Tag: design research

Can an author approach more than one publisher at the same time?

Answer: This is an interesting question and one which has caused much discussion even in our office! 

Question: Can an author approach more than one publisher at the same time? -MR

Answer: This is an interesting question and one which has caused much discussion even in our office! 

In some cases, publishers will request that you only approach one at a time, but this isn’t always enforced in every subject or publisher.  Some editors I’ve heard will not consider a project if it has been sent to multiple publishers – the argument being that it can seem like you’ve just sent it out haphazardly to everyone, without fully considering which is the best publisher for you and the project.  It’s best to really consider who already publishes in the area you’re working in, where the best books are coming from and whether the reputation of the publisher is right for you (for instance, if you need a university press for tenure, or you need a publisher who double reviews the manuscripts, and so on).  As each publisher will invest time and money in the review process, submitting to various places is a difficult one, but you should certainly feel free to submit elsewhere if you haven’t heard back.

I’d personally say that given the fact it can sometimes take a little while to hear back from editors initially, it might be worth approaching a few to start with to gauge interest – however, it is best to be upfront about this, and certainly once you have had contact with an editor you need to make it clear to everyone if the project is also being considered by another publisher (for politeness as well as practicalities).  It is tricky if you were to get to the point of being offered a contract by two publishers at the same time without either knowing you’d been discussing the project elsewhere, especially as by that point there will likely have been a significant amount of input from the publishers and reviewers in developing the overall approach of the project.  Again, if in doubt have a look at the publisher’s website and see if there is guidance on multiple submissions.  And individually submitting the same project to several editors at the same publisher is generally poor form – if you’re not quite sure who to approach, try one editor and ask them to pass the project on to a colleague if it’s not right for them, or copy the editors into the same email so they don’t all end up individually assessing the same project.   

Louise Baird-Smith
Commissioning Editor – Design and Photography
Bloomsbury Visual Arts

“Ask the Editor” is a Design Incubation series, where design academics, researchers, and practitioners pose their questions to editors of books, journals, conferences and other academic and design trade publishing organizations. If you would like your questions answered by publishing professionals, send your questions to Design Incubation via the “Ask the Editor” form on our website.

Is there any difference between writing a single authored book and a co-authored book?

Question: Is there any difference between writing a single-authored book and a co-authored book? -AB

Answer: While different publishers or series may have set rules on when they will (or won’t) accept co-authored titles, in most cases, there usually isn’t a problem from the publishers’ side on this. 

Sometimes it can actually be a bonus where the book is interdisciplinary or has broad coverage where a single author couldn’t be an expert in all the content. My colleague is publishing a book on climate change in history written by a historian and a climate scientist together – it’s a massive selling point because we can say our book has holistic coverage and the science is valid.   

Something to bear in mind though is how to divide the work, and do you know you can definitely successfully work together over a couple of years? In terms of how you split the work is up to you – maybe you’d each write certain chapters and swap to read/edit the other ones, or you may have certain aspects of the book you’ll research individually, then write up together.  Generally, there would be a lead author, though this isn’t essential.  Saying all that, going above two co-authors can get tricky, so over this number, you’ll need to really consider if multi-authored is the right approach – an edited collection may then make more sense (a different author writing each chapter, with overall editors who commission individual chapters).  Another consideration is that any royalties will be split between the primary authors/editors of the volume, and you will be equally responsible for the delivery of the book.

Louise Baird-Smith
Commissioning Editor – Design and Photography
Bloomsbury Visual Arts

“Ask the Editor” is a Design Incubation series, where design academics, researchers, and practitioners pose their questions to editors of books, journals, conferences and other academic and design trade publishing organizations. If you would like your questions answered by publishing professionals, send your questions to Design Incubation via the “Ask the Editor” form on our website.

How important is it that an author has written a book before?

Question: How important is it that an author has written a book before? Does that improve their chances of you taking on their project and giving them a contract? –MR

Answer: While there is an element of reassurance if an author has already published a book before, everyone has to start somewhere and there will always need to be a ‘first book’ at some point. 

Some big textbook lists/publishers may not sign unpublished authors as the bigger textbook projects have a higher risk factor than an academic monograph might do, but this isn’t the same across the board. 

I’ve worked on subjects where academic scholarship was relatively new, so the pool of previously published authors was very small – getting new voices into the mix was really important to build up the high quality literature in the area.

Equally, if someone has written many books before, it doesn’t mean that they will necessarily be offered a contract for their next book. 

Whether you have tons of experience as an author, or are brand new, the combination of the project itself and your experience in the area (as a researcher, practitioner or teacher, depending on the type of book) along with the feedback from the peer reviews is a more realistic predictor of whether a project would be approved.  If in doubt, just drop the editor/publisher an email and see if it’s worth submitting a proposal.

Louise Baird-Smith
Commissioning Editor – Design and Photography
Bloomsbury Visual Arts

“Ask the Editor” is a Design Incubation series, where design academics, researchers, and practitioners pose their questions to editors of books, journals, conferences and other academic and design trade publishing organizations. If you would like your questions answered by publishing professionals, send your questions to Design Incubation via the “Ask the Editor” form on our website.

Insectile Indices, Los Angeles 2027

Yeawon Kim
Graduate student
Media Design Practices
Art Center College of Design

Yeawon Kim
Graduate student
Media Design Practices
Art Center College of Design

Crime prediction technology – we have all seen it in the movies, but what has in the past been pure fiction is now quickly becoming a reality.  Predpol, HunchLab and ComStat are different types of relatively new crime prediction software, or “predicative policing” software, that demonstrate how algorithms and other technologies can be used within urban infrastructures to predict crime.  However, utilizing these technologies and algorithms to collect data to predict crime, which is invariably subject to and tainted by human perception and use, can lead to a number of adverse ethical consequences – such as the amplification of existing biases against certain types of individuals based on race, gender or otherwise. On the other hand, if data can be gathered by some artificial intelligence (AI) means – thereby removing the human component from such data collection, can doing so result in more efficient and accurate crime prediction?  Furthermore, will we in doing so also reshape the aesthetic of urban landscapes, especially when one takes into account the constant evolution of AI?

Insectile Indices is therefore a speculative design project that considers how electronically augmented insects could be trained to act as sophisticated data sensors, working in groups, as part of a neighborhood crime predicative policing initiative in the city of Los Angeles, 2027.  This project is not only an investigation into the ethics of this controversial idea, but an aesthetic exploration into the deliberate alteration to a natural wildlife ecosystem of insects and the potential reshaping of an urban landscape.

In 2007, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) asked American scientists to submit proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, the results of which led to a plethora of troubling and worrisome commentary.  Rather than build off of a frightening narrative that discusses the potential sinister militaristic use of such technology, this project does the opposite and imagines instead an aesthetically pleasing utopia where these insect-cyborgs have social utility and work towards the public good of humanity.  Insectile indices also plays with the idea of aesthetics in our future techno-driven world by addressing whether we are more apt to silently “turn the other cheek” to more pervasive surveillance if these insect-cyborgs, or the urban landscapes they have the potential to reshape, become more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

In this session, I plan to share the process of researching and creating the visual representation of this speculative fiction.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.

Research for Designers

Meredith James
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design
Portland State University

There are a number of textbooks on the market for research strategies used by designers, from A Designer’s Research Manual by O’Grady and O’Grady, to Visual Research by Bestley and Noble, to Design Research by Laurel and Lunenfeld. These texts offer a range of approaches, from marketing strategies used by designers, to more academic case studies. However, what is missing from the marketplace is a simple “how-to” guide that introduces basic primary and secondary research techniques to students.

This presentation will provide a literature review of tactics every designer and educator should know, and then present a practical research guide created for designers that fills the gap in existing literature. This pocket guide is being used in design classes at both foundational and advanced levels. Our students work has advanced to be more culturally and critically aware due to the implementation of these techniques. 

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.

Typographic Landscape Ecologies

Joshua Singer
Associate Professor
San Francisco State University

Typographic Landscape Ecologies is an ongoing design research project that documents, maps, and visualizes typographic artifacts in the urban landscape as a way to explore cultural forces in the constructed world. The project presuppose a model of a semiotic landscape; a complex multi‐dimensional text or collection of texts in geographic space; the landscape as a collection of symbolically mediated phenomena understood only through representation. The typographic elements of the urban landscape form, through their invisible connections to the greater world of meaning, an ecology of meaning that constructs geographic space as real as its material forms.

Typographic Landscape Ecologies uses conventional research as a means to authoritatively document the landscape in an attempt to reveal patterns and relationships. The project uses experimental methods as a foil to the authority of conventional research as a way to generate speculative conclusions. Imprecise and questionable associations generate new semantic connections and new forms of thinking and knowledge. The illumination of new knowledge is the ultimate goal of research giving subjective and illegitimate conclusions value by revealing something not yet known. The work of the radical architecture groups Superstudio and Archigram, the design fictions of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, the iconoclastic maps of Denis Woods, and the imaginary science of ‘Pataphysics offer examples of the ability of working data into new syntaxes, into alternative and speculative narratives, that can offer glimpses of other potentialities. In Typographic Landscape Ecologies this is demonstrated by the visual cross-referencing of aesthetic ecologies and cultural vectors, their overlay onto three dimensional virtual environments comprised of layers of historical maps that encourage us to read between the lines or layers of a cultural-semiotic space. This does not offer concrete answers, but rather poses new and unexpected questions.

This research was presented at the Affiliated Society Meeting: Design Incubation Special Program on Typography on February 23, 2018.

Communication Design Faculty Census 2018

We invite faculty, researchers and interested parties to engage with the data collected as part of the Faculty Census 2018 and to use the information gathered here to support their own work and their engagement with institutions in higher education.

Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles

Presentations and discussion in Research and Scholarship in Communication Design at the 106th Annual CAA Conference 2018 in LA.

Hosted by CAA Affiliated Society, Design Incubation

Research in Communication Design. Presentation of unique, groundbreaking, significant creative work, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice and the academic and scholarly review of creative projects. New approaches to design education and pedagogy will also be discussed.

Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Los Angeles
Saturday, February 24, 2018, 2:00–3:30 PM
LA Convention Center: 402A

Abstract submission  deadline: December 21, 2017
Submit abstracts online at Colloquium Abstract Submissions.

The colloquium session is open to all conference attendees.

Co-Moderators

Aaris Sherin
Professor 
Graphic Design
St John’s University

Bruno Ribeiro
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design
Department of Art and Design
California Polytechnic State University

Presentations

Lessons From Mom & Pop on Resourceful Design
Kelly Porter
Assistant Professor
East Tennessee State University

Insectile Indices, Los Angeles 2027
Yeawon Kim
Graduate student
Media Design Practices
Art Center College of Design

Research for Designers
Meredith James
Assistant Professor
Portland State University

Geometries of the Sacred and Profane in Lewerentz’s St Peters
Nathan Matteson
Assistant Professor
DePaul University
College of Computing and Digital Media
School of Design

Guided Experiential Learning for Design Innovators
C.J. Yeh
Professor
Fashion Institute of Technology

Transforming ‘Graduate Students’ Into ‘Competent Designers’
Benson Cheung
Associate Professor
Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong (THEi)
Faculty of Design and Environment

Leveraging the Smartphone as a Teaching Tool
Heather Snyder-Quinn
Professional Lecturer
DePaul University 
College of Computing and Digital Media 
School of Design

During the conference we will also be holding an Affiliated Society Meeting: Design Incubation Special Program on Typography. The meeting agenda for the meeting will be posted in an upcoming announcement. The meeting is open and free to the public.

María Rogal Will Chair the 2018 Communication Design Educators Awards

Design Incubation’s Communication Design Educators Awards program was established to recognize and showcase faculty accomplishments through peer review. This competition reflects the organization’s mission to foster professional development and discourse within the academic design community. Since 2016, applicants from around the world have entered this awards competition recognizing design excellence and ingenuity in the academic study of communication design, with categories in published research, creative work, teaching, and service. The award processes and procedures are rigorous, transparent, objective and professional. Each year, entries are reviewed and ranked by an independent, renown jury of design educators and researchers across a broad range of design expertise and scholarly accomplishment within the discipline.

After envisioning the academic design awards and chairing the jury, University of Minnesota graphic design professor Steven McCarthy is passing along the role of Chair. We value his continued support and involvement in the program. Design Incubation offers their gratitude for his leadership in the launch of this important effort.

We are excited to announce María Rogal, Professor of Graphic Design in the school of Art + Art History at the University of Florida will chair the 2018 jury. She has had the distinction of being a juror of the awards since its inception. McCarthy writes, “Rogal brings vast experience, great powers of empathy, and astute judgment to the task. Rogal’s disciplinary connections and intellectual network will undoubtedly offer the jury some fresh input as the competition enters its third year.”

Rogal offers McCarthy her greatest respect and appreciation of his leadership over many years, particularly in having recognized the need for professional development and creating a program to support it. Rogal writes, “the diverse submissions I reviewed over the past two years were rewarding and inspiring. But this process also highlighted how important these awards and the application process can be for communication design educators. Through the application and peer review process itself, we also support professional development.”

We thank Bloomsbury Publishing, the sponsor of these awards. The 2018 awards program will follow the same timeline as previous years, with entries due May 31, 2018. An overview of the awards program is on our website. Look for more information on the program in the coming months.

DI-AwardsPressRelease2017

Alex Girard and Bruno Ribeiro Join Design Incubation

November 21, 2017.

Design Incubation is excited to announce important additions to our team.

Alex Girard, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the Art Department at Southern Connecticut State University, will be the Director of Peer Reviews.

He has had a distinguished career as an design educator and academic administrator, teaching at the University of Minnesota and Community College of Aurora, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Community College of Aurora.

Girard will direct the peer review process and ensure academic integrity and standards within the organization.

Bruno Ribeiro, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in Department of Art and Design at California Polytechnic State University will be the Director of Community Outreach for West Coast Initiatives. His research specialization is in interaction and motion design. His background is in visual communication and industrial design, having studied at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial – ESDI (Rio de Janeiro), an an MBA in marketing from Fundação Getúlio Vargas – FGV (Rio de Janeiro) and an MFA from Ohio State University.

Ribeiro will be expanding our reach on the west coast, as we continue to expand our support of research in communication design.