Steffi Duarte
Curatorial Research Assistant
Product Design & Decorative Arts Department, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Decorative Art & Design Department, Cleveland Museum of Art

How can materiality and visual communication provide insight, however fleeting, into histories of past struggles?  Drawing on the ephemera and visual language of the global struggle against South African Apartheid, from 1960 to 1990, this presentation is a critical investigation of the relationship between design and a struggle for one country’s freedom fought across vast geographical distances.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Design Incubation Colloquium 2.3: St. John’s University on Saturday, January 16, 2016.

Gennifer Weisenfeld
Professor
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Duke University

This book tells the story of the birth of commercial art in Japan from the turn of the twentieth century through its global efflorescence in the total design event of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Until recently, there has been little systematic effort to analyze Japanese advertising and commercial art production within the broader context of world design history, while also taking into account the wide-ranging cultural implications of Japan’s emerging consumer capitalism and the ideological formations of nation- and empire-building. Such a study requires the challenging integration of the disparate scholarly spheres of art, design, business, social, and political history as aesthetics are read back into the sociology of consumption. This integrative interpretation illuminates the immense creativity imbued in aesthetic responses to new business systems as well as the profound impact that consumer capitalism has had on the development of modern Japanese art and visual culture.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 2.3: St. John’s University on Saturday, January 16, 2016.

Vinoad Senguttuvan
Senior Data Scientist
Metis

Big Data/Data Science has had a significant impact on the web, influencing the way we price flights, recommend movies and predict elections. Web Design, especially interactive web design, can now use Big Data to validate specific design choices and thereby improve upon its effectiveness. This talk will address how data science can pinpoint various parts of a web design and fine-tune them to maximize performance.

While Data Science has been an immense help to Web Design the inverse is also true. The scope and size of Big Data has grown exponentially over the years, and various interactive web design
techniques are being created specifically to visualize Big Data and provide an interactive interface that is easy and intuitive to use.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 2.3: St. John’s University on Saturday, January 16, 2016.