Tag: #DI2025Jun

Type as Cultural Bridge: An Interactive Fusion of Iranian and American Design

How typography and interactive media can bridge Iranian cultural heritage and contemporary American aesthetics.

Narges Sedaghat
Graduate student
East Carolina University

In an increasingly globalized and diasporic world, the negotiation of cultural identity has become a central concern in design. Scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall have theorized identity not as a fixed essence but as a fluid process shaped by historical and aesthetic negotiations. Visual culture, particularly typography, can play a critical role in reinterpreting heritage within new cultural frameworks. This project explores how typography and interactive media can bridge Iranian cultural heritage and contemporary American aesthetics, contributing to broader conversations around hybridity, migration, and representation.

The project unfolds in two interrelated phases. The first phase focuses on type design as a medium for cultural storytelling. A full English A-to-Z typeface was developed, inspired by ancient Persian motifs, particularly the Achaemenid lotus. This typeface merges traditional Iranian elements with modern typographic forms, reframing Iranian identity not as fixed or nostalgic, but hybrid and dynamic, aligned with Bhabha’s concept of the third space that conceptualizes identity as a process shaped by hybridity and negotiation.

The second phase of the project centers on participation and interactivity. It takes the form of a web-based experience built with p5.js, where users type their names using the custom font. This action triggers a system that algorithmically generates Iranian-inspired motifs. Users can download or print their designs as postcards, transforming the experience from passive viewing to active participation.

By creating a custom typeface, this project aims to bridge Iranian heritage and contemporary design. This typeface serves as a tool for cultural exchange, and by inviting user interaction, the project becomes a participatory platform. It illustrates how design can embody migration, hybridity, and transformation. Ultimately, this research positions visual design not only as a means of cultural preservation but as a forward-looking method for negotiating hybrid identities and fostering inclusive, multisensory storytelling.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs 

By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor 
SUNY Farmingdale

Most design faculty arrive in higher-ed with a portfolio, not a pedagogy. Drawing on fifteen years of teaching—from high-school art rooms to senior BFA capstones—I translate three active-learning structures into designer-friendly routines that make a classroom feel less like a lecture hall and more like a working studio.

• Agency-Style Jigsaw – Students take on specialist roles (art director, strategist, production artist). Each digs into a targeted reading or demo, then teaches the rest of the team before they assemble a full brand campaign.

• Flipped Chapter Exchange – Half the class distills one chunk of the text, half tackles another, and both sides trade five-slide Pecha Kucha briefs so studio time is free for critique and iteration.

• Iterative Think-Pair-Share – Sixteen individual concepts collapse to eight, then four, then one polished solution as teams merge and refine, mirroring the review ladders of an agency.

I’ve run these circuits in typography, branding, and service-design courses; the pattern is consistent. Roles spark accountability, students vet ideas in smaller circles before they ever reach me, and critiques get sharper because everyone arrives as a mini-expert. The shift echoes John Dewey’s claim that learning “is rooted in experience.” By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.

The paper positions this toolkit alongside the practice hubs at Stanford’s d.school and Cooper Hewitt, but its tone stays grounded in studio life. I close with a one-page Method Map that pairs common design-course goals with these structures, so any instructor can drop in a project, set the roles, and watch the room light up—no educational jargon required.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Creative Computation in the Age of AI: Reimagining the Boundary of Human Creativity

How negotiated systems encourage relational authorship and systemic sensitivity.

Bei Hu 
Assistant Professor 
Washington University in St. Louis

As artificial intelligence increasingly participates in creative processes, the distinction between human authorship and machine generation grows more complex. Traditionally, creative computation—rooted in open-source culture, conditional design methodologies, and human-authored algorithms—has emphasized transparency, rule-based emergence, and collaborative process. In contrast, contemporary AI models often function as opaque systems, producing outputs that blur the boundary between human intention and machine autonomy.

This paper examines how creative computation can serve as a critical lens for navigating this shifting boundary. It argues for a framework that sustains human agency even within projects that incorporate AI technologies. Drawing on case studies from a Conditional Design course—where students created emergent works through simple rules and collective negotiation—alongside examples from the author’s own open-source creative coding practice, the research explores how negotiated systems encourage relational authorship and systemic sensitivity.

The paper proposes an approach that embraces AI’s generative capacities while reaffirming the importance of process, openness, and participation. Through this lens, creativity is reimagined not as a product of isolated genius, nor as a fully automated output, but as an emergent, co-constructed process shaped through conditions, collaboration, and responsiveness.

By reframing creative computation as a site of critical engagement, the paper advocates for practices that foreground relationality, transparency, and negotiated complexity—offering pathways for sustaining deeply human forms of creativity within an increasingly algorithmic cultural landscape.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus

It can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon.

Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor 
Louisiana State University

N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus, unpublished for over fifty years, is a work that is at once deeply radical and almost impossibly understated. Subtitled “a novel with voices” and described as an “exploded haiku,” it offers the viewer/reader a sequence of textual elements that gradually coalesce into language—only to fracture, detonate, and dissolve back into nothingness. A vital contribution to Black poetics, The Mundus operates on many levels: it can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon. It is the ultimate exploration of what Pritchard described as the “transreal.”

The Mundus was composed through an analog process—Pritchard assembled multiple sheets of typewritten and photocopied text, collaging them together with tape. The result is a visually arresting object, where the mechanical precision of the typewriter is interrupted by the intervention of the artist’s hand. Yet its ultimate form emerges only through an act of transcoding: reinterpreting this typewritten collage as digital typography. Drawing on my experience designing and typesetting The Mundus, I will examine how this act of typographic transcoding is not just a technical process but a crucial extension of the work’s meaning—one that activates the text’s latent potential and intensifies its formal and semantic resonance.

This act of transcoding allows The Mundus to exist across multiple frameworks simultaneously. In contemporary discourse, visual communication is often framed as a dichotomy between two poles: maximalist expression versus minimalist restraint. Pritchard’s work resists this binary, offering instead a vision that holds both extremes in tension. The Mundus creates a space where presence and absence, language and silence, structure and fragmentation coexist—where nothing and everything unfold at once.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design

Typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vision disabilities rank among the top 10 most common disabilities in the United States. The World Health Organization reports that approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide experience some form of vision impairment. With an aging population, the prevalence of vision-related disabilities is expected to rise. Additionally, learning disabilities affecting reading have a significant societal impact, with the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimating that approximately 20% of the population experiences dyslexia. Given the number of people affected by some form of vision-related disability, communication design, especially type design, must respond by developing and utilizing typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

The history of type design often focuses on aesthetics and form, with readability and legibility viewed more through the lens of reproduction and technology. Historically, type designers demonstrated no concerted effort to explore accessibility meaningfully, and even now that we understand accessibility, few center these concerns. Instead, typography functions similarly to an outdated structure needing retrofitting, using legibility testing for typefaces to determine if they meet accessibility standards. Just as retrofitting buildings for accessibility often fails to meet the needs of disabled individuals fully, using typefaces designed without considering accessibility fails to meet the needs of those with reading and vision disabilities.

Despite its ableist history, the field of type design shows promising signs of change. This presentation will explore three typefaces—Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Luciole—demonstrating the potential of centering disability needs in developing a typeface without sacrificing aesthetic concerns. The emergence of such typefaces is a beacon of hope, signaling a potential future where collaboration with the disabled community can integrate accessibility without sacrificing aesthetics, challenging misconceptions about accessible design, and paving the way to expand accessibility practices in design.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer

Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00AM – 12:30PM EDT
Online (ZOOM)

Recent research in Communication Design. Presentations of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.

Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
Online

Moderator

Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University

PRESENTATIONS

Resonant Pages: Artist Books, Natural Rhythms, and Digital Interactivity
Lingyi Kong
Adjunct Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design
Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus
Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor 
Louisiana State University

Creative Computation in the Age of AI: Reimagining the Boundary of Human Creativity
Bei Hu 
Assistant Professor 
Washington University in St. Louis

From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs 
Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor 
SUNY Farmingdale

Type as Cultural Bridge: An Interactive Fusion of Iranian and American Design
Narges Sedaghat
Graduate student
East Carolina University

Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer

Call for design research abstracts. Deadline: Fri, April 25, 2025.

Submission Deadline: Friday, April 25, 2025.

Event date: Friday, June 20, 2025
Format: Virtual/Online
Location: ZOOM

We invite designers—practitioners, creators, and educators—to submit abstracts of design research, creative investigations, and productions. This is a virtual online event format. Abstracts can be submitted online now for peer review.

Abstract submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed. Accepted abstracts will be published online. Please review the articles, Quick Start Guide for Writing Abstracts and Writing an Academic Research Abstract: For Communication Design Scholars before submitting.

There is a $10 conference fee required upon acceptance of the research abstract for non-members. The conference fee is waived for active annual members. Find out more about our annual memberships.

Researchers will videotape their 6-minute presentations which will published online in advance of the colloquium. The video recording is due by Thursday, June 5, 2025. We encourage all attendees to watch the videos in advance of the moderated discussion.

Presentation format is Pecha Kucha. For more details, see the colloquia details and description.

The colloquium is a moderated panel discussion of the research involving the researchers, thought leaders, and Design Incubation members.

Host: Cat Normoyle, Design Incubation Director of Peer Reviews.