Research in Communication Design
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.
Meaghan Barry, Assistant Professor at Oakland University and Aaron Ganci, Assistant Professor at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design, two of our 2016 Design Incubation Fellows have recently published in the journal Design and Culture.
Barry’s Statement of Practice interview with designer, performance artist, and Cranbrook Designer-in-Residence Elliot Earls explores the many facets of Earl’s practice and the evolution of his thinking about design, education and performance over the last several decades.
Ganci reviewed John McCarthy and Peter Wright’s text, Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design.
Barry and Ganci continued their writing projects with the support of Design Incubation’s Fellowship Director, Aaris Sherin, to craft these articles.
For more information on how Design Incubation supports design writing and publishing see the Fellowship page on the Design Incubation website. Applications for the 2018 program will be accepted June 1, 2017 – September 1, 2017.
Jessica Barness
Assistant Professor
School of Visual Communication Design
Kent State University
Steven McCarthy
Professor
College of Design
University of Minnesota
Conventional academic scholarship typically involves publishing one’s research findings in journals and books, or in the arts, performing or exhibiting creative work. Design straddles these worlds and adds its own cultural norms, such as industry competitions that seek the commercial work of professional practitioners, or the fine arts tradition with its emphasis on gallery shows. Design scholarship, whether written or visual, does not always fit these models: How might design faculty approach the dissemination of creative work that is neither client-based nor fine art?
Over the past decade, another path to knowledge formation and scholarly productivity has emerged: critical making. Involving a speculative approach to design (experimental, future-oriented, expressive), critical making combines an authorial point-of-view with the tangible aspects of media, technology, materials and process. Critical making is experiential and uses design to create knowledge across disciplines.
Through critical making, some design faculty have found diverse scholarly venues to share their creative and intellectual work. These dissemination venues often take their cues from other disciplinary cultures like the humanities, the arts, science, engineering and business, and can include publications, exhibitions, performances, and conferences. These venues can be an advantage to design scholars as they are already generally recognized and legitimized by academic culture. However, faculty may not fully understand the opportunities for an enhanced, rigorous approach to scholarship – a strategic integration of making and writing – that moves beyond industry practice and fine arts traditions yet remains distinctly relevant to the design discipline.
Considerations of this presentation will include faculty effort, the scholarly product, the selection process, dissemination venues, scope (local, regional, national, international), and the resulting impact. The challenges in assessing interdisciplinary work and the roles in collaborative projects will be discussed, as will the implications for tenure and promotion.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.3: Kent State University on Saturday, March 11, 2017.
A webinar discussing design scholarship with an emphasis on the intersection of professional practice and writing.
A webinar discussing design scholarship with an emphasis on the intersection of professional practice and writing. Information about discipline specific journals and book publishers.
As design educators we are increasingly asked to do it all. We need to excel in the classroom, provide service to our institution, maintain a professional practice and publish and engage in design-related scholarship.
See more at: http://www.rgd.ca/events-and-programs/rgd-events/events/
By examining the role of the Olympics in different geographical and political contexts, I focus on how communication design becomes a vehicle for the promotion of new national identities and even new forms of citizenship.
As a scholar interested in understanding space, I see acts of spatial representation as primary means of creating the realm of “spatial conception”—where communication design plays a key role expanding from place-marketing campaigns to unofficial and often subversive spatial imaginaries.
By examining the role of the Olympics in different geographical and political contexts, I focus on how communication design becomes a vehicle for the promotion of new national identities and even new forms of citizenship. My research proposes the term “Olympic design milieu” as a way of understanding the multiplicity of design generated by the Olympics—this includes officially created symbols and constructions that aim to facilitate the Olympics and induce civic pride, but it also incorporates unauthorized acts by political or civil society groups that question or oppose the Olympics.
“Graphic Design Histories of the Olympics” includes chapters of my recently published book Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation as well as a film I produced with director Marija Stojnic titled Olympic Design: Mexico 1968: Visual Identity: Lance Wyman (2014).
The three chapters featured focus on three elements of the Olympic design milieu. Chapter 1, “Through the Lens of Graphic Design: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Universalism in the Tokyo 1964 Design Program,” reveals how the Tokyo 1964 graphic design program played an important role in re-articulating Japan’s postwar identity. The next chapter, “Not for a Nation, but for the People: London 2012 Brand Design as a New Paradigm of Olympic Design,” looks at Wolff Olins’ design as the first conscious effort of Olympic designers to induce public participation in the design process. This marked the expansion of the Olympic design operation from an exclusive affair (a sponsors-only right to Olympic properties) to a matter of engagement across society. Finally, the chapter titled “Opposing the Olympic City: Designerly Ways of Dissenting” demonstrates the potential of design to induce alternative forms of participatory citizenship by looking at materialized practices of Olympic opposition.
The accompanying film features Lance Wyman describing how his official Mexico 1968 Olympic designs convey a “sense of place.” Appropriating these official symbols, powerful subversions by the student movement of the same era show the blurring of the official and the unofficial, the authoritative and the subversive in the Mexico 1968 Olympic milieu.
Jilly Traganou was born in Athens and studied architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. A scholarship from Japan’s Ministry of Education brought her to Japan in the early ‘90s and inspired her PhD work (University of Westminster) on the representation of space through travelling, resulting in the book The Tokaido Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (Routledge 2003). Her interest in theorizing travel led to a co-edited volume with Miodrag Mitrasinovic titled Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate 2009).
Living in Athens in 2003-2004, Jilly experienced the making of an Olympic City and began new research into Olympic design. Her new book Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation was published this year. This summer, she continued her research in the Olympics as a Fulbright scholar in Brazil during the 2016 Games. Her work has been supported by the Bard Graduate Center, The Japan Foundation, The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton, Design History Society, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts among others. She is an associate professor of spatial studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2016.
Design Incubation is pleased to announce the results of the inaugural Communication Design Educators Awards!
Design Incubation is pleased to announce the results of the inaugural Communication Design Educators Awards
Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards is a competition. We offer recognition in 3 categories: Scholarship (design research, creative production, and/or professional practice), Teaching, and Service (departmental, institutional, community) in the field of Communication Design. The purpose of these awards is to showcase design excellence and ingenuity in the academic study of design.
Jilly Traganou
Associate Professor
Parsons School of Design
Pascal Glissmann
Assistant Professor
Parsons School for Design
Olivier Arcioli
Lecturer and Researcher
Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Andreas Henrich
Professor
Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Gary Rozanc
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design
University of Maryland
Basma Hamdy
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design Department
Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt
Assistant Professor, Graphic Design
College of Imaging Arts & Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
Denielle J Emans
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design Department
Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
Steven McCarthy (Chair)
Professor of Graphic Design
University of Minnesota
Elizabeth Guffey
Professor of Art History
Purchase College, SUNY
Founding Editor of Design and Culture
Elizabeth Resnick
Professor of Graphic Design
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Maria Rogal
Professor of Graphic Design
University of Florida
David Shields
Associate Professor & Chair of Department of Graphic Design
Virginia Commonwealth University
For details, visit the awards page at DesignIncubation.com/educator-awards/
Deadline: Submission deadline is May 30, 2016. The application form can be downloaded here.
Announcement of Awards
The awards will be announced the first week of September 2016.
Time: 02/04/2016, 12:30 PM—2:00 PM
Location: Hoover, Mezzanine Level
In collaboration with CAA Task Force on Design at the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Chair: Dan Wong, New York City College of Technology, City University of New York
Discussant: Kathryn Weinstein, Queen’s College, City University of New York
Design programs in American colleges and universities are adding design research, contemporary practice, and publishing that demonstrates rigor and impact factor to the requirements of design educators’ scholarly activities. With these changing requirements, the need for reputable and established modes of dissemination has reached a critical mass.
From practice to theory, this panel examines research formats, forms of investigation, representation of research, venues, organizations, and publishing opportunities available to Communication Design educators and researchers. It will discuss contemporary design research approaches and formats, and note various organizations and publishing outlets accessible to educators, researchers, and practitioners of design. In conclusion, the panel will explore where practice fits within academia.
James Pannafino
Associate Professor
Interactive and Graphic Design
Millersville University, Pennsylvania
Publishing a book is one of the most ambitious goals an educator can have. Recent changes in the publishing industry have created unique opportunities for new forms of distribution. Educators can now create legitimate scholarly outputs with self-publishing platforms utilizing both online and print on demand (POD) technology. Pannafinno, the author of Interdisciplinary Interaction Design: A Visual Guide to Basic Theories, Models and Ideas for Thinking and Designing for Interactive Web Design and Digital Device Experiences will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various modes of self-publishing.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 2.3: St. John’s University on Saturday, January 16, 2016.Elizabeth Guffey
Professor of Art & Design History
State University of New York at Purchase
Editor, Design & Culture
Rarely do we get a chance to see from the inside what the editorial process of peer review journals looks like. We will provide an unusual chance to see what the editorial process looks like, from the editors’ point of view, beginning with initial review of submissions through the peer review process and to final publication. We will also discuss some of the realities of publishing—including the timely pressures on editors to produce well-balanced journal issues with a variety of high-quality articles.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 2.3: St. John’s University on Saturday, January 16, 2016.Saturday, January 16, 2016
2:00pm – 4:30pm
St. John’s University Manhattan Campus
101 Astor PL, New York
(Local subways: 6 at Astor Place; N,R at 8th Street)
To attend: RSVP@designincubation.com. Include name, email contact, and affiliation. All are welcome.
Design and Culture: Peer-Review Journals from the Inside Out
Elizabeth Guffey
Professor of Art & Design History
State University of New York at Purchase
Editor, Design & Culture
Self-Publishing in Higher Education: Meaning and Approach
James Pannafino
Associate Professor
Interactive and Graphic Design
Millersville University, Pennsylvania
Envisioning South Africa’s Global Struggle Against Apartheid
Steffi Duarte
Curatorial Research Assistant
Product Design & Decorative Arts Department
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Decorative Art & Design Department
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan
Gennifer Weisenfeld
Professor
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Duke University
Big Data in Interactive Web Design
Vinoad Senguttuvan
Senior Data Scientist
Metis
