and see the inherent complexity of the issues surrounding them. By framing these complexities as systemic, we can break the spell of the canonical designer. A beautiful poster is, to be sure, seductive. But our students must pay attention to the interfaces and visual tools they build that will shape their world. In this talk, I will present a few such examples: a drop-down menu wherein a Palestinian’s nationality is not listed; a single black line used to facilitate the measurement of a patient’s pain; an online form used to send in tips for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. If the time allows, I will also provide tips on how to find these examples, including via a tip of the cap to the relatively new Peoples’ Graphic Design Archive.

Certainly, if we are going to teach the tools to reshape the world, we must make sure our students have solid ground for survival—as such, I am not suggesting we fully jettison the foundational design education. But the problematics associated with the aforementioned artifacts are communal. By pairing banal design histories with systemic thinking and autonomous design approaches within the design practice curriculum, we can help our students understand their power and position them to make real, meaningful change.

Prototyping Interactive and Exploratory Visualizations for Interdisciplinary Dialogues

The visualization of interdisciplinary dialogues between design faculties and practitioners

Eugene Park
Associate Professor
University of Minnesota

Visualization of archives is a perennial challenge in the field of design that offers unique opportunities in storytelling in the context of big data. Recognizing the importance of data-driven experiences, this presentation will highlight the creative and educational opportunities as well as the challenges involving the visualization of interdisciplinary dialogues between design faculties and practitioners held over Zoom. By aggregating voice and chat transcripts into unified datasets, it becomes possible to transform them into a series of graphics that visualizes how these interdisciplinary discussions evolved across various topics.

Aided by Python scripts, the data was prepared and analyzed by design students who attended the zoom meetings and rewatched the video recordings. Instead of relying on unsupervised machine learning techniques, students discussed amongst themselves and determined the word groups for each Zoom session, which was the basis of visualizing the evolution of discussion topics over time. The intention behind this process was not to establish an efficient and scalable data pipeline, but to create a learning experience for students to disseminate what was discussed among design faculty and practitioners and become involved in the visualization process.

The outcomes of this project revealed how visualizing interdisciplinary discussions can unveil narratives and insights that otherwise might have been missed in other modalities. By observing how topics evolved over time, it was possible to see the collective areas of expertise of the dialogue participants as well as their knowledge gaps. Ultimately, this project raises questions on the assumptions behind data visualization outcomes and processes. What are the limitations of visualizations for topic modeling? How can animation and interactivity affect the experience of data-driven narratives? And how can students and algorithms work together to promote learning experiences? These are some of the major questions that will be explored through this presentation and subsequent discussion.

Come Back Home: A Case Study of a Collaborative Srts-based Research Project

How can society continue to engage in the shared pursuit of truth within the context of social-media fueled mis-information and socio-political fragmentation?

Liese Zahabi
Assistant Professor
University of New Hampshire

What constitutes truth? How can society continue to engage in the shared pursuit of truth within the context of social-media fueled mis-information and socio-political fragmentation? This collaborative, experimental project combines the creative forces of a Communication Professor who is also a songwriter and musician, a Design Professor who is also a motion designer and writer, and three dance students—resulting in three video-based artworks and a short documentary that examines the themes of truth, media, information, and current events. The project sits at the intersection of creative praxis, performance, and visual communication, weaving together multiple forms and modes of content. This presentation aims to briefly describe the project and connect it to the nascent but growing practice of Arts-Based Research (ABR).

In the second edition of her book Method Meets Art (2015), Patricia Leavy describes the concept of ABR: “Arts-based researchers are not ‘discovering’ new research tools, they are carving them. And with the tools they sculpt, so too a space opens within the research community where passion and rigor boldly intersect out in the open.” (p. 21) ABR offers ways for scholars in various disciplines to explore their research questions through an array of creative, visual, audible, performative, and written practices. Come Back Home is a strong example of ABR, showcasing creative research and making rooted in communication, visual, and performance practices, exploring the messy nature of information in our contemporary world. 

As design educators and researchers grapple with the forms their scholarship ought to take, ABR offers innovative ways to reconsider the formats of rigorous academic work. This project demonstrates how disciplines might collaborate around a set of questions, generating meaningful research that bursts out of the traditional mold of the formal academic article, creating work that can be published in more accessible venues, speaking to a more diverse array of audiences.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University on Saturday, October 15, 2022.

Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivist

Susan LaPorte
Professor
College for Creative Studies

Communication Design and typography have been intertwined from the start, as the urge to express moved from the oral to the written, so has this partnership. Consider the enterprising graphic marks pressed into clay to communicate commerce by Sumerians, hieroglyphs documenting Egyptian rituals, the innovation of movable type first in the east, and then the west, to the typographic alphabet soup from the industry period, and ones/zeros that continue to document our thoughts through the words we write and the typographic expressions we employ to amplify their messages. The shape that typography has taken reflects the taste(s), technology(s), and need(s) of global citizens through time.

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivists. The class was given their vast collections of objects and artifacts as a starting point for their type design inquiry. Each student documented typography/or graphic marks found or embedded within carriages, signage, broadside, machinery, games, as inspiration for a new typeface that expanded the sample and inspired new alphabet of their own vision. Additionally, the goal was for students to see the importance of research around a design can broaden their design practice; that design is not always about serving a client, but also expanding knowledge around our discipline.

A typographic history lecture was shared to broaden their understanding of type, written communication, and the technology that shaped information through the centuries. Students then focused their own critical research, to discover greater relevance of context and meaning to the design of their type specimens. The process of creating were iterative, critical, and resulted expanding the students understanding of design practice and original type designs inspired from the collection.

The results of this class and our partnership with the HFM, and with the financial support of the Ford Fund are a set of publications, entitled Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters. It is a documentation of 13 new typefaces, designed by 13 new type designers, expanding our typographic legacy.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University on Saturday, October 15, 2022.

Subject, Material, Tool: A Strategy for Harnessing the Visual Communication Possibilities of Physical Materials

A set of limitations designers can play with in order to get the most image-making possibilities out of any given material

Anne Jordan
Assistant Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology

I am a book cover designer. My work consists primarily of typography as image. I aim to find that perfect point of verbal-visual connection, where what the title says and how that typography was made snap into place to reinforce each other. I do this by incorporating image-making techniques that harness the visual communication possibilities of physical materials.

Over the past fifteen years, I have developed a unique process to turn these physical materials into engaging digital images that I call “Subject, Material, Tool.” This process is a structured way to create images in which the materials used to make the images both form and inform the meaning of the typography.

“Subject, Material, Tool” is a set of limitations designers can play with in order to get the most image-making possibilities out of any given material. Essentially, it prompts designers to examine each material through three distinct lenses: as a subject, as a raw material, and as a tool. My presentation will demonstrate exactly how “Subject, Material, Tool” works via a series of applied case studies in book cover design.

I am also a design educator at the graduate level and have used “Subject, Material, Tool” as a creative prompt in the classroom with great success. My students have benefited from learning “Subject, Material, Tool” because it provides them with a concrete strategy for coming up with ideas and creating images, significantly improving their creativity in the image-making process. I will share several examples of student work as evidence of such.

Image-making, the verbal-visual connection, and type as image are topics that have been well researched by colleagues such as Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell, Cassie Hester, Annabelle Gould, Renee Seward, Keetra Dean Dixon, and others. This is for good reason, because finding an ideal verbal-visual connection is one of the biggest challenges designers face. “Subject, Material, Tool” fits into this area of research, but is different from existing research. “Subject, Material, Tool” is a new take on the image-making process, offering a unique structure and point of view, therefore adding valuable scholarship to this important area of research.

This presentation will be directed at design educators looking for ideas about teaching process in their classrooms. “Subject, Material, Tool” is specific enough to be helpful, but open enough that it can be broadly used across many areas of art and design.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University on Saturday, October 15, 2022.

Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University

Saturday, October 15, 2022
Time: 1:00pm–2:00pm
Online ZOOM event

Hosted by Jessica Barness, Associate Professor and Sanda Katila, Associate Professor, School of Visual Communication Design, Kent State University.

Presentations will be published on the Design Incubation YouTube Channel after October 7, 2022. Virtual Conference will be held online on Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 1pm EST.

Register on Eventbrite

MODERATORS

Jessica Barness
Associate Professor 
Kent State University

Sanda Katila
Associate Professor
Kent State University

PRESENTATIONS

Subject, Material, Tool: A Strategy for Harnessing the Visual Communication Possibilities of Physical Materials
Anne Jordan
Assistant Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology

Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters
Susan LaPorte
Professor
College for Creative Studies

Come Back Home: a Case Study of a Collaborative Arts-based Research Project
Liese Zahabi
Assistant Professor
University of New Hampshire

An Argument for Including the Banal in Design Histories
Gabi Schaffzin
Assistant Professor
York University

Prototyping Interactive and Exploratory Visualizations for Interdisciplinary Dialogues
Eugene Park
Associate Professor
University of Minnesota

Designing with Power: Drawing Parallels Between Design Pedagogy and Writing Workshops
Joshua Korenblat
Associate Professor
State University of New York at New Paltz

Voices Heard: Designing an Oral History Archive
Kimmie Parker
Assistant Professor
Oakland University

Say No to Stigma: Making Mental Health Visible in Rural Ugandan Primary Schools
Penina Laker
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St Louis

CFP: 2022 Design Incubation Communication Design Awards

Call for Nominations and Entries for the 2022 Design Incubation Educators Awards Competition.

Design Incubation announces a call for nominations and entries for the 2022 awards for communication design educators and graduate students in the areas of scholarship, teaching, service. The aim of the awards program is to discover and recognize new scholarship (creative work and publications), teaching, and service in our broad and varied discipline. We hope to expand the design record, promote excellence and share knowledge within the field. 

Nominations and Entries

We ask colleagues and mentors to identify outstanding creative work, publications, teaching, and service being created by design educators in the field communication design and to nominate these individuals for an award. Nominations will be accepted until December 31, 2022 

Entry Guidelines

Entries will be accepted until December 31, 2022. Nominations are not required to enter in this scholarly competition. Complete the online entry form (https://designincubation.com/design-incubation-awards-competition-entry-form/) with the following:

  • Title: Description of project and outcomes (not to exceed 500 words)
  • Supporting Materials: (limited to 5-page medium resolution pdf of artwork; web links to websites, videos, other online resources; published documents or visual documents)
  • Biography of applicant/s (150 words per applicant)
  • Curriculum vitae of applicant/s
  • $20 entry fee donation

2022 Jury

Steven McCarthy (Chair), University of Minnesota, 

John Bowers, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Maria Rogal, University of Florida, Florida

Kaleena Sales, Tennessee State University

R. Brian Stone, The National University of Singapore

Teal Triggs, Royal College of Art, London

Biographies

JOHN BOWERS

John Bowers is chair of the Visual Communication Design department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through making, writing, and teaching, he explores issues of individual and collective identity. His making practice repurposes newspapers from public to private record, and billboard paper into forms that address their underlying targeting strategies and have been sold through Printed Matter. He worked as a Senior Identity Designer at Landor (San Francisco) during the dot-com bubble. His professional work has been published in 365: AIGA, Communication Arts, ID, and Graphis. His writing includes “A Lesson from Spirograph,” (Design Observer), Introduction to Two-Dimensional Design: Understanding Form and Function, Second Edition (Wiley), and Visual Communication Design Teaching Strategies, which isposted on the AIGA Educators Community website. He has been a curriculum consultant and visiting designer in the US, Canada, and Sweden.

STEVEN MCCARTHY (CHAIR)

Steven McCarthy is Professor Emeritus of Graphic Design at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He established the Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards and chaired the jury from 2016-2018. McCarthy’s teaching, scholarship, and contributions to the discipline include lectures, exhibitions, publications, and grant-funded research on a global scale. His creative work was featured in 125+ exhibitions and he is the author of The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating (BIS, Amsterdam). From 2014–2017, McCarthy served on the board of directors of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

MARIA ROGAL

Maria Rogal is a Professor of Graphic Design and founding director of MFA in Design & Visual Communications at the University of Florida. She is the founder of D4D Lab, an award-winning initiative codesigning with indigenous entrepreneurs and subject matter experts to support autonomy and self-determination. After over a decade working with partners in México, she cofounded Codesigning Equitable Futures to foster respectful collaborations among the university and local community in Gainesville, Florida. She continues to speak and write about social and codesign, recently presenting at Pivot 2020, and co-authored “CoDesigning for Development,” which appears in The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design. Her research has been funded by AIGA, Sappi, and Fulbright programs, among others, and her creative design work has been featured in national and international juried exhibitions.

KALEENA SALES

Kaleena Sales is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Chair of the Department of Art & Design at Tennessee State University, an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in Nashville, TN. She is co-host of Design Observer’s The Design of Business | The Business of Design Minisodes podcast with Omari Souza. Her design writing and research centers on Black culture and aesthetics, recently co-authoring the book Extra-Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Non-Binary Field Guild for Graphic Designers, alongside Ellen Lupton, Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara. Kaleena has a Master’s Degree from VCU Brandcenter, an MFA from Savannah College of Art & Design, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Design at NC State University. 

R. BRIAN STONE

 R. Brian Stone is an Associate Professor at The National University of Singapore. His award-winning work and teachings are centered in the areas of motion design, interaction design, information visualization, and user experience.

Professor Stone is the co-founder of the bi-annual MODE Summit, an international conference bringing together motion design educators to present research and discuss the discipline. In addition, he is the co-editor of a collection of essays entitled, The Theory and Practice of Motion Design: Critical Perspectives and Professional Practice published by Routledge.

Prior, to his tenure at NUS, Brian taught at the University of the Arts and The Ohio State University. Apple recognized Professor Stone’s teaching with the Apple Distinguished Educator award. He is also a recipient of the Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, The Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Order of Omega Faculty Recognition Award, and the National University of Singapore’s Annual Teaching Excellence Award.

Brian holds a MA and MFA in Design from The Ohio State University and a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of the Arts.

TEAL TRIGGS

Teal Triggs is Professor of Graphic Design and leads on the MPhil/PhD programme in the School of Communication, Royal College of Art, London. As a graphic design historian, critic and educator she has lectured and broadcast widely and her writings have appeared in numerous edited books and international design publications. Triggs’s research focuses on design pedagogy, criticism, self-publishing, and feminism. She is Associate Editor of Design Issues (MIT Press) and was founding Editor-in-Chief of Communication Design (Taylor & Francis/ico-D). Her recent books include: co-editor with Professor Leslie Atzmon of The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury), author of Fanzines (Thames & Hudson)and the children’s book The School of Art (Wide Eyed Editions) which was shortlisted for the ALCS 2016 Educational Writer’s Award. She is Fellow of the Design Research Society, International Society of Typographic Designers and the Royal Society of Arts.

Uttar Pradesh’s First Breastfeeding Cubicle

communication collaterals in the form of cubicle wall panels were co-designed and rigorously tested with a cohort of mothers from the target audience

Service Design Award Winner

Sarah Tanishka Nethan
Researcher
Community Empowerment Lab 

Shatarupa Bandopadhyay (Former Art Fellow, Community Empowerment Lab)

Abdul Qadir (Graphic Designer, Community Empowerment Lab)

Aarti Kumar (CEO, Community Empowerment Lab)

Vishwajeet Kumar (Principal Scientist, Community Empowerment Lab)

Sarah-T.-Nethan_Breastfeeding-Cubicle_Design-Incubation-Communication-Design-Awards-2021Download

Exclusive breastfeeding till six months has the potential to save ~8,20,000 babies. The State of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) in India loses ~2,00,000 newborns annually, making it the global epicentre for newborn deaths. However, simple interventions like early initiation within 24 hours after birth and exclusive breastfeeding till six months aid newborn survival. But despite ongoing awareness and advocacy around the benefits of breastfeeding, the progress and uptake still remain low. The National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-16) reports that in U.P. only a quarter of infants were being initiated to breastfeeding within an hour of birth, and only a quarter continued to be exclusively breastfed till six months.

A 10-days design sprint and partnership with Uttar Pradesh State Road Transportation (UPSRTC) in 2019 led to U.P.’s first Breastfeeding Cubicle at a public bus station in the State’s capital, Lucknow. This project aimed at

a) Creating an enabling environment for breastfeeding within the bus station;

b) Communicating value around breastfeeding and respectful care for nursing mothers through Communication Design, thereby shaping behaviors; and

c) Reinforcing ideal behaviors around breastfeeding through nudges in the form of communication materials.

The approach of the participatory design was adopted, wherein the communication collaterals in the form of cubicle wall panels were co-designed and rigorously tested with a cohort of mothers from the target audience. Insights from consultations with key stakeholders within the health system and UPSRTC were also included throughout the design process. The Breastfeeding Cubicle is a safe haven for traveling mothers who want to nurse their infants in a public place like a bus station. The wall panels act as a catalyst to nudge mothers to breastfeed their baby, through the use of storytelling aided by contextually relevant illustrations.

Design Process:

The idea of having a Breastfeeding Cubicle at public bus stations was birthed by the sight of a mother struggling to nurse her infant in a busy bus station at Lucknow. The Managing Director of UPSRTC (Dr. Raj Shekhar) was taken aback to see the plight of the mother and decided to create a comfortable space for mothers to freely breastfeed their babies. Our team was commissioned to develop the wall panels for the cubicle, which was led by the designer.

Potential personas were mapped, based on insights gained from the Formative Research conducted as part of a Gates-funded grant to strengthen breastfeeding practices through Kangaroo Mother Care, as well as exploratory unstructured interviews with urban as well as rural mothers and Agrimaas (respectful care champions stationed at the Kangaroo Care Lounges in public health hospitals of Raebareli district). The Breastfeeding Support for Indian Moms (BSIM), a peer group on Facebook that aims at empowering mothers around breastfeeding was also used as a platform to gain an understanding of the “pains” and “gains” of breastfeeding i.e. common challenges faced by mothers and challenges specific to breastfeeding while traveling, from a larger sample set. Additionally, methods like role-playing and journey map were employed to build deep empathy and understand the current mental model of beneficiaries, along with a review of existing communication materials on infant nutrition. Insights obtained from all these activities helped frame certain guiding principles for the cubicle space as well as the communication materials to be used in it.

From the above, we learned that women who would avail the services of UPSRTC buses belong to middle and low-income families. Broadly, they can be categorized into:

• Mothers of babies younger than 6 months

• Mothers of babies older than 6 months

It was found that most mothers avoid traveling during the early months of the infant (less than 4 months). Therefore, our focus was on babies above 4 months which would include a mixture of breastfeeding infants as well as those on complementary feeding. As a result, one of the challenges for us was to bring a balance between information for these two types of infant categories in the existing architecture of the cubicle, with a major focus on reinforcing breastfeeding behavior. Messaging content for the communication materials in the form of wall panels were developed for the two categories of infants, with the common goal of calming down a hurried and anxious traveling mother in those 10-15 mins of the breastfeeding episode inside the cubicle.

On reviewing the existing communication materials, it was found that the tonality of the messaging was very instructive and direct. The desirable outcome (i.e. exclusive breastfeeding) was stated explicitly and contradicted the beneficiary community’s underlying socio-cultural reasoning. Therefore, our approach instead was to create a system that shifts behaviors and helps adopt ideal behaviors than merely changing them. A highly iterative process of co-designing and pretesting the prototypes with beneficiaries from seven public health facilities in U.P. was employed, along with inputs from health providers and UPSRTC stakeholders. During the pretesting, it was found that the shortlisted prototype version powerfully resonated with the beneficiaries and also affected their desire to not replace breast milk with other alternatives.

Project Outcome and impact

The above activities enabled the design and development of wall panels for the breastfeeding cubicle. In order to make it gender inclusive and balance any underlying gender connotations, the wall panels had a teal and fuchsia base. Principles of affect and salience biases were used to create a conversational and narrative-based messaging architecture and tonality. The messaging was framed as a dialogue between the mother-baby dyad, with the mascot (i.e. an infant) addressing key perceptions on breastfeeding through culturally grounded analogies, along with simple cartoon-style illustrations. Cues for messaging were taken from experiences shared by mothers during the interviews, which became instrumental in making it contextually relevant for the beneficiaries. In addition to this, a remote lactation tele-support system was also developed, wherein the nominee created the operational plan, call protocols, and a database.

U.P.’s first breastfeeding cubicle was inaugurated on 30th September 2019 by Shri. Ashok Kataria (Minister of State, Independent Charge for Transport). Data from pre-COVID times suggests that an average of five mothers used the Breastfeeding Cubicle every day, who found the space to be attractive as well as comfortable, and the messages to be intuitive. The wall panels have created a respectful and caring environment for severely resourced nursing mothers by nudging them towards the desired outcome of breastfeeding, without any imposition. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the vibrant color palette and illustrations grabbed the attention of most passers-by. Furthermore, the conversational tonality of the messages, especially the analogies, appealed to the beneficiaries’ cultural “sense”. With such a positive response, UPSRTC had also announced to scale this initiative across hundred bus stations in the State. However, the expansion has been on pause since early 2020 due to the pandemic, since all the resources across government bodies (including UPSRTC) have been directed towards COVID-19 relief efforts.

This project aimed at changing behavior of beneficiaries by reinforcing ideal behaviors to achieve the goal of breastfeeding. However, behavior change isn’t possible overnight. But what this initiative does is that it aids a gradual shift to achieving breastfeeding outcomes for such a critical social challenge in difficult terrain like U.P. through Communication Design. This initiative, therefore, acts as a stepping stone to achieving the larger goal of newborn survival in one of the toughest geographies in the world.

Sarah Tanishka Nethan is a Social Design Researcher working at the intersection of participatory design and Behavioral Science, and currently working as Lead, Family Planning & Reproductive Health at Vihara Innovation Network. Over the years, she has developed community-centric solutions across disciplines of public health (primarily Sexual and Reproductive Health; Maternal, Newborn and Child Health; and WASH), planetary health, gender, and education. An advocate for inclusion and Human-Centered Design, she is deeply passionate about building innovations at the confluence of local wisdom and Design that bridge the social-development equity gap within communities. Currently at Vihara, in addition to managing the FP-RH practice area, she is conducting a landscape analysis on measurement and evaluation within HCD+ASRH programs, with an aim to develop solutions for some pertinent challenges within this field. In the past, she has also worked on various multidisciplinary projects associated with the World Health Organization, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UN Women, World Design Organization, Government of Uttar Pradesh (National Health Mission), and Stanford University, among others. She holds a B.Sc. in Fashion and Apparel Design from JD Institute of Fashion Technology, and Master in Design from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Mumbai.

Semiotics Studio

Course outcomes connect the study of form to the political dimensions of designing, specifically how systems of representation bear on social realities

Design Teaching Award Runner-Up

Aggie Toppins
Associate Professor, Design
Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts
Washington University in St. Louis

Semiotics Studio is a new communication design course in the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. Students learn the fundamentals of semiotic theory (the philosophical study of signs and systems of representation) and apply its concepts to studio practice. Students construct pictogrammatic signs for public contexts, shape experimental readings in motion graphics, and create critical interventions through an open design project. Learning outcomes for this class connect the study of form to the political dimensions of designing, specifically how systems of representation bear on social realities. Through exercises, projects, readings, and class discussions, students explore the world of meaning-making including categories of signs, the possibilities of interpretation, and how signs work to normalize cultural practices and perceptions of truth.

There are three studio projects in this course. At the beginning of the semester, projects come with multiple constraints but these gradually loosen so that by the end of the semester, students determine the scope of their own project. The first project is a pictogram assignment in which students learn to systemically construct signs on a formal level while applying basic semiotic concepts from Saussure, Peirce, and Barthes including models of signification, sign modes (icon, index, symbol), and the principles of denotation and connotation. Next is a motion graphics project in which students explore Barthes’ idea of “double articulation,” his twin concepts of anchorage and relay, as well as his critique of authorship. The latter is connected to Michael Rock’s writings on graphic authorship. The third and last project introduces students to poststructuralism including the relationship of signs to theories of power from Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, and Baudrillard. Students are asked to choose an artifact or system of design, mind-map the semiotic domain that surrounds this artifact or system, and then design a critical intervention through a project of their own choosing.

In addition to these studio projects, students read challenging texts and write five reading responses. The texts are a combination of primary philosophical works, secondary texts, podcasts, and design criticism. Readings are applicable to studio projects and intended to exercise the student’s capacity for critical thinking.

My teaching methods are informed by emancipatory pedagogy, such as those espoused by Paolo Freire and bell hooks. I offer my students learning goals but my assignments do not have preconceived “right” or “wrong” answers. Assignments present students with opportunities to center their experiences and connect their personal interests to the field of communication design. Class time is spent on skill-building workshops, discussions in which students and teachers bring relevant examples (no lecturing to docile listeners), opportunities to workshop research, various forms of critique, and open work sessions.

Although we are in a classroom and we are reading texts and making speculative projects, I teach from the perspective that design has import. Together, we are co-investigating problems in the world (which is to say, many worlds). Semiotics is a theoretical trajectory that begins in Europe and the United States. I contextualize this in the classroom while relating the ideas to design in global contexts. We problematize Western thought by including critical perspectives on colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. My goal is to help students adopt design as a language for critical thinking so that they are equipped not just to take a position in the field, but to potentially transform it.

The Sam Fox School provides students with a robust form-based education. I developed this elective course to address the lack of curricular opportunities for students to engage critical and social theories in design. Additionally, I successfully applied to Wash U’s Gephardt Center to support an embedded librarian, Jenny Akins, to be present in our classroom community. My collaboration with Jenny allowed for the integration of information literacy learning outcomes simultaneously with semiotics and design. Every studio project was informed by a research phase. Having an embedded librarian created a mechanism for supporting students in adopting strong research habits in and out of the classroom.

Students responded well to the course and my teaching evaluations were entirely positive. In the final reviews, one student commented that they appreciated the community we built together and felt they had a lot of room to explore. Another student commented, “I understand what I’m doing now when I make design decisions.” In reflecting on the course, I was pleased with the diversity of responses to project prompts as well as the quality of the students’ work. Considering the challenges of remote learning and the mental and physical toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on our students, I was impressed by and grateful for the high level of energy that my students brought all semester. I look forward to teaching this class in the future and evolving the curriculum over time.

Aggie Toppins is an Associate Professor and Chair of Design at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining the faculty at Wash U, Aggie taught for eight years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she served for two years as the first female Department Head in Art. Aggie works at the intersections of studio practice and critical writing to explore the ways that visual communication bears on social realities. She is interested in the appraisal of history, the negotiability of meaning-making, and in using these critical orientations to decouple design from universalist narratives of capital. Her recent writing has been published by AIGA Eye on Design, Slanted, and in Briar Levit’s forthcoming book Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History (Princeton Architectural Press).

Social Design: Bridging Two Continents Through Collaboration and Innovation

Students understand their role as designers/co-creators/catalysts within a global context to explore the problem of sustainability

Design Teaching Award Winner

Neeta Verma
Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

NVerma_EvidenceofOutcome_DIA_2021Download

The aim of this advanced-level course in Social Design was for students to understand their role as designers/co-creators/catalysts within a global context to explore the problem of sustainability. This multi-disciplinary partnership brought together students from the University of Notre Dame (UND) and the National Institute of Design(NID) in India. The cohort of 14 students traveled approximately 17,000 miles, with 19 weeks of working together (3 weeks in India, 2 weeks in the US, and 14 weeks of working virtually). With an emphasis on problem solving and innovation, the learning goal was to examine the problem of sustainability through a cross-cultural prism, in India and the United States— two very divergent socio-economic constructs. The project was funded through a $30,000 grant awarded to the lead faculty. This semester-long collaboration was to help students develop an understanding of social constructs within two divergent economies and look through globally re-contextualized perspectives at the singular issue of sustainability. The course was designed as a solution solution-finding process for a singular problem, where students not only to sought a solution but gained a deeper understanding of complex cultural, social, and economic environments within which design solutions often need to find congruity. The students gained both a depth of understanding and breadth of social competency of the frame of reference within which their solutions were expected to function.

PEDAGOGY:

The course followed an 8-step pedagogical process used in the Social Design class.

Empathy: the understanding the needs, attitudes, and pre-dispositions of a people with whom the designers are working

Immersion: Daily engagement and involvement over a period of time

Awareness: Observations and knowledge gathering of a problem area within its cultural context

Definition: Determining the scope of research and inquiry

Engagement: Understanding stakeholders and their interconnectedness

Synthesis and problem framing: Structuring the context within which the problem is being defined

Design interventions: Collaborative encounters that facilitate solution-finding at the grassroots

Integration: Ensuring that the solution embeds itself within the context from which the problem emerged

OUTCOMES:

A total of six projects were completed. Of those, the one listed below is being showcased: Sustainable Packaging by Kacey Hengesbach (UND), Anupam Garg (NID)

The project looked at packaging trends in the current fruit and vegetable markets supply chain to document non-sustainable packaging trends and explore ways to replace existing packaging solutions with biodegradable alternatives in India.

PROFICIENCIES:

The students developed cultural competencies by discovering ways of navigating new environments. Within research students were introduced to ethnographic research; and empirical investigation through interviews, photo and film documentation, logging daily activity, contextual analysis, and partnering with local individuals working in the supply chains to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges. The project framework for the project focused primarily on a critical understanding of convergence and divergence in problem-framing that helped students position their research in two diametrically different geographies. In some cases, the research yielded similar results between the two contexts and in others, there was great divergence.

RESEARCH PROCESS:

The following steps were used within the design process:

1. Problem Definition

Researching statistics that quantitatively describe the acute problem of plastic consumption and the proportion that is specifically used for fruit and vegetable packaging. Also examined was the per capita consumption of plastics in the United States and India as they compare to world consumption.

2. Researching the market

Students researched the time and distance fruits and vegetables travel to get to markets. They examined the complexity of supply chains and journeys of fruits and vegetables as well as the needs that packaging had to fill along those journeys before arriving at the local wholesale markets.

3. Field research, interviews, and photo documentation

Over two weeks, students visited the wholesale and retail markets to understand the various needs of the vendors and where plastics were replacing traditional materials.

4. Exploring material

Students explored traditionally used regional materials like bulrush, banana, bamboo, and jute but ultimately chose the water hyacinth, a plant that is predominantly found across the world. It has both pliability and high strength in its various stages of drying.

5. Exploring materiality

Students explored the pliability and the tensile strength of the water hyacinth in its various stages of drying. They also examined how different surfaces could be created during each stage of drying to develop surfaces from soft (for protection) to hard (for support and bearing weight) to accommodate the varying needs of the markets.

6. The Design Intervention

For the final design intervention, the proposed solution was a packaging solution that offered a cradle to cradle method made out of naturally biodegradable materials, specifically using water hyacinth in combination with jute and bulrush. The packaging system was customizable, stackable, usable for display, reusable for future use, compactable, and transportable.

7. Project Design Impact

Environment: Creating a product that benefits the environment by ridding it of an invasive species without the use of harmful chemicals.

Economy: Adding income to rural areas that participate in manufacturing.

Culture: Supporting existing regional crafts and using their skills to create sustainable packaging solutions.

COURSE IMPACT:

The course due to its travel component and the complexity of the problem exposed students to contexts that they had never experienced before expanding the classroom globally. Challenges included differences in climate, language, and cultural etiquettes. The academic challenges lay in navigating the research as the students immersed themselves in unfamiliar environments. On the other hand, experiencing the richness of a whole new culture and renegotiating the sense of the self within a new context helped broaden perspectives. The opportunity provided an incredibly enriching experience for design students to immerse themselves within a new social, cultural, and economic order. The experience enabled the design students to gain global perspectives about the implications of design and the impact it can have. Above all, with social innovation at the core of design education today, this experience built confidence and resiliency within students as they situated themselves within diverse contexts and collaborated with others to manage complexity at both global and local scales.

Neeta Verma is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame and situates herself within the porous discipline of Visual Communication Design. Her areas of research and teaching focus on social equity and justice. She teaches Social Design at the intersection of social innovation and collaborative practices, and Visualization of Data that investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of representation. Her current research, supported by a prestigious grant, examines youth violence. She received her MFA from Yale and currently holds Faculty Fellowships at the Center for Social Concerns, the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies, and the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame. She is the recipient of several awards including Graphis, Core77, A’Design Awards, and International Design Awards. She has presented her research at both national and international conferences. She serves on the SEGD Academic Task Force and CAA Committee on Design.