New Director of Design History and Theory

Welcoming Dr. Leslie Atzmon as Director of Design History and Theory

Starting this January 2026, we welcome Dr. Leslie Atzmon as Director of Design History and Theory. Atzmon has been participating with our team for several months. She is currently on the jury of the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards, as well as other initiatives we have under development.

Leslie Atzmon is a designer and design historian who teaches at Eastern Michigan University. She co-edited the collections Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury 2017) and The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2019). Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy were awarded a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) ArtWorks grant from 2012-2014 to support experimental book design workshops and the creation and production of The Open Book Project book. Atzmon has a new collection, entitled Visual Ecologies of Placemaking, edited with Pamela Stewart (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2026).

Atzmon’s current work mainly investigates the intersections between design and science, with a focus on biodesign. In 2016, Atzmon was a Fulbright fellow at Central Saint Martins UAL, UK doing research on Darwin and design thinking. This led to the essay, “Intelligible Design: The Origin and Visualization of Species,” in the journal Communication Design (2016). In 2019/2020, she curated the exhibition Design and Science, which ran at Eastern Michigan’s University Gallery and The Esther Klein Gallery/Science Center in Philadelphia. She also edited a related collection entitled Design and Science (Bloomsbury 2023). Atzmon is currently working on a biodesign textbook, entitled Biodesign in Context (forthcoming Lived Spaces 2027), with Professor Diana Nicholas of Drexel University.

Welcome to the team, Leslie!

Design Incubation Colloquium 12.2: Annual CAA Conference 2026 (In-person only)

Presentations and discussion in Research and Scholarship in Communication Design at the 114th Annual CAA Conference 2026

Thursday, February 19, 2026
4:30PM – 6:00PM CST
Hilton Chicago – Lower Level
Salon C-6

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.

The colloquium session is open to all conference attendees. Be sure to watch the online video presentations before attending this event.

CHAIRS

Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University

Heather Snyder Quinn
DePaul University

Camila Afanador-Llach
Florida Atlantic University

Discussants

Anne Hostetler Berry
University of Illinois Chicago


Jessica Meharry
DePaul University

PRESENTATIONS

The Significant Others: Women’s Contributions to the Private Press Movement
Maria Smith Bohannon
Associate Professor
Oakland University

m(other)ing: Creating Design Research Space for Work on Parenting and Reproductive Journeys
Meaghan Dee
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech

Bree McMahon
Associate Professor
University of Arkansas

The Empathy Points Method: Integrating Identity and Bias Recognition Into Design Education
Andrea Hempstead
Associate Professor
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Shearing Layers: A Framework for Reframing Contemporary Graphic Design Education
Jarrett Fuller
Assistant Professor
NC State University

Typographic Thresholds: Addressing Climate Urgency
Megan Irwin
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Invisible Nightlife Review: Teaching Fiction as Design Practice
Nika Simovich Fisher
Assistant Professor
Parsons / The New School for Design

Backward by Design: Reframing AI Literacy through Systems Thinking and Critique Pedagogy
Lingyi Kong
Adjunct Professor
Parsons School of Design

Design Incubation Colloquium 12.1: Virtual: Online

Friday, November 14, 2025
11:00AM – 12:30PM EDT
Online (ZOOM)

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.

Friday, November 14, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
Online

Moderator

Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University

PRESENTATIONS

Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon
Elizabeth Resnick
Professor Emerita
Massachusetts College of Art and Design

The Keywork: Using AI for Insight, Not Replacement, in Creative Practice
RJ Thompson
Associate Professor

University of Pittsburg

Make, Print, Share: Fold, Print, Share: Collective Learning Through Risograph Printing
Kyla Paolucci
Assistant Professor

St. John’s University

Vic Rodriguez Tang
Assistant Professor
Texas State University

From Denim Wars to AI: Rethinking Fashion Advertising in the Classroom
Summer Doll-Myers
Associate Professor

Kutztown University

Born Digital: Fresh Attempts around Typography Courses for Students Today
Jialun Wang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design

Eager Zhang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design

Mis/Understanding: Reframing Language Barriers and Miscommunication Through Interactive Design
Najmeh Pirahmadian
Graduate student
Ohio University

CFP: 2025 Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards

ENTRY DEADLINE EXTENDED: JANUARY 15, 2026.

Call for Nominations and Entries for the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards Competition.

Design Incubation announces a call for nominations and entries for the 2025 awards for communication design educators 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, 2025 January 15, 2026.

Entry Guidelines

Entries will be accepted until (December 31, 2025). 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.

Entry fee: $35.00 USD.

2025 JURY

Steven McCarthy (Chair) University of Minnesota

Leslie Atzmon https://www.emich.edu/art/faculty-staff/l_atzmon.php

Bernard Caniffe – http://piecestudio.org/case-studieshttps://www.design.iastate.edu/profiles/canniffe/

Matt Gaynorhttps://www.memphis.edu/artanddesign/people/matthew-gaynor.php

Myra Thiessenhttps://www.monash.edu/mada/design/people/myra-thiessen

Leslie Atzmon is a designer, design historian, and design critic. She has published in Eye, Design and Culture, Communication Design, and Design Issues. Atzmon edited Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design (Parlor Press 2011) and co-edited Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury 2017) with industrial designer Prasad Boradkar. Most recently, she edited The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2019) with Teal Triggs of the Royal College of Art. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Central Saint Martins in London investigating the topic of Darwin and design thinking. Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy were awarded a Sappi Ideas that Matter Grant, which supports design that changes lives for the better. For the grant, students rebranded Ypsilanti’s non-profit Riverside Arts Center as a community arts hub. Atzmon recently curated the exhibition Design and Science, and is currently working on a collection also entitled Design and Science (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2020).

Bernard Canniffe is a current professor and former department chair of graphic design at Iowa State University, and has held faculty positions at MICA (Baltimore), MCAD (Minneapolis) and Ringling College of Art and Design (Sarasota), A native of Wales (UK), he has presented and exhibited on a global scale since earning an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999. PIECE Studio, a creative venture he founded in 2006, is an agency that “engages in and with communities, organizations, activists, governments and municipalities and has run projects and workshops that promote social justice and community empowerment internationally,” primarily through the design of identities, publications and posters. 

Matthew Gaynor received his BA and MFA in graphic design from Yale University, and is currently chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Memphis. He has held faculty and leadership positions at University of Kansas, California State University at San Bernardino, University of Cincinnati, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Kansas State University. He also served as creative director for F+W Publications, which published HOW magazine. Gaynor has won numerous awards for his design work, which is focused on the intersection of type and image, and continues his practice of typographic design, as well as an ongoing interest in photographic portraiture.

Myra Thiessen is a researcher and senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and is the program coordinator of the communication design program in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture. She earned a PhD in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading and a Bachelor of Design degree in communication design from the University of Alberta. She has published her research widely, especially about typography and cognition, in the journals Visible Language, Ergonomics, and The Design Journal among others, and co-edited the book The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design. 

Steven McCarthy is professor emeritus of graphic design at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for over two decades. He earned an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from Bradley University. His book The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013. McCarthy’s creative work has been in over 150 juried and invitational exhibitions, and has been awarded inclusion in the AIGA annual, the STA 100 show and in Graphis Poster. He has published in the journals Design Issues, Message, Visible Language, Design and Culture, Visual Communication, and occasionally writes for Eye magazine. In 2017 he was awarded the Minnesota Book Artist Award.

http://stevenmccarthy.design

Colloquium 12.2: CAA Conference 2026 Call for Submissions

114th CAA Annual Conference, In Person Format.
Deadline for abstract submissions: August 29, 2025.

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:
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.

Accepted researchers will be required to produce a 6-minute videotaped presentation that will be published on the Design Incubation channel. The CAA conference session will consist of a moderated discussion of those presentations.

The session will involve a quick 3-minute presentation overview from each accepted submission researcher, followed by a moderated group discussion.

114th CAA Annual Conference
In Person

Hilton Hotel, Downtown
Chicago, IL
February 18-21, 2026

Presentations and Moderated Discussion

Presenters will follow the basic membership and fee requirements of CAA.

We are accepting abstracts for presentations now until August 29, 2025.

From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs 

By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor 
SUNY Farmingdale

Most design faculty arrive in higher-ed with a portfolio, not a pedagogy. Drawing on fifteen years of teaching—from high-school art rooms to senior BFA capstones—I translate three active-learning structures into designer-friendly routines that make a classroom feel less like a lecture hall and more like a working studio.

• Agency-Style Jigsaw – Students take on specialist roles (art director, strategist, production artist). Each digs into a targeted reading or demo, then teaches the rest of the team before they assemble a full brand campaign.

• Flipped Chapter Exchange – Half the class distills one chunk of the text, half tackles another, and both sides trade five-slide Pecha Kucha briefs so studio time is free for critique and iteration.

• Iterative Think-Pair-Share – Sixteen individual concepts collapse to eight, then four, then one polished solution as teams merge and refine, mirroring the review ladders of an agency.

I’ve run these circuits in typography, branding, and service-design courses; the pattern is consistent. Roles spark accountability, students vet ideas in smaller circles before they ever reach me, and critiques get sharper because everyone arrives as a mini-expert. The shift echoes John Dewey’s claim that learning “is rooted in experience.” By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

The paper positions this toolkit alongside the practice hubs at Stanford’s d.school and Cooper Hewitt, but its tone stays grounded in studio life. I close with a one-page Method Map that pairs common design-course goals with these structures, so any instructor can drop in a project, set the roles, and watch the room light up—no educational jargon required.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer

Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00AM – 12:30PM EDT
Online (ZOOM)

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.

Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
Online

Moderator

Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University

PRESENTATIONS

Resonant Pages: Artist Books, Natural Rhythms, and Digital Interactivity
Lingyi Kong
Adjunct Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design
Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus
Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor 
Louisiana State University

Creative Computation in the Age of AI: Reimagining the Boundary of Human Creativity
Bei Hu 
Assistant Professor 
Washington University in St. Louis

From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs 
Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor 
SUNY Farmingdale

Type as Cultural Bridge: An Interactive Fusion of Iranian and American Design
Narges Sedaghat
Graduate student
East Carolina University

CFP: Academic Abstract Writing Program

Application Deadline: May 2, 2025

The online Academic Abstract Writing Program at Design Incubation offers a series of activities that will help design researchers to craft a written synopsis of their research. The outcome(s) will be a concisely written document typically expected of academic publication venues. This includes conferences, journals, grant applications, publishers, and academic organizations.

The program is designed along two tracks:

  1. The first track is for design faculty who are new to academia and want a program that will help them to navigate the academic publication arena.
  2. The second track is aimed at design faculty who have established their research agenda and activities, and would like to explore ways to broaden their scope of publication opportunities.

Application:

Academic Abstract Writing Workshop Program

This program is designed to facilitate design researchers in the development of their academic research abstract(s) for conferences, grant proposals, journal articles, and other publications.

The program does not guarantee abstract submissions will be accepted by the academic venues. The program is designed to improve your understanding of abstract writing, and the factors involved in developing a successful abstract submission.

Complete all required application information. Submit as much information as possible in the other fields to help us to understand your interests, goals, and challenges.

Seats are limited for this fellowship program. Upon acceptance, there is a $100 (members)/ $150 (non-members) program registration fee.

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Submit a short biography (250 words) describing your current position and professional research goals.
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Please select all the program formats in which you are interested.
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Select all that reflect your challenges.
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Please list and/or describe the publications, conferences, grants, organizations, venues, or types of places where you would like to submit your abstract(s).
Submit a draft of an existing abstract, or a summary proposal of the work you are doing, challenges you encounter, and goals you aim to attain.
Accepted file types: pdf, docx, doc, rtf, txt, Max. file size: 5 MB.

Submit a cv or resume.

This will help us to understand your experiences and interests and to develop the program that best suits your needs.

Accepted file types: docx, doc, pdf, txt, rtf, Max. file size: 5 MB.

The Bayou at y.our Doorstep: Integrating Environmental Education in Graphic Design

The role Houston’s waterways play in the community

Natacha Poggio
Associate Professor
University of Houston Downtown

Houston’s vast network of 22 bayous and river systems is central to the city’s identity, influencing both its geography and culture. The University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) sits at the intersection of two key waterways, White Oak and Buffalo Bayous, offering students a direct connection to the natural environment that shapes their urban experience. These bayous, which embody both tranquility and the destructive potential of floods, also highlight the impact of human activity on Houston’s green spaces.

In an introductory graphic design course, students were tasked with visualizing the environmental, emotional, and developmental importance of Houston’s bayous for community well-being. Through this service-learning project, they collected observations and interviewed community members to apply their storytelling and visual design skills to create illustrations that reflect the role Houston’s waterways play in the community, while also addressing the negative effects of pollution.

The project culminated in a public exhibition at Earth Day Houston, in partnership with Discovery Green. With over 31,000 attendees, the displays aimed to raise awareness and educate about the importance of reducing pollution, particularly single-use plastics, as part of a larger goal to achieve a waste-free celebration. UHD Recycling Ambassadors played a significant role in this effort, collecting and sorting 3,800 pounds of garbage, with less than 9% ending up in a landfill.

This case study demonstrates the power of integrating environmental education into design curricula, engaging students in creating relevant real-world solutions through service-learning and empowering community members alongside the students’ learning experience.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.2: Annual CAA Conference 2025 (Hybrid) on Friday, February 14, 2025.

Workshop on Writing an Academic Abstract

An Affiliated Society Meeting at the CAA 113th Annual Conference

Affiliated Society Meeting at the CAA 113th Annual Conference, New York City

Friday, February 14, 2025
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Murray Hill West

This is a hybrid event. Attendance is free to anyone in person. (No conference fee is required.) To attend virtually, complete the form below to receive details for the virtual login.

Join Design Incubation for a workshop on Writing an Academic Abstract. We will provide examples, recommendations, best practices, and ideas on crafting a written synopsis of your communication design research for submission to conferences, journals, invited lectures, grant and book proposals.

Please complete the form and let us know how we can facilitate your academic abstract writing efforts. This event is suited for junior faculty new to research and publication. It is also an opportunity for senior faculty to discover community and feedback on their scholarly endeavors.

Form: https://designincubation.com/abstract-writing-workshop/