Tag: architecture

Design + Cultural Heritage: The Guano Rug, A Cultural Heritage Under Extinction

Crafting hand-knotted rugs primarily made from wool sourced from sheep, llama, or alpaca.

Maria Isabel Paz Suarez
Assistant Professor
Universidad San Francisco de Quito

Located in the Chimborazo Province of Ecuador, Guano is a town celebrated for its rich artisanal heritage, particularly in crafting hand-knotted rugs primarily made from wool sourced from sheep, llama, or alpaca. Distinguished by their rich textures and vibrant colours, Guano rugs were once a high-commodity export in the 1970s. During that era, Guano produced over 3,000 square meters of tapestries per month for international export. Today, however, only 10 artisans of this craft survive, all of which are over 60 years old. Unfortunately, the Guano rug artistry is now a cultural heritage on the brink of extinction.

As an architect and lover of drawings, I have been researching ways to redesign the Guano carpets at all scales. The rugs are hand-knotted at 42,000 stitches per square meter, with designs often transferred from paper drawings to yarn. The original drawings, often damaged, are becoming increasingly difficult to interpret by those weaving the textiles, often hindering the possibility for new generations to weave and learn this craft. For the past five years, in close relationship with the artisans, I have developed new methodologies to produce these tapestries.

To enable the preservation of this craft, research on their creative processes and methodologies has been vital. My research has involved interviews with the 10 living artisans at their workshops, visits to local suppliers that produce natural and tinted yarn, and the design and production of a new collection featuring contemporary designs for international markets.

The result of this ongoing research is an attempt to show the world how to understand these cross-stitched drawings, enabling new designers to collaborate with the artisans and expose Guano to a global economy.

In light of this Design Incubation Colloquium, I intend to share details about my process of design and research with the Guano community showcasing the means and methods I’ve used to create digital drawings and patterns for Guano artisans to interpret. At large, I strongly believe there is an opportunity to revitalize this craft. By fostering the transfer of knowledge to younger generations, I am confident this project will work towards the preservation of this Ecuadorian cultural heritage.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Architecture and Design Students Envision the Post-COVID Built Environment

How designers can prepare for the next pandemic by looking at it as a human-centered design initiative

Denise Anderson
Assistant Professor
Michael Graves College, Kean University

Craig Konyk
Associate Professor
Michael Graves College, Kean University

Kylie Mena
Michael Graves College, Kean University

Varrianna Siryon
Michael Graves College, Kean University

Humanity will call upon architects and designers to respond to the resulting modified human behaviors and built environment in the post-COVID-19 world. These areas include the need for flexibility of public spaces and interior layouts, rethinking product designs, and strategies for informational campaigns and digital safety platforms using an integrated design approach.

In spring 2021, a team of interdisciplinary students and faculty at the Michael Graves College were awarded a grant to explore how designers can prepare for the next pandemic by looking at it as a human-centered design initiative. The objective was to utilize the expertise areas of Architecture, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, and Interior Design to research the pandemic’s effects on public spaces and propose design strategies to improve communities. For example, as part of a university-wide initiative on pandemic research, students proposed design solutions for the safe opening of Kean’s childcare center.

In the summer, as the world managed and changed due to the Delta variant and the anti- vaccine movement, further investigations into two areas hit hardest by the pandemic were explored: education and mental health. Extended research was conducted on special needs children and the increased anxiety that led to panic buying.

The presentation will examine the interdisciplinary design thinking process and solutions for the childcare center. It will present methodology soliciting support in undergraduate and graduate courses to identify pandemic-related problems and solutions. Furthermore, it will answer how design and architecture can help envision what communities need to manage and thrive in a post-COVID-19 environment.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 8.2: Annual CAA Conference on Thursday, March 3, 2022.

Urban Abstract Design of Modern Architecture in Bauhaus

Designers must delve beneath the obvious principles of Bauhaus purity and minimalism to comprehend how human memory and sense perception contribute to our experience

Min K. Pak
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
Art & Design
University of Southern Indiana

Photography reflects memory, allows us to ponder our past thinking and past experiences in our environments. At the boundaries between graphic design and photography, we can observe patterns in urban environments and associate these patterns with recalled sounds and human emotions.

In 1923, Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) sought to capture a futuristic vision in Bauhaus architecture. Her photographs balance the clarity, simplicity, and asymmetry that represent Bauhaus’s spirit of utopian zest and vitality and openness of spirit. Indeed, Moholy’s extreme verticals, tilted frames, and abstract forms emphasize the simple, clean, beautiful lines characterizing Bauhaus architecture.

Since each building employs its own architectural language, I identify the words for these urban shapes, for their forms and structures—freeing these buildings from their specific spatial contexts so that we observe them individually, seeing beauty even in marginal details of everyday city life.

Beyond merely documenting discoveries in Moholy’s photographs, I explicate her new ways of seeing this geometric, abstract architecture as a response to reading the world’s simplicity and organic autonomy. I contend that we designers must delve beneath the obvious principles of Bauhaus purity and minimalism to comprehend how human memory and sense perception contribute to our experience with both photography and Bauhaus.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.4: Parsons Integrated Design on Thursday, June 14, 2018.

When the Process is the Product: Pollock, Gehry and the Illusion of Randomness

Craig Konyk, AIA
Assistant Professor
School of Public Architecture
Michael Graves College
Kean University

This paper explores the role of randomness in the design process using two examples for the field of art and architecture as illustrative examples: Jackson Pollock and Frank Gehry.  Both Pollock’s and Gehry’s work rely on the revelation of the process as the product.

Jackson Pollock is one of those art world figures that is frequently derided by the average person with a dismissive, “My kid could paint that.” Abstract Expressionism (the combination of the term “abstract” with “expressionism”, two vastly different artistic movements of the 20th century) defined a certain “automatism” of the process of the paint’s actual application, even defining Pollock in a certain sense as the “idiot savant” of the post-war American art scene; child’s play indeed.

Frank Gehry’s study models of torn paper and crumpled foil elicit similar decrees of child-like facileness from the same quarters.  But for all their apparent improvisation, a closer study reveals quite a different narrative.  Contemporary critics of the time, when not dismissing the work outright, were compelled to suggest edits and/or additions, the implication being that the works were somehow “disharmonious” in their present state and in need of adjustment.  But when the process is one that defies easy visual “completed-ness” in the traditional sense, the artist/architect maintains the final arbitration of that “completed-ness”.

The acknowledged acceptance of Polock’s and Gehry’s work as serious endeavors allows a certain liberation for experiment in design, outside of the pragmatics of functionality.  It is not to say that we now all have to “do a Gehry” in order to be “artists”, but we are now in a position to argue for more difference in approach, rather than any narrowly focused expectation of what a design project should look like.  In that respect, as designers, we now have the freedom to allow the process to be revealed and use randomness as a strategy, which enhance and elevate all design investigations.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.1: San Jose State on Saturday, Sept 30, 2017.

Multi-modal Interface Design: Communicating Design Through Presentation and Review

Peter Lusch
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
College of Arts and Architecture
Penn State

Danielle Oprean
Post-Doctoral Research Scholar
Stuckeman Center for Design Computing
Penn State

Multi-modal visualization has long been considered important for design communication through representation and presentation, yet it has not been explored through an interface. In this presentation we discuss the outline for our test of use of a new interface designed to provide a multi-modal experience of design representations through the presentation and review processes. This interface is being developed for use in an immersive environments lab, a unique presentation space that allows for large-screen display and virtual reality. Before implementing a new interface, testing needs to be done to identify issues and perceptions of how well it works. We aim to test the feasibility of using a multi-modal interface with advanced-level undergraduate students in the design disciplines (architecture, landscape architecture, and graphic design) as a way for them to communicate design through presentation and review. In this presentation we talk about how usability testing allows for the results of actual use of an interface to feed back into improving the overall design. Specifically, we will provide an overview of our application of usability testing in design disciplines to address our hypothesis that being able to view different modalities of design representation at one time is more meaningful to communicate design both during presentation and in the review process. Success of the meaningfulness of the interface will be explored through the TAM model (Davis 1992) of usefulness, ease of use, and behavioral intention. We will also present the primary end point goals for this study, including our human factors study, and our self-report measurement of actual use of the multi-modal interface through questionnaires measuring usefulness, ease of use, and behavioral intention.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.3: Kent State University on Saturday, March 11, 2017.

INPLACE: Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts Through Community Engagement

Robert J. Thompson 
Assistant Professor
Graphic & Interactive Design
Department of Art
College of Creative Arts & Communications
Youngstown State University

Terry Schwarz 
Director
Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative
Kent State University

In 2015, the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency that funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation awarded the Department of Art in the College of Creative Arts & Communication at Youngstown State University with a $100,000 “Our Town” grant to fund arts engagement, cultural planning and design projects. Their programs support creative place-making projects that help to transform communities into lively, beautiful, and resilient places with the arts at their core.

The grant authors, Asst. Professor of Graphic Design, Leslie Brothers, Executive Director of the McDonough Museum of Art, and Dominic Marchionda, City-University Planner with Youngstown State University successfully proposed the “INPLACE” project, otherwise known as “Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts through Community Engagement.” INPLACE came together over the course of three years through a unique blend of artists, designers, community stakeholders and civic leadership. It focuses planning initiatives and resources in targeted locations within city-in-revival Youngstown, Ohio to draw on the compounding effect of well-coordinated action and creative output. It is directed toward community driven public art projects that combine storytelling with art and design to create memorable, permanent place-making experiences throughout the city. The NEA chose only 64 of nearly 250 applications from across the nation for funding. INPLACE offers unique opportunities for members of Youngstown’s creative community to play an integral role in this prestigious NEA Our Town grant.

This presentation seeks to present the process of discovery, working with various constituencies within the Youngstown community, mentoring teams into cultivating meaningful, high-quality projects, share project proposals, and provide updates on the INPLACE project, which ends in July 2017.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.3: Kent State University on Saturday, March 11, 2017.

Idea Incubator: The Architectural Design Studio Experience and the Nurturing of Creativity

Craig Konyk AIA
Assistant Professor of Architecture
School of Public Architecture
Michael Graves College
Kean University

The Education of an Architect in unlike many other disciplines in that the primary vehicle for the teaching of Design is the Architectural Studio. The Architectural Studio has its roots in the Beaux-Arts Atelier model from turn of the century France, where young architectural students would work in the design office of their Architectural Instructors, learning by emulation and association from like-minded colleagues. It was an informal affair, but actually a very encouraging model for creative enterprise.

Growing out of the model of the Artists’ Studio, where leftover, underutilized spaces (mansard attic spaces in Paris, basement space in Coenties Slip and lofts in Soho, Lower Manhattan, etc.) became places of creative production, and even urban rejuvenators, the Architect’s Studio became formalized in American Architectural Professional Education as the central component of a young architect’s path to licensure and professional standing. Without the Architecture Studio, one could not become an Architect.

Additionally, another significant component of the Studio system is the amount of time that is spent in the Studio working on design projects, discussing potential solutions, crafting submissions for final evaluation. The intensity and complete focus of the effort in one place for a sustained period of time creates an atmosphere not unlike a laboratory, where anexperiment is pursued to its logical conclusion. In our increasingly distracted and undirected society, the ability to combine time, singular focus and a space to achieve something of quality is a rare occurrence; one could even say it is a “luxury”. But in fact it is a necessity for one to achieve any significant break through in design.

This presentation will explain the unique properties of the Architectural Studio format, its history and development pedagogically and how elements of it may have application in other focus intensive design disciplines. It will argue that the Architecture Design Studio was a Design Incubator even before the term was given definition.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.1: Kean University on Saturday, Oct 22, 2016.