Presentations and discussion in Research and Scholarship in Communication Design at the 113th Annual CAA Conference 2025
Recent research in Communication Design. Presentations of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.
Welcoming Cat Normoyle, incoming Director of Peer Reviews, and Camila Afanador Llach as Chair, Director-at-Large
This 2024 academic year has been busy and productive at Design Incubation. We have had many activities this fall, including the Design Educators Awards, currently accepting nominations and entries until December 31, 2024. In October, we had our first fully in-person colloquium since the onset of the pandemic and our largest one to date at Boston University with four sessions and more than 20 research presentations. This year, we celebrate our 10th year with new members and ongoing development. We continue to host the series, Design Your Research Agenda (DYRA), the latest one in November. We will be publishing this episode online shortly.
Starting this September 2024, we welcomed Cat Normoyle, Associate Professor at East Carolina University as the incoming Director of Peer Review. In spring 2025 she will be taking over this role from Camila Afanador-Llach, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has held the position since fall 2021.
Normoyle is a designer, writer, and educator whose research and creative activities focus on community engagement, interactive and immersive experiences, and design pedagogy. She has a strong record of contributions to design scholarship and community engagement, evidenced by publications, presentations, and grants. Notably her writing appears in articles and book chapters published by AIGA Dialectic, Design Research Society, AIGA Design Educators Community, Routledge, and others. She is a recent grant recipient of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for her work on the project, Our Story: The LGBTQ Stories of Eastern North Carolina, which is preparing for a fall 2025 exhibition of work. She is currently working on a book project, “Community-based Practices in Action.” We are excited to welcome her as the new Director of Peer Reviews at DI.
Afanador-Llach has made tremendous contributions to the peer review process at DI over the last 3 years. She has further developed the peer review process, ensuring the double-blind process is objective, anonymous, rigorous, and fair and that it offers the benefits of the peer review to our members by offering feedback to all who have participated in our colloquium submission process.
Afanador-Llach will be staying on as a Chair and Director-at-Large as she segues into other DI initiatives. We would like to thank her for her three years of service as Director of Peer Review and we are excited to be working with her in new capacities.
Afanador-Llach was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and is currently researching and writing about the history of graphic design in her home country Colombia. She recently completed a three-year NEH-funded project cataloging and translating metadata, developing an online resource. With her experience with metadata and from her role as DI Director of Peer Review, we hope to further the development of keyword analysis and implementation at DI.
Design scholars and researchers discuss various aspects of their research agendas
Friday, November 8, 2024 1:00pPM Eastern / 12:00PM Central Virtual Event
Designing Your Research Agenda is a panel discussion and open forum for design scholars and researchers to discuss various aspects of their research agendas. We aim to open a dialog regarding multiple challenges of discovering one’s design research inquiry. Designing Your Research Agenda is an ongoing design research event series.
Some of the questions we will discuss with panelists include:
How did you determine your research agenda (high-level timeline of your career/trajectory)
How do you define research and why do you think it matters/for society, the field, and yourself?
How do your department and institution define and support the work you do?
How would you describe/categorize your department and institution?
If you were going to position your work within a category, would you say your research addresses: design theory, design history, design practice, design research (traditional graphic design, speculative design, UXUI, typography, AR, VR, creative computing, design solutions, etc.), design pedagogy, or something else?
What barriers (if any) exist at your institution or in the field for creating and disseminating your research?
Moderators
Jessica Barness Kent State University
Heather Snyder Quinn DePaul University
Biographies
Jason Alejandro is a Puerto Rican graphic designer and Associate Professor of Graphic Design at The College of New Jersey. His academic research explores intersections of cultural identity, design history, and critical pedagogy, with a focus on how these topics shape visual communication. Alejandro is particularly interested in using graphic design to address social and cultural narratives, including underrepresented communities in design education. His work spans writing, publishing, and visual projects, including contributions to both academic and professional design discussions on identity and collaboration in design practice. He is horrified at how well ChatGPT generated this bio, even if it is somewhat generic.
Yoon Soo Lee is a Professor of Art and Design. She has been teaching at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth since 2001, and also at Vermont College of Fine Arts since 2011.
Yoon Soo’s practice moves around three core areas of study: the art of pedagogy, how to work in dialogue cross-discipline, and how to create art and design that is based on self-knowledge. These investigations have led to presentations at the AIGA Educators Conference, UCDA Design Educators Conference, grants from the National Institute of Health, presentations at the Cognitive Science Society and papers such as “Functional Criticism in the Graphic Design Classroom” published in “Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal”.
Yoon Soo studied at Seoul National University where she received her BFA and MFA, and she also studied at Western Michigan University where she received her second MFA in graphic design.
D.J. Trischler is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design for the University of Cincinnati’s Ullman School of Design in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. He teaches typography, design research methods, and an introduction to design lecture. His research addresses the “dis-placed” sentiments familiar to the contemporary human experience, experimenting with possibilities to use design to “place” people in their surrounding ecologies. Through his research, he aims to increase place attachment, a sense of community and belonging, grow neighborliness and community engagement, and ultimately strengthen quality of life and well-being. D.J.’s work in this niche originated from his graduate thesis research into Neighborhood-Centered Design.
Four Graphic Design History Methodologies for historical research— formal analysis, biography, fiction writing, and data visualization.
Brockett Horne Lecturer Boston University
Recently, graphic design practitioners have urgently taken up the project of history-telling. Designers are committed to transforming the limited, exclusive narratives of graphic design history that we have inherited through a variety of methods to likewise define more inclusive spaces within the practice of graphic design. Yet Graphic Design History researchers rarely debate or articulate their methodologies for producing historical research. We speak of what’s missing from history, but methodologies are not discussed.
Unlike fields like Art History, American Studies and other spaces in the Social Sciences, where reflection on methodology is prevalent, designers lack a space to reflect upon HOW historical research is conducted. For other fields, books such as Anne D’Alleva’s Methods & Theories of Art History or Serie McDougal’s Research Methods in Africana Studies are assigned in required coursework about methodology. Even within studio courses in Graphic Design, methodologies such as Design Thinking and User-Centered research are codified and include substantial literature, but they are not prevalent when speaking about how we research history.
This presentation outlines four Graphic Design History Methodologies for historical research— formal analysis, biography, fiction writing, and data visualization. The presentation will especially inform design practitioners without training in history or material culture. Questions that will be addressed include: What cultural, political, gender, and historiographical perspectives shape Graphic Design Historical research? To what extent does Graphic Design History research methodology inadvertently seek information that aligns with prevailing beliefs (see Berry and Walters, The Black Experience in Design) How might present-day attitudes, values, and knowledge influence our interpretation of historical artifacts? And, crucially, how can we navigate these biases to develop more inclusive research practices accessible to all interested in history?
Takeaways:
Explore a lexicon of Design History Methodologies: formal analysis, biography, fiction writing, and data visualization
Assess strengths and limitations of a few design research methodologies
The Design + Translation panel aims to recenter perspectives and prioritize inclusivity by representing a wider range of voices that build design community.
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?
Friday, June 7, 2024
Time: 1:00pm–5:00pm EST
St. John’s University, Manhattan Campus
101 Astor Place, New York, NY
Hosted by Liz DeLuna, Professor, St. John’s University
Presentations will be published on the Design Incubation YouTube Channel after May 29, 2024. This hybrid conference will be held on Friday, June 7, 2024 at 1pm EST at St. John’s University, Manhattan Campus.
Eventbrite Tickets, in-person and virtual attendance:
Evolution in Content Creation: 10 years of The Design Writing Fellowship Aaris Sherin, Professor, St. John’s University
Cultures of Excellence: Lessons Learned from Eight Years of the Communication Design Educators Awards Steven McCarthy, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota
Learning outcomes emphasized gathering information, examining sources, interpreting evidence, connecting design to social contexts, and crafting historical narratives in text and image
Aggie Toppins Associate Professor Washington University in St. Louis
In Spring 2023, Toppins introduced a new course called “Making History” in which students had the opportunity to learn historical research methods and use them in their studio work. At the time, WashU had only one design history course, an elective survey of graphic design, which one student in my class had taken. An ungraded quiz on the first day of class showed that most students had no sense of what was (or was not) considered canonical. None were familiar with prevailing themes in graphic design history. Unlike a survey course, which tasks students with absorbing a broad scope of historical content, this course focused on making inquiries into the past. Learning outcomes emphasized gathering information, examining sources, interpreting evidence, connecting design to social contexts, and crafting historical narratives in text and image.
Toppins’ teaching methods were hands-on and high-impact. Having secured a $2500 Sam Fox School teaching grant, she was able to bring in a number of guest speakers and take students on field trips. Students visited local archives, museums, and historical sites. They listened to scholars and designers with diverse backgrounds discuss their research methods and outcomes. They got to physically handle historical objects from cuneiform tablets to mid-century paste-ups. Students also read historical texts, critical essays, and watched documentaries to prepare for in-class discussions and debates. After each of these activities, students responded to prompts in a provided sketchbook. The sketchbook served as the “field notes” component of the course, in which students recorded their ongoing reflections and took notes on research. In most cases, the sketchbook helped students locate the topic for their final, self-guided project. Throughout the semester, leading up to this project, students engaged in four workshops that instilled specific methods. Each workshop resulted in a short outcome, like a zine or broadside, that kept students connecting the dots between making historical inquiries and making graphic design. The final project asked students to pursue a topic of their own interest. Students became primary investigators, forming their own questions and mapping out their own research approaches.
Student work from this class was strong in terms of formal design and critical positioning. Students could articulate their goals, match appropriate research methods to their questions, and translate their findings into criteria for design projects. They also became familiar with graphic design history’s prevailing themes by thinking critically about historiography and methodology. Another important outcome of this course is that it gave Toppins the chance to test exercises and content for her forthcoming book, Thinking Through Graphic Design History. Some student work from this class will be published in the book, which will reach market in 2025.
Aggie Toppins is an Associate Professor of Communication Design and Chair of Design at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She combines studio practice and critical writing to explore the social life of graphics. Aggie’s creative work has been internationally exhibited and garnered national design awards including the Type Director’s Club ‘Certificate of Typographic Excellence,’ and the SECAC Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design award. Her recent writing has been published by Design and Culture, Design Issues, Diseña, Slanted, Eye, and AIGA Eye on Design. She has written essays for Briar Levit’s book Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History and Ali Place’s recent volume, Feminist Designer. Her first book Thinking Through Graphic Design History will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
Revised documentation integrates more women, people of color, and underrepresented stories into the curriculum
Kristen Coogan Associate Professor Boston University
Today’s pressing social and political landscape prompts reflection. As people, designers, and educators, how can we actively contribute to the cultivation of more inclusive and balanced cultures? Amidst these circumstances, established historical narratives face renewed scrutiny, challenging their authority and the traditional confines of academic discourse. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ groundbreaking “The 1619 Project” confronts the whiteness of American History. Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” envisions educational spaces where a reimagined teacher-student dynamic invites diverse contributions. This research also recognizes the inherent bias found in any historical discourse built on collective knowledge yet often within a singular perspective. As the demand for a decentralized history grows, the question arises: how do we build a more inclusive design history? At Boston University, Graphic Design History students foster inclusivity through a plural design history pedagogy. Revised slide presentations integrate more women, people of color, and underrepresented stories into the curriculum — enabling students to find more of themselves throughout the narrative. Through interactive lab sessions, students contribute distinct viewpoints informed by supplementary readings, written responses, and collaborative discussions. Culminating in extended essays, students disrupt the Western design canon, spotlighting lesser-known designers and movements. These responses culminate in the “Design History Reader,” where specific texts reveal narratives beyond the established versus marginalized dichotomy. Chapters unveil conceptual ecosystems, emphasizing visual and contextual symmetries bridging dominant and minority narratives. The “Reader” serves as a dynamic starting point, open to interpretation. While not fully representative, it’s an expanding, living archive shaped by collective research.
Presentations and discussion in Research and Scholarship in Communication Design at the 112th Annual CAA Conference 2024
Recent research in Communication Design. Presentations of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.
