Tag: #DI2018oct

How AI is Changing Design

Scott Theisen
Executive Creative Director
Deloitte Digital

Everyday a few more pieces of software and technology are being worked on, distributed and connected using some flavor of AI. What does this mean for how we design artifacts, software and services? What might this mean for us as professionals? How might this start to change our perception of ourselves? This talk will highlight some of the new, fascinating and scary ways AI is already affecting us.

Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, consumer AI technologies have had to deal with unforeseen implications of its creation and deployment, when put in the hands of their millions of users. Design bias and human needs have created issues that reveal the designers immaturity with the medium.

Software manufacturers deploying AI to generate content, mathematically analyze our requests and respond to our input. How is this influencing our ideas, our culture and the choices we make? With computer vision that can process incomprehensible data, rapid iteration that can outperform human limitations… AI is present in our daily lives and shaping the future in which we will live.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

A Tool for Understanding: Giving Voice to Diverse, Non-traditional and Low-Income Students Through Teaching Letterpress Printing

Vida Sacic
Associate Professor
Northeastern Illinois University

Visual communication skills provide a backbone for participation in a shared cultural exchange. Yet, universities often fail to offer tangible ways to foster long term accessibility and inclusion.

Northeastern Illinois University is among the nation’s leaders at graduating students with the least debt while serving the most diverse group of students in the Midwest.*

In the span of last eight years, we have formed a program in Graphic Design tailored to students who come from racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse families and communities of lower socioeconomic status.**

Students often define success as the ability to use design skills to earn a living following graduation. Self-expression builds our students’ confidence and assertiveness as designers. For this reason, storytelling organically became a focus of the program. As it became evident that diverse students achieve most favorable learning outcomes in collaborative spaces where they can interact face-to-face, the heart of our program became our letterpress printing class.

Our growing letterpress type shop houses digital and analog tools. Students are required to collaborate with class members and beyond to complete projects, thereby practicing cultural sensitivity and interpersonal communication skills. The experimental nature of print and mechanics offers students an ability to slow down and consider their work more carefully, while introducing elements of chance and discovery to their process. This arrangement offers a unique environment to raise 21st century citizen designers and a valuable model for integration practices in design education. This model can be replicated in any makerspace environment that uses high tech to no tech tools.

Beneficial outcomes are evident as increasing amounts of our students are finding employment in the field, applying their skills to relevant positions and using their lived experience as a source of knowledge that can serve as an asset in their applied practice and beyond.

* data by U.S. News & World Report, September 2017

** 38% of Northeastern Illinois University students declare themselves as Hispanic/Latino, 31% Caucasian, 11% African American, 9% Asian, with the rest listed as other.
6% are identified as Non-Residents (including undocumented students).
55% of our students are non-traditional students, defined as postsecondary students who are 25 years old and older. They are contrasted with traditional students, aged 18 -22, who enroll immediately after high school, attend full-time, live on campus, and do not have major work or family responsibilities.
data by www.collegefactual.com

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

Evolving Graphic Design from Serving Industry to Fulfilling Fundamental Human Needs

Gareth Fry
Assistant Professor
Utah Valley University

In the same way that discussions about critical issues in our society’s past were once buried and eventually found a foothold in public discourse, graphic design must be shaken from its hypnotic focus on serving industry and refocused on the fulfillment of fundamental human needs. This presentation seeks to initiate a dialog through which designers and educators examine the physical, emotional, and mental impact our work has on others; develop a greater focus on human needs; and share ideas about evolving graphic design education and professional practice.

Graphic design has the potential to achieve highly-positive outcomes, but our field is still largely unaware of the negative effects caused by the tsunami of visual ephemera we create. Research of design psychology and anthropology reveals that the heart of the problem is our natural propensity to view the world in terms of “us” and “them,” and to divide our loyalties accordingly. This characteristic develops from birth and undoubtedly occurs in order to help infants ensure that their basic needs for safety and love are being met. It remains with us into adulthood, and throughout life we reflexively divide people into myriad groups. For designers, our clients are our primary “us,” whereas our audiences are a distant, passive, and easy-to-forget “them.” This is the system we have inherited, and most of us accept and perpetuate it without a second thought.

Previous scholarship that expounds ways to lift graphic design to a higher plane has tended to focus on superficial and transient factors such as industry issues, political agendas, and cultural trends. A far more powerful approach to finding a solution, however, is to re-code our “us” and “them” thinking, build a framework for graphic design that rests on the bedrock of our humanity, and make enlightened changes to our practices and output.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

90 Years of The Society of Typographic Arts

Sharon Oiga
Associate Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago

Guy Villa Jr
Assistant Professor
Columbia College Chicago

In an event that took place in the 1920s, designers affiliated with the Chicago Chapter of AIGA held an unsanctioned, notoriously wild party on Lake Michigan. When the AIGA Board of Directors in New York learned of the incident, they disavowed the Chicago Chapter on the grounds of lack of control over members. The orphaned designers then gathered to form The Society of Typographic Arts (STA). The salacious start of this professional design organization foreshadowed events to come in their 90-year history, including a temporary switch to the name of American Center for Design as well as an infamous dumpster-diving incident to save archival work. These factual incidents, uncovered in the research of the book created for the 90th anniversary of the STA, will be detailed in the presentation. Viewers will expand their knowledge of design history, hear about STA’s periodically controversial timeline of events, see significant works of design, and learn how designers of this era and region characterized design in the American Midwest.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

Creativity in Letting Go of Certainties

Dannell MacIlwraith
Assistant Professor
Kutztown University

Admit it; designers are control freaks.

I know that in both my work and my life, I have been a very intentional, controlling person who feels safe within a set of clearly defined parameters. But in order to grow, I have been experimenting with letting myself abandon control and accept uncontrollable components within my designs. The unexpected makes life and design interesting and stimulating. The detachment of control has added new systems to my work, practice, and curriculum. The elements of unpredictability, chance and accident have a long (but under appreciated) tradition in design, threading through the Dada movement and the visual culture of John Cage, Stefan Bucher and Daniel Eatock.

Relinquishing some control has added new techniques to my work, practice, and lifestyle. I employ my newfound methodologies in material explorations, layout techniques, and “blind” elements that create chance outcomes.

Chance methodologies that produce unexpected results can be integrated within both analog and digital techniques. These methodologies have included student projects utilizing india ink with air duster to create abstract shapes. These organic/non-controlled shapes are the first steps to animated illustration. (dannelldesigns.com/ink-2018) Within my own work, I have used the weather as means of ‘choosing’ color for a website. The temperature dictates the color scheme for the site; the warmer the temperature the warmer the colors; the cooler the temperature the cooler the colors. (dannelldesigns.com)

My research is designed for me to accept the imperfections and chaos of life. There will be unexpected elements to work with and through. Is this a relatable subject to society? Designers are problem-solvers and form the elements of their work. The process of being a “chooser” and deciding on fonts, colors, and layout is authoritative. How can we teach our students to not only be ‘choosers’ but to be open to unexpected and uncontrollable outcomes? By letting go of control, we can gain new experiences and happy accidents.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

Design as Performance

A. Marcel
Graduate student
Vermont College of Fine Arts

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalitarianism

We currently face a phenomenological question: In a hyperreal, post-truth world, how do we orient toward the real and toward freedom?

This abstract argues that the antidote to disorientation occurs through the embodied praxis of performativity. My research contributes to continued dialogue in media and political theory, as well as performance studies. Performativity is a growing and major new paradigm for the arts in the 21st century. Much like the way conceptual art brought the visual arts out of an object-oriented realm and into a method event based realm in the 1960s, performance has a similar capacity for socio-economic critique via multi-modal, experimental forms of semiotic expression.

This thesis argues that performance orients us toward the real through a creation of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopic space. Performance becomes an index for the real as an index of a 4D world, a spatial dimension we can’t see in a 3D world, but can experience through time-based media or events. Performance thus becomes a method of queering of space and time—and ultimately our relationship to mimesis. This index runs counter to the concept of the single narrative that is the heart of the hyperreal and the simulacra of fascism. The locus for liberatory practice centers in heterotopic spaces and, in turn, the inclusion of multiple narratives—for all of us, as we are always both spectator and participant, audience and actor.

Using fiction as method, I explore this hypothesis through the writing of a play called Hot Dogs 24/7. My theory imagines a tripartite world set within a hypercube, or a tesseract. Hot Dogs 24/7 is a sci-fi retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The text is then realized into the visual via video installation. Recursively moving between the micro and the macro, my intention is that my work is doing what I am saying; it is performing. Ultimately, the connection to the physical body, as material and sensory, is the piece driving this all. To conclude, this thesis calls for the formal recognition and exploration of performative design as a subset of graphic design.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

A Taste of Miami: Mentors, Creative Teams, Award Shows

John Delacruz
Associate Professor of Advertising
School of Journalism and Mass Communications 
San Jose State University

A mentor is a friendly guide who helps a less experienced person by demonstrating positive behaviors. To be effective, a mentor’s role is to be dependable, engaged, authentic, and tuned into the mentee’s needs and limitations. Mentoring is important because students learn from essential knowledge and skills from their mentors whilst also providing an understanding of workplace practices. This is certainly the case in the creative industries.

The creative industries rely on mentorship practices,  they require team-working skills and the ability to learn, support and help others in an increasingly inter-disciplinary environment.  Students at San Jose State University (SJSU) aiming to enter the creative industries have been working on a project with Miami Ad School in San Francisco. Miami Ad School, a portfolio school with campuses worldwide, intensively prepares students to enter the advertising industry as art directors and copywriters. In two years students develop approaches to problem-solving, they develop their craft and become confident communicators of ideas as they learn from experienced creatives at the top of their game. In fact, MAS is guided by an active teaching and learning model where the instructor can be seen as a mentor as much as a teacher.

SJSU students have been included in MAS creative teams on a course that focuses on award show student competition briefs. The aim is to better understand how mentoring can take place within a creative team where, through active learning, undergraduate students can develop new approaches to their own practice as a result of working alongside students immersed in different pedagogies. Will these undergraduates bring a new approach back to their SJSU classes and will their work improve as a result? Expectations and reflections gathered at both the start and end of the exercise will provide valuable insights.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University on October 27, 2018.

Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1: DePaul University

Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1 (#DI2018oct) will be held at DePaul University, College of Computing and Digital Media on Saturday, October 27, 2018. 10:30AM-5:00PM

Design Incubation Colloquium 5.1 (#DI2018oct) will be held at DePaul University, College of Computing and Digital Media on Saturday, October 27, 2018. 10:30AM-5:00PM

Hosted by Heather Quinn and the School of Design Talks. This event is open to all interested in Communication Design research.

DePaul University
Richard M. and Maggie C. Daley Building
14 E Jackson Blvd.
Chicago, IL 60604
Lower Level Theatre

For details visit the Colloquia Overview and  Online Submission Form. Submission deadline: Saturday, August 25, 2018.

For visiting presenters and attendees, you can find hotel recommendations on the DePaul website here:

https://resources.depaul.edu/demon-discounts/travel/Pages/hotels.aspx

DePaul Colloquium After Party

Attendees and presenters are invited to join Design Incubation and Haddon Avenue Writing Institute for a reception and tour of the facilities from 6-8pm. Drinks and refreshments will be provided. Please rsvp@designincubation.com if you plan to attend.

October 27th, 2018
6-8pm
Haddon Avenue Writing Institute
2009 W. Haddon Ave, Chicago Illinois

Featured Presentation

Storytelling: Balancing the Head, Heart, and Gut
Kelly Bishop
VP, Product & Design
The Onion
Fusion Media Group

Moderators

Liz DeLuna
Associate Professor
St. John’s University

Robin Landa
Distinguished Professor
Michael Graves College
Kean University

DesignEdu.Today
Gary Rozanc will be attending and documenting this event for his series.

Presentations

A Taste of Miami: Mentors, Creative Teams, Award Shows 
John Delacruz
Associate Professor of Advertising
School of Journalism and Mass Communications 
San Jose State University

Creativity in Letting Go of Certainties
Dannell MacIlwraith
Assistant Professor
Kutztown University

Body Type
Samantha Flora
Co-Founder and Designer
JAM Studios and Fat Kid Type Foundry

Material Voice: Communicating with Substrates
Meridyth Espindola
Graduate student
Vermont College of Fine Arts
BFA, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

90 Years of The Society of Typographic Arts
Sharon Oiga
Associate Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago

Guy Villa Jr
Assistant Professor
Columbia College Chicago

Design for Decentralized Studio Learning
Lisa Hammershaimb
Associate Dean of Curriculum, Graphic Arts
Independence University

Neuron Focus Support – Eliminating Distraction Through Facilitated Goal-Oriented Task Management
Abhinit Parelkar
Graduate student
College of Computing & Digital Media
DePaul University

Gerard Panganiban

Graduate student
College of Computing & Digital Media
DePaul University

Facilitating Justice Through Design Research
Mariam Asad
Graduate student
Georgia Institute of Technology

Social Homelessness on US Campuses
Yeohyun Ahn
Assistant Professor
Art Department
UW Madison

What Can Machine Learning Contribute to Empathy in Design? How to Build a Journey Map Using Big Data and Text Sentiment Analysis
Sarah Pagliaccio
Principal, User Experience Designer
Black Pepper

Design as Performance
A. Marcel
Graduate student
Vermont College of Fine Arts

How AI is Changing Design
Scott Theisen
Executive Creative Director
Deloitte Digital

A Tool for Understanding: Giving Voice to Diverse, Non-traditional and Low-Income Students Through Teaching Letterpress Printing
Vida Sacic
Associate Professor
Northeastern Illinois University

Evolving Graphic Design from Serving Industry to Fulfilling Fundamental Human Needs
Gareth Fry
Assistant Professor
Utah Valley University

Wearable Workshops
LeAnne Wagner
Professional Lecturer
School of Design
DePaul University

Comfort Toys
Benjamin Evjen
Assistant Professor
Utah Valley University

Featured in Chicago Design Week 2018 (Oct 27 – Nov 3)