The research offers memorable experiences that complement traditional marketing materials.
Caitlin Lu & Maidah Salman Graduate student Boston University
Purpose: This study investigates new approaches for displaying designs through digital visualization to enhance engagement and impact while considering the future of design. By integrating methods like projection mapping and digital signage, the research aims to offer memorable experiences that complement rather than replace traditional marketing materials.
The focus is on sustainability, adaptability, interaction, and error correction across various display sizes, including screens and projections. With the global shift toward sustainability, this study offers new strategies for designers to move beyond conventional methods and incorporate more eco-friendly practices.
Process: The research involves a workshop where participants test and compare digital design methods with traditional print media. This includes hands-on experience with projection mapping and a presentation introducing new digital marketing techniques. Following the workshop, participants will complete surveys to measure the effectiveness of different methodology.
Outcomes: Test theory by conducting a workshop where we will check the success rate of digital design as compared to tangible marketing collateral. The findings will highlight how digital visualization can enhance sustainability and audience engagement in design practices.
Significance: The study explores emerging digital techniques that advance conventional design methods, contributing to more sustainable and impactful communication strategies.
The Center was “founded” in response to a lack of design student cohesion and camaraderie.
Grace Preston Professor Texas State University
My paper recounts a collaborative initiative between myself and a cohort of undergraduate design students that we named the Center for Drawn Togetherness. The Center was “founded” in response to a lack of design student cohesion and camaraderie as our institution transitioned back to a fully in-person model post-pandemic. To address these issues, we conceptualized a series of interlocking illustration events that culminated in an exhibition. Each event asked participants to work together, challenging the idea that drawing is a solitary activity and exploring how drawing together could strengthen bonds among participants.
In the first event, a risograph workshop, participants collaboratively designed and printed an official “currency” for the Center. The second event allowed participants to earn “money” by contributing to a collaborative mural, asking them to respond to prompts that could be completed with a partner. The culminating event allowed participants to spend their “money” in a student-run illustration pop-up shop. All happenings were housed in an exhibition that doubled as a gathering space for design students, with student collaborators facilitating the events.
Event planning sessions emphasized Sasha Constanza-Chock’s principles of Design Justice, particularly their assertion that communities should co-lead and control design projects intended to benefit them (2020). Since I was concurrently teaching my student collaborators, planning sessions also challenged the traditional roles of teachers and students, proposing that we can operate as equals.
The workshops received positive feedback from participants, which was gathered through surveys and interviews after the events concluded. The Center plans to use this feedback to develop new initiatives in this upcoming school year. We will continue to investigate how in-person drawing events can potentially promote empathy among students, advocate more collaborative relationships between teachers and students, and encourage young designers to feel ownership over their educational experience.
Script revival serves as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity.
Anmol Shrivastava Assistant Professor Illinois State University
Kaithi (KAE-THEE), also known as Kayathi or Kayasthi, is a script that was once widely used in northern India. Now classified as a “major extinct” script, Kaithi once flourished alongside companion scripts like Devanagari and other major Indian scripts of today. The name Kaithi is derived from ‘Kayastha’, a cultural group known as “scribes”. I am a Kayastha.
Script revival is crucial to colonized cultures, serving as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity. It fosters pride, heritage transmission, and resistance to cultural homogenization, empowering communities to rebuild unique identities and celebrate their heritage.
This presentation explores the intersection of design and ancestry through a personal journey to revive the nearly extinct Kaithi script, historically used by my ancestors, the Kayasthas. It will demonstrate how design can become a powerful tool for historical and cultural revival, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between design, identity, and heritage.
By delving into sparse historical documents of Kaithi and sharing a personal journey of self-learning the script, the presentation will showcase current and upcoming projects that combine typography, type design, lettering, poster design, and embroidery. It will explore projects aimed at broadening the reach of this nearly extinct script by making Kaithi easier to self-teach. This presentation will illustrate how design can play a crucial role in reconnecting with and reviving our ancestral roots, fostering a deeper sense of identity and belonging.
The design outcomes are realized through custom display typefaces, prints, posters, small books, animations, and mixed media. They generate a network of connections between projects.
Moon Jung Jang Associate Professor University of Georgia
My creative practice focuses on the simultaneous, multiple existences of mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about unseen things and their information. To understand such a phenomenon, I explore multiplicity as a visual concept and as narrative systems to capture the multiple existences in space-time. My design methodology is as follows: First, I select a group of interrelated unseen things and intangible information, such as temperature, labor, and alignment, that could be meaningful in my daily life. Second, I examine visual qualities that could consist of multiplicity, such as simultaneity, duality, polyhedral-ness, ambivalence, and modularity. Third, I design visual narrative systems to translate or transfer intangible information into metaphoric modules, sequential colors, and their values.
The design outcomes of my work are realized through custom display typefaces, prints, posters, small books, animations, and mixed media, which generate a network of connections between projects. For example, one project, A Sequence of Gray, consists of a book, a series of posters, and an animation that demonstrated the concept of ambivalence and gray gradients as narrative systems to translate the simultaneous existence of black and white. It led to A Sequence of Blue: Labor Day, an installation that translates my unseen laboring time into sequential blue values. In conclusion, this creative practice of multiplicity has allowed me to examine paradoxical, polyphonic, and metaphoric sequences in designing visual narratives and to have active perspectives to understand the unseen.
References
Kenneth Weisbrode, On Ambivalence, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2012
Mari Carmen Ramirez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, London & Huston, 2007
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for The Next Millennium, Vintage Books, New York, 1988
Graphic Design, Landscape Architecture, and Architecture represent an understanding of water systems beyond existing conventions.
Eugene Park Associate Professor University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Jessica Rossi-Mastracci & Matt Tierney University of Minnesota
Visualizing water systems, across a range of varied spatial and temporal scales, is a complex problem that can be difficult to fully represent on a graphical outcome. Traditionally, these systems have been represented in static, print formats that only convey water’s dynamic flow at a single point in time. This often results in simplistic graphics that show water in a limited perspective, omitting a wide range of scenarios, such as flood and drought that are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change.
Recognizing the need to innovate in this area, this research aims to develop hybrid representations to convey water and its fluidity across multiple spatial and temporal scales. To achieve this, faculty members in Graphic Design, Landscape Architecture, and Architecture formed a multidisciplinary research team where each discipline offered new insights and methods of representing and understanding water systems beyond existing conventions.
The research team first conducted a broad survey of visualization techniques related to water including heatmaps, chord diagrams, choropleth maps, technical sections, Sankey diagrams, 3-dimensional digital modeling, sequential sections, geospatial data and mappings, decision trees, and system diagrams. Then, these were analyzed to understand types of data that could be displayed, potential spatial scales of use, and relevant time scales, and organized into a graphic matrix that served as a guide to hybridize representation strategies to visualize water as a dynamic and fluid system.
Outcomes from this work resulted in a dashboard prototype that begins to spatially and conceptually represent flows, inputs, uses, and sinks at multiple water scenarios. The intention is to ultimately develop a tool where architects, landscape architects, designers, and engineers can use to plan for future water scenarios at specific locations. Ultimately, this project demonstrates that multiple design disciplines can develop innovative representation and data visualization methodologies through cross disciplinary collaboration.
Recognizing that certain words, phrases, and cultural meanings are untranslatable.
Shuang Wu Assistant Professor Virginia Tech
My research explores how graphic design can bridge cultures through translation. Drawing from a multicultural educational background, the study examines the complexities of translation across diverse cultures. Recognizing that certain words, phrases, and cultural meanings are untranslatable, it asks: how can graphic design convey these non-translatable elements through visual expression? The study addresses this question through personal works and pedagogical experiments.
The research begins with A Poetic Space, an immersive project that visualizes ancient Chinese poems using lines, motion, sound, and typography. This approach transcends literal translation, allowing non-Chinese-speaking audiences to appreciate the essence of thousand-year-old Chinese poetry.
Expanding on this, we also explore how visual aids enhance the translation of Chinese culture. A poster series featuring Taoism-inspired phrases reconstructs Chinese characters using an innovative grid, revealing Taoist concepts within the phrases.
In the classroom, I prompt students to investigate how visual elements can translate languages beyond Chinese. Students visually explored non-translatable words from different languages through multimedia. For example, one student created a book based on the Russian word “Toska,” meaning deep sorrow, using a broken typewriter to convey a personal and emotional narrative. This project demonstrates how design can express universal human feelings across languages.
This research shows that graphic design can convey cultural and linguistic nuances that have no direct translation, offering a model for similar projects in various languages and cultures. By using innovative visual methods, it provides ideas for designers and educators to enhance cross-cultural communication and understanding. The practice also aims to shift the focus away from Western design philosophy, encouraging international audiences to appreciate and embrace underrepresented cultures and designers to experiment with their design elements.
Empowering faculty with data-driven information to establish a transparent salary structure.
MiHyun Kim Associate Professor Texas State University
Have you ever wondered whether you’re being fairly compensated for your work? Have you experienced frustration due to an unfair salary structure? Do you question if factors like your gender, race, or connections to higher-level administrators play a role in this inequitable environment?
This study explores the persistent challenges of salary compression and inversion across various fields in higher education, with a specific focus on the discipline of art and design. Institutions often face the need to attract new talent with specialized skills, resulting in higher starting salaries for new hires and creating disparities among existing faculty members.
As a Faculty Senate Fellow at Texas State University during the 2022-2023 academic year, I developed a series of compelling data visualizations based on regional and national salary compression data sourced from institutional data and the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA). The study found that as of the 2022—2023 academic year, 51.8% of the faculty at Texas State University earned below the national median salary and 46.8% of the faculty at the School of Art and Design earned below the national median salary.
By examining salaries across different colleges, departments, and ranks, I aimed to identify trends and patterns in compensation, comparing state universities in Texas and peer institutions across the nation. Also, I pinpointed faculty members earning below the national median salaries, highlighting disparities, especially among senior lecturers, minorities, and full professors. As a result of the study, the university increased the salaries of faculty members whose incomes were below 90% of the national median salary.
To investigate the topic deeper from various perspectives, a salary sub-committee among the faculty senates was formed, and a survey was conducted to gather information and insights from faculty members regarding salary compression issues at the university. The responses were categorized into five groups, and these categories were visualized to encourage empathy and understanding among faculty members and upper-level administrators.
The ultimate goal of this project is to advocate for fair and equitable compensation practices, empowering faculty with data-driven information to establish a transparent salary structure. This presentation explores the visualized data, gains a deeper understanding of salary equity challenges, and contributes to the conversation on reshaping compensation practices within higher education.
Exploring the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena.
Chris Lee Associate Professor Pratt Institute
This project undertakes the design of a “chop suey” typeface called 1882–1982–2019. The general aim of the project vis-a-vis design research is to explore the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena, while also figuring design as a vehicle of antagonism, and as a space of contestation. The project enacts graphic design research not by dint of the traditional forms of scholarly research and creative activity that go into it (i.e. as transparents texts written for academic publications, or work created for display in public exhibitions, where both constitute forms of production valorized within through institutional peer-review processes, for instance), but rather by the fact that it produces a form (a typeface) that is not typically legible as an artifact that instantiates scientific knowledge production. Furthermore, such an artifact acts as a case that exceeds the conventional pathways initiating and animating design (i.e. the client brief), and thus does not satisfy even commercial valorization—that is to say, it has little to no prospective value as a commercial product. In sum, the project is an argument for design outcomes as a form of discursive (quasi-)autonomous design-as-research, recognized as such only by the grace of its inclusion in design discourse (hence, the above qualification, “quasi”).
Screenshot
In the case of this project—a typeface in three ‘weights’ (called 1882, 1982, 2019, respectively)—the outcomes serve as vehicles for a historical narration of the status of the “Asian,” or what Iyko Day calls “alien capital” in North American settler-colonial political economy. The primary outcome of this project is the process of producing the typeface itself. This entails a raw archival excavation directly sourced from historical material (1882, the year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress); the “correction” or “refinement” of these according to the kinds of normative idealizations articulated by figures like Gerard Unger, Karen Cheng, etc. (1982, a seminal year in the history of the formation of “Asian-American” as a racial subject position); as well as the generation of AI generated “hanji” (Chinese ideograms) in resonance with Day’s characterization, as well as popular depictions of the “Yellow Peril” that persist from the anti-Chinese attitudes that have persisted from the 1880s until today (2019). In sum, the work aims to prompt a reflection on the extent to which design outcomes are inflected by somatic knowledge and subjective performance (from calligraphic skill to “craftsmanship” in writing AI prompts), in spite of the fact that very little to none of this is residual and legible in the final artifact. Sofie Fetokaki’s work on classical musical performance pedagogy provides a clarifying lens for examining the role of performance and charisma in valorizing and institutionalizing what Diana Taylor calls “performatic” knowledge as objective, inevitable, and stable basis of evaluation in graphic design outcomes in formal educational contexts like accredited design schools.
The typeface is framed by a typographic specimen book that serves the conventional functions of such publications, namely, unpacking the origins/inspirations of the typographical forms. The story that emerges demonstrates the ways that “alien capital” has served as one foil (that is, one Other, amongst whiteness’ many other Others) against which white Euro-American normativity has been defined. Tracing the history of anti-Chinese, and more broadly, anti-Asian animus for over a century and a half, yields an account of attitudes that are resonant with the ones that subtend and stabilize otherwise contestable ideas about validity, correctness, and progressive excellence in typography and graphic design today. As scholars in whiteness studies like Ruth Frankenberg have articulated, “whiteness” lacks its own internally coherent content, and is figured primarily by all the things that it is not. In short, the project aims to serve as a case for examining the way that typographic design has participated in the construction of whiteness. The project casts typography itself as a racialized field, while also functioning as an actuator of what the race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “racialization.” In this narrative, Euro-American craft is given its content, marked tautologically by aesthetic ideals articulated primarily in contrast to the outcomes of “cheap Chinese labor.”
The Design + Translation panel aims to recenter perspectives and prioritize inclusivity by representing a wider range of voices that build design community.
Typography as Racialization: Euro-American Craft and Asian Labor Chris Lee Associate Professor Pratt Institute
Visualizing Faculty Salary Inequity: A Study of Salary Compression and Inversion and Its Impact in Higher Education MiHyun Kim Associate Professor Texas State University
Design + Visual Translation and Cultural Bridging Shuang Wu Assistant Professor Virginia Tech
Drawing Water: A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Representing Water Performance Eugene Park Associate Professor University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Jessica Rossi-Mastracci & Matt Tierney University of Minnesota
A Sequence of Multiplicity Moon Jung Jang Associate Professor University of Georgia
Kaithi Script’s Revival: An Intersection of Design and Cultural Inheritance Anmol Shrivastava Assistant Professor Illinois State University
Design + Subversion
Moderators: Ash Yuxuan Wei & Dan Wong
The Design + Subversion panel is a space to critique the status quo through forms of intervention, disruption, subversion, and truth-telling.
Drawn Together: Exploring the Intersection of Image-Making and Community-Building Grace Preston Lecturer Texas State University
Advancing Design Practices: Assessing the Impact of New Technologies and Sustainable Innovation Caitlin Lu & Maidah Salman Graduate student Boston University
Designing for Mental Health and Wellbeing: Integrating Mental Health Support into UI/UX Design Course Ting Zhou Assistant Professor University of Connecticut
Exploring Identity through Curatorial Practices: Gráfica Latina José Menéndez Assistant Professor Northeastern University
Tatiana Gómez Assistant Professor Massachusetts College of Art and Design
In Search of Feminism and Identity in Asia Wanjing Li Designer and Artist Boston University
Design + Performance
Moderators: Halim Lee & Cat Normoyle
The Design + Performances panel engages the senses through action and experience. It encompasses activities that unite communities and ideas.
Design + Computation + Performance + __________ James Grady Assistant Professor Boston University
Sensory and Ambient Interfaces Jonathan Hanahan Associate Professor Washington University in St. Louis
Accessibility and Creative Authorship in Design Theory Through Multimodal Learning and Metacognitive Reflection Molly Haig Adjunct Professor University of Europe for the Applied Sciences Berlin, Germany
Dr. Till Julian Huss Professor University of Europe for the Applied Sciences
Pedagogical Workshops and Collaboration Chen Luo Lecturer Boston University
Design + Methodology
Moderators: Claire Bula & Camila Afanador Llach
The Design + Methodology panel presents insights on new design tools, systems, and processes found through innovative research frameworks.
User-Centered Design + Generative AI Research Tools: Usability Testing and Implication Yi-Fan Chen Assistant Professor Farmingdale State College
Design + History Methodology Slam Brockett Horne Lecturer Boston University
A New Framework and Database for Exploring Works of Experience Design Nicholas Rock Associate Professor Boston University, School of Visual Arts
Emotional Engagement in Design: Traditional vs. Art-Based Approaches Violet Luczak Associate Professor McHenry County College, Crystal Lake, IL
Design + Cultural Heritage: The Guano Rug, A Cultural Heritage Under Extinction Maria Isabel Paz Suarez Assistant Professor Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Design + Co-Creation: Engaging Audiences through Cross-Disciplinary Co-Curation Bei Hu Assistant Professor Washington University in St. Louis
Faith and Fiction — The Impact of AI on Spirituality and Design Nika Simovich Fisher Assistant Professor Parsons / The New School for Design
Event date: Friday, October 25, 2024 Format: In-person Only Location: Boston University, College of Fine Art, School of Visual Arts
Design + ____________
What is design research?
In honor of Design Incubation’s 10th anniversary, we are examining the ways design and design research has changed over the past decade. How do we define design research, as designers, scholars and educators?
We invite designers — practitioners, creators, educators and students — for a live, in-person event, to examine their own creative research and practice and the adjacencies that touch their work. Design + Social Justice, Design + Curation, Design + Performance …what are some of the subjects that drive your own design curiosity? How does the intersection of such content areas inform your creative practice, your pedagogy, your research?
The 2024 Colloquium will be organized to showcase your design research in lively, interactive sessions that may take the form of presentations, performances, workshops and / or demonstrations.
Interact with us!
Submit abstracts describing your Design + __________.
We invite designers—practitioners and educators—to submit abstracts of design research. This is an in-person event.
Accepted presentations are videotaped in-advance by the researchers for publication online on the Design Incubation channel which is due by August 1, 2024.
A day-long colloquium will be held at Boston University, College of Fine Art, School of Visual Arts on Friday, October 25, 2024. This event is open to all interested in Communication Design research.
Hosts: Kristen Coogan and Mary Yang.
Moderators: Liz DeLuna, Camila Afanador Llach, Dan Wong.
