Tag: #DIawards2018

Lowering Barriers to Access at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Teaching Award Winner

Helen Armstrong
Associate Professor
North Carolina State University

Armstrong’s advanced graphic design studio course, GD400, took on an acute problem for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS). One of the museum’s key exhibitions—the Acrocanthosaurus Exhibition—repelled visitors on the autism spectrum. The space was so overwhelming for these visitors that they often could not enter the room. Instead, they sat on benches outside to avoid the sensory overload of the exhibition. The wide reach of this problem was apparent. In addition to the number and diversity of visitors with Autism adversely affected by the Acrocanthosaurus Exhibition space at the NCMNS, the common occurrence of similar spaces—with similar issues— in Natural Science museums across the world compounded the impact of this problem.

In keeping with the technological focus of the course, Armstrong outlined this student design brief: “Working with the NCMNS Office of Accessibility & Inclusion, develop an assistive tool to transform the central exhibition into an Autism-friendly experience. This assistive tool (phone, tablet-based, physical artifact or embedded technology) should customize the exhibition to serve young adults on the Autism spectrum.” The intent here was not to create what could easily be developed by off-the-shelf technology, but rather to design prototypes that challenged what it meant to enter a space of tangible artifacts as a visitor with impairments.

Over the course of the semester, the students consulted with the Autism Society of North Carolina, as well as the NCMNS, to build representative personas of museum visitors on the spectrum. They benchmarked assistive technology, established research guidelines appropriate to their specific personas, generated User Journey Maps to isolate visitor pain points, and sketched out User Experience Storyboards. From this research the students harnessed technologically-driven approaches—bone conduction tech, chatbots, conversational interface, sensor embedded-networked objects, and gesture-driven participatory interfaces—to build hi-fi prototypes and construct scenario videos that redefined the visitor experience. Via a series of studio visits, the museum team provided feedback. At semester end the students presented to stakeholders, making their work freely available for use by NCMNS museum staff and beyond.

NC State Impact
  • Built empathy in students while equipping them with user-centered research methods that enabled them
    to effectively harness technology to lower barriers for individuals with disabilities
  • Created a dialogue between NC State students and local stakeholders engaged in supporting accessibility
  • Established a model for collaborative studio projects that generate new knowledge and then disseminate that knowledge via in-person presentations and online content
  • Introduced students to a variety of technologies useful for prototyping and testing assistive devices
Wider Impact
  • Identified common pain points to be addressed by the NCMNS in future exhibitions.
  • NCMNS has already implemented one of the prototypes: the sensory map and is exploring the implementation of bone conduction technology to create alternative soundscapes.
  • Established best practices for designing inclusive museum spaces across the country.

For complete documentation of the process and outcomes of this project, visit https://goo.gl/MdWwM9

Helen Armstrong views design from across the spectrum of a college professor, a researcher, and an author. She is an associate professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University. From 2013–2015 she served as co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee, striving to build communities of students and educators. She is currently on the AIGA National Board of Directors and the Design and Culture editorial board. Armstrong authored Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field and co-authored Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content. Her recent book, Digital Design Theory explores the effect of computation upon design methodologies from the 1960s to present. Currently, Armstrong is combining her knowledge of participatory practice with computational thinking to explore the potential of intelligent interfaces to address the needs of individuals with disabilities.

http://www.helenarmstrong.site/

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2018.

Works in Process

Scholarship: Creative Work Award Winner

George Garrastegui
Assistant Professor
New York City College of Technology, CUNY

The Works In Process (WIP) podcast is a series of conversations with creative individuals that explore the evolution and techniques behind their latest projects— highlighting, exploring and possibly demystifying the creative process. This podcast is a way to discover, and really uncover the process that goes behind the work that creatives do. Speaking to designers, artists, writers, and other creatives professional, we discuss their process through candid conversations. It is the way they work and their projects that are the inspiration.

Launched in August 2017, the podcast uses the interviews as an avenue to investigate the rigor, repetition, and muscle memory of various creative fields, not the outcome. The initial purpose of the podcast is to uncover a strategic approach. Using the conversations to highlight the breakthrough moments of each guest. This unmasks the perfection myth that is supported by curatorial online platforms. The illusion of perfection is a disadvantage to the emerging creative professional and it devalues the importance of the concept and focuses only on the execution.

The Works in Process podcast attempts to broaden the scope of what is process and how its embraced. Thus transforming the attention to the evolution of the concept, rather than its stylistic approach. Moving forward, the goal is to break down each episode, and extract similarities. Similarities of technique, mind-state and ways of addressing their projects. This synthesis can become a resource beyond the audio. WIP looks to highlight the creative individuals’ contribution in various forms: from case studies to in-depth articles, to panels discussions and workshops.

As a culture, we choose to like, heart, share, or comment but rarely do we sit back and appreciate the real work—the process. The Works in Process podcast wants to create a shift in the conversation, and change the focus—slowly.

Creativity is never complete, it’s always a process.

Works In Process (WIP) – http://wip.show/

George Garrastegui is a passionate educator, designer, and a creative catalyst. A native New Yorker, who looks to the city’s rich history and culture for inspiration for his work. With an extensive background in publishing and marketing, he has crafted creative solutions for Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Cadillac, and Ford. When not teaching creative strategy at CUNY’s NYC College of Technology, George focuses on projects that initiate and discuss the creative process and has turned that passion into a podcast: Works in Process. He believes that you are not a designer because it’s your job, you are a designer because it’s who you are.

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2018.

What Does Democratic Design Look Like? Establishing the Center for Design in the Public Interest at the University of California, Davis

Scholarship: Creative Work Award Runner Up

Susan Verba
Professor
University of California, Davis

At the UC Davis Center for Design in the Public Interest (DiPi), a multidisciplinary team of design practitioners, writers, researchers, educators, and students work closely with community partners to make ordinary experiences better.

Established with a mission to directly impact social problems and seed funding awarded by the UC Davis Office of Research (via the Interdisciplinary Frontiers in the Humanities and Arts competition), DiPi focuses on projects related to public health, safety, and civic engagement. Explorations derive from the core question: What does democratic design look like? Activities result in the redesign of everyday things and the creation of new tools and methods. Outcomes—including design prototypes and best practices—are disseminated as open-source models for others to build on.

Faculty affiliated with DiPi contribute expertise in writing and rhetoric; communication; computer science; medicine; anthropology; and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. Student assistants and researchers have diverse backgrounds—in design, art, biotechnology, cognitive science, community development, computer science, digital media, pharmaceutical chemistry, sustainable agriculture and food systems, technical communication, and more. The team’s transdisciplinary collaborations offer exciting opportunities to explore new ways of working and lead to innovative ways of approaching design education.

Susan Verba, Professor of Design, is the Center’s director. Since DiPi’s launch in 2014 she has initiated grant proposals and spearheaded outreach efforts that have supported more than a dozen public interest projects. In addition to leading the projects, Verba’s activities include training and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, establishing collaborative partnerships, and connecting research to teaching and curriculum development.

A major focus of Verba’s work at DiPi involves The Pain Project, a cooperative venture with UC Davis Health and Hill Country Health and Wellness Center (a Federally Qualified Health Center serving low-income patients in rural Shasta County, California). The goal is to engage patient and provider communities in the design of tools to help evaluate and better manage chronic pain. Although millions of Americans suffer from chronic pain, clinicians lack adequate informational resources for engaging patients in their own care, and patients lack effective ways to track and communicate their pain or to fully understand treatment options and risks such as opioid addiction. The Pain Project is supported in part by a Sappi Ideas that Matter grant.

A related project, Outpatient Radio, aims to combat the stigma and isolation of chronic pain, improve understanding of the many issues surrounding chronic pain, and spark new conversations in California’s North State community through grassroots radio programming. Although experts often dominate medical discussions, Outpatient Radio seeks to redraw the boundaries of expertise to include individuals whose personal experience and regional knowledge are often overlooked. By collecting and sharing stories in-person, on-air, and online, we are exploring how narratives connect, inform, and support communities through listening and conversation. The hour-long show aired on community stations KKRN 88.5 FM in Round Mountain (Shasta County) and KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis, California, and is online at https://youtu.be/MBrvnTVYeeM. Outpatient Radio was honored with a San Francisco Design Week award for “the unexpected and experimental products that can’t be put into a category” and recognized with an Honorable Mention in the 2018 SEED + Pacific Rim Awards for excellence in public interest design.

Online at http://dipi.design.

Susan Verba is a professor in the Department of Design and director of the Center for Design in the Public Interest at the University of California, Davis. Her work focuses on information design that directly benefits the public, exploring issues of health, safety, community participation, and access. She is also principal and cofounder of Studio/lab, where she leads research-based projects and advocates for the value of design in corporate, nonprofit, and government communications. She earned an MFA in graphic design from Yale University and a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, and studied at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy as a Fulbright scholar.

 

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2018.

LEAP Dialogues: The Educators Guide

Service Award Winner

Mariana Amatullo
Associate Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Andrew Shea
Assistant Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Jennifer May
Director, Designmatters
ArtCenter College of Design

LEAP Dialogues: The Educator’s Guide (Mariana Amatullo, Jennifer May and Andrew Shea, eds. Designmatters, 2017), is an open-source publication about design for social innovation and the career pathways that are emerging in this field. A re-conceived digest of the original award-winning print publication designed by TwoPoints.Net, LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation (Mariana Amatullo, Bryan Boyer, Liz Danzico, and Andrew Shea, eds., DAP and Designmatters, 2016), the Educators Guide is tailored to educators and comprised of six selected dialogues and five case studies from the original book, a new annotated bibliography and a new series of open-ended questions that expand each dialogue with critical reading prompts to jumpstart conversations in the classroom. Taking a cue from the early adoption of the original book in syllabi across design courses in peer institutions, the impetus to develop the guide was to contribute to the emerging field of design education for social innovation by creating a readily accessible set of materials meant to communicate and inspire new and expanded directions of study for students and educators alike. With this goal in mind, the subheadings that organize the material of the guide: designing services, designing for community engagement, designing for entrepreneurship, designing across organizational boundaries, and designing for impact measurement, serve as guideposts to the themes that are illustrated in the dialogues and case studies selected. The themes, dialogues, case studies and annotated bibliography can be combined in several ways to create syllabi for courses with different learning outcomes for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Since its publication in September 2017, the Educators Guide has been received with critical interest as attested by its inclusion in syllabi across the country (in colleges such as ArtCenter and Parsons where members of the editorial team teach, but also nationally and internationally). In a field of design that remains sparsely populated in terms of comparable readings that communicate teachable lessons, the data compiled to date about downloads of the guide demonstrate significant interest distributed across the world: as of May 29, 2018, the Educator’s Guide has been downloaded 567 times by 460 unique users across 25 countries, including the United States, the UK, Australia, China, Germany, Finland, India, Uruguay and South Africa. Approximately 40% of the downloads have been from users at educational institutions, including Arizona State University, Illinois Institute of Design, MICA, Indian School of Design & Innovation, Aalto, Stanford, EnsAD, University of Toronto, MassArt, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Tshwane University of Technology and University of South Australia.

LEAP Dialogues: The Educator’s Guide is available for download here: https://designmattersatartcenter.org/leap-educatorsguide.

In 2018 the editors partnered with AIGA National and the AIGA Design Educators Community to make available a series of “how to” instructional videos, produced by AIGA, that include a range of scenarios on how the Educators Guide might be used in the classroom: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiga/

An April 2018 article by editor Andrew Shea about the pedagogical value of the case studies in the Guide published by AIGA DEC is available here: https://educators.aiga.org/design-over-time-the-value-of-case-studies/

Mariana Amatullo is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, The New School. She joined Parsons in August 2017 after 16 years at the helm of Designmatters at ArtCenter, the social innovation department she co-founded in 2001. Amatullo’s expertise is in developing design curricula and conceiving international and national educational projects, research initiatives and publications at the intersection of design and social innovation. Her scholarship and teaching engages broadly with questions about the agency of design in organizational culture and social innovation contexts. Amatullo holds a Ph.D. in Management from Case Western Reserve University; an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of Southern California, and a Licence en Lettres Degree from the Sorbonne University, Paris, where she also studied Art History at L’Ecole du Louvre. A native of Argentina Amatullo grew up around the world.

Andrew Shea is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, and principal of the design studio MANY. He wrote Designing for Social Change: Strategies for Community-Based Design and was on the editorial team of LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation. His design and writing have been featured by Design Observer, Fast Company, Slate, 99 Percent Invisible, Core77, and Print, among others.

Jennifer May is the Director for Designmatters, where she oversees a dynamic portfolio of external partnerships, curricular and extracurricular projects and an active slate of special initiatives and publications. Jennifer also serves as a faculty adviser on Designmatters Transdisciplinary Studios, working directly with department chairs, faculty and partners to create educational experiences for students. Jennifer first joined Designmatters as the manager of the LEAP Symposium, a 2013 gathering of 150 thought leaders to discuss career pathways in the emergent field of design for social innovation. She continued with the LEAP initiative as the managing editor of LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation, an award-winning publication on new practices in social innovation, and editor of the open-source LEAP Dialogues: The Educator’s Guide.  Jennifer earned her M.B.A. from USC Marshall School of Business, where she was a Society and Business Lab Graduate Fellow, a Forte Fellow, and Vice President of Programs for Net Impact.

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2018.

The Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2018

2018 Design Incubation Educators Awards competition in 4 categories— Creative Work, Published Research, Teaching, Service.

Call for Entries: Deadline, May 31, 2018

CATEGORY: SCHOLARSHIP CREATIVE WORK

Works in Process

Scholarship: Creative Work Award Winner

George Garrastegui
Assistant Professor
Communication Design
New York City College of Technology, CUNY

What Does Democratic Design Look Like? Establishing the Center for Design in the Public Interest at the University of California, Davis

Scholarship: Creative Work Award Runner Up

Susan Verba
Professor
University of California, Davis

CATEGORY: SCHOLARSHIP PUBLISHED RESEARCH

Unawarded

CATEGORY: TEACHING

Lowering Barriers to Access at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Teaching Award Winner

Helen Armstrong
Associate Professor
North Carolina State University

CATEGORY: SERVICE

LEAP Dialogues: The Educators Guide

Service Award Winner

Mariana Amatullo
Associate Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Andrew Shea
Assistant Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School

Jennifer May
Director, Designmatters
ArtCenter College of Design

Recognition of excellence through peer review in scholarship, teaching, and service is fundamental to the professional development of communication design academics. To support this need, Design Incubation established the Communication Design Educators Awards in 2016.

An independent jury of esteemed design educators is invited by the Awards Jury Chair. This year’s jury chair, Maria Rogal, invited these internationally recognized jurors: Jorge Meza Aguilar, Ruki Ravikumar, Wendy Siuyi Wong, and Steven McCarthy. Rogal writes, “this jury reflects the diverse perspectives and experiences that exist in communication design today.”

The awards acknowledge faculty accomplishments in the areas of published research, creative work, teaching, and service. The award processes and procedures are rigorous, transparent, and objective. They reflect Design Incubation’s mission to foster professional development and discourse within the design community.

This year, award entries are open February 1, 2018 – May 31, 2018 via the online application. An overview of the awards program is on our website.

We are excited to announce Bloomsbury Publishing is sponsoring this year’s awards.

The 2018 Jury

Steven McCarthy is Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He conceived of the Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Awards and chaired the jury in both 2016 and 2017. McCarthy’s teaching, scholarship, and contributions to the discipline include lectures, exhibitions, publications, and grant-funded research on a global scale. His creative work was featured in 125+ exhibitions and he is the author of The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating (BIS, Amsterdam). From 2014–2017, McCarthy served on the board of directors of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Jorge Meza Aguilar is Professor of Strategic Design and Provost for Outreach and Collaboration at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where he founded the Bachelor in Interactive Design and the Master in Strategic Design and Innovation programs. He is widely recognized as an expert in strategic design and is the founding Director of Estrategas Digitales which focuses on research, strategic design, branding, trend forecasting, branding, Internet, and digital media. Meza is also a consultant and entreprenuer and holds degrees in art, graphic design, and systems engineering. Previously, he studied in and worked as a designer in Poland at Advertising Agency Schulz.

Ruki Ravikumar is Director of Education at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, a position she has held since April 2017. She joined the museum following thirteen years of service at the University of Central Oklahoma, where she held successive positions as professor of graphic design; director of graduate programs; chair of the Department of Design; assistant dean; and most recently, as associate dean of the College of Fine Arts & Design. In addition to her practice as an educator and published researcher in the areas of intersections between graphic design and culture and their impact on design education, she is also an award winning graphic designer. Further, she has served in leadership roles at the local and national levels of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Maria Rogal, Jury Chair, is Professor of Graphic Design, School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida and was Interim Director from 2015–2017. She is the founder of Design for Development (D4D), an award-winning initiative to co-design with indigenous entrepreneurs and subject matter experts to generate sustainable and responsible local outcomes. She has lectured and published about D4D, recently co-authoring “CoDesigning for Development,” which appears in The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design. Her research has been funded by AIGA, Sappi, and Fulbright programs, among others, and her creative design work has been featured in national and international juried exhibitions.

Wendy Siuyi Wong is Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Design at the York University, Toronto, Canada. She has established an international reputation as an expert in Chinese graphic design history and Chinese comic art history. She is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2002). She is a contributor to the Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design (2012), The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (2015), and acts as a regional editor of the Greater China region for the Encyclopedia of East Asian Design to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Also, Dr. Wong has served as an editorial board member of Journal of Design History.