Design Incubation will host the College Art Association (CAA) conference business meeting at the Hilton Chicago and on Zoom on Thursday, February 19th from 1:00–2:00 pm CST. There is no cost to attend this meeting.
In this session, we’ll present A Decade of Keywords in Communication Design Research, a project that analyzes over ten years of Design Incubation colloquium submissions to reflect on the themes, methods, and questions shaping the field. We will share results of the keyword analysis and how it leads to topic ideas for a Design Incubation book series. We will present the book series ideas and ask participants to contribute by providing feedback, sharing research interests, and discussing the project goals. This session is open to designers, researchers, educators, and practitioners interested in contributing to this project and book publication.
Design Incubation is a volunteer academic organization whose focus and mission is the facilitation of research and scholarship in communication design. Our aim is to foster discussion and collaboration among academics and industry professionals. We are a resource for those working and studying within the field.
Welcoming Dr. Leslie Atzmon as Director of Design History and Theory
Starting this January 2026, we welcome Dr. Leslie Atzmon as Director of Design History and Theory. Atzmon has been participating with our team for several months. She is currently on the jury of the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards, as well as other initiatives we have under development.
Leslie Atzmon is a designer and design historian who teaches at Eastern Michigan University. She co-edited the collections Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury 2017) and The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2019). Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy were awarded a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) ArtWorks grant from 2012-2014 to support experimental book design workshops and the creation and production of The Open Book Project book. Atzmon has a new collection, entitled Visual Ecologies of Placemaking, edited with Pamela Stewart (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2026).
Atzmon’s current work mainly investigates the intersections between design and science, with a focus on biodesign. In 2016, Atzmon was a Fulbright fellow at Central Saint Martins UAL, UK doing research on Darwin and design thinking. This led to the essay, “Intelligible Design: The Origin and Visualization of Species,” in the journal Communication Design (2016). In 2019/2020, she curated the exhibition Design and Science, which ran at Eastern Michigan’s University Gallery and The Esther Klein Gallery/Science Center in Philadelphia. She also edited a related collection entitled Design and Science (Bloomsbury 2023). Atzmon is currently working on a biodesign textbook, entitled Biodesign in Context (forthcoming Lived Spaces 2027), with Professor Diana Nicholas of Drexel University.
Builing upon Ethics, Theory, Methods, Profession, Technology, and Visual Trends layers, each operating on distinctive temporal cycles of change.
Jarrett Fuller Assistant Professor NC State University
This presentation examines applying Stewart Brand’s “Shearing Layers” as a theoretical framework for restructuring graphic design education amid contemporary challenges. With technological disruptions including artificial intelligence and broader sociopolitical instabilities, design educators must develop curricula preparing students for sustainable career trajectories in uncertain futures, not merely immediate employment.
The proposal adapts Brand’s architectural model—originally conceptualized by Frank Duffy to describe buildings as systems with components evolving at different rates—to establish a multi-layered pedagogical structure. Just as buildings comprise Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff, this curriculum framework is built upon Ethics, Theory, Methods, Profession, Technology, and Visual Trends layers, each operating on distinctive temporal cycles of change.
The framework fundamentally inverts traditional design education by positioning theoretical seminars as the stable core around which experimental, responsive studio courses orbit. This restructuring enables programs to maintain philosophical and methodological continuity while simultaneously accommodating emerging technologies and shifting professional demands—addressing what Drucker and McVarish (2013) identified as “the perpetual crisis of design education.”
While not yet implemented, this speculative framework provides design educators with a conceptual tool for navigating curricular decisions in contexts of persistent change. The proposal contributes to design pedagogy discourse by offering a theoretical model that reconciles paradoxical demands for both stability and adaptability in curriculum development.
These structures prepare designers to address complex societal challenges with both historical perspective and future-oriented skills, enabling educational programs to respond dynamically to rapid disciplinary evolution while maintaining foundational integrity.
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.
Graduating students may not understand the historical conditions that created their discipline.
Aggie Toppins Associate Professor Washington University in St. Louis
Design history is not a firmly established field in the United States. Scholars Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze show how in the UK, by contrast, educational reforms in the 1970s mandated that colleges offer subject-specific contextual studies, creating demand for design historians in studio programs and initiating the field’s growth in Europe. Although many early graphic design historians were American educators, most colleges here offer little design history content. Consequently, graduating students may not understand the historical conditions that created their discipline.
NASAD Data Summaries show that enrollment in communication design programs is eclipsing studio art, yet most design students are required to study art history. The author will argue that as design professions contend with new forms of automated labor, skills in historical thinking—described by Andrews and Burke through the “five Cs” of change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity—are as useful as analyzing aesthetic objects. Design conferences and journals have recently spotlighted design history pedagogy, questioning its entanglements with connoisseurship and canonicity, and with capitalism and imperialism. How are these trends making an impact on design history education today?
In this presentation, I share insights from data I collected on 345 US-based undergraduate programs in communication design. The data affirms that the survey course is often the only touchpoint graphic design students have with design history. I aggregated information about these courses from academic bulletins, course catalogs, and program websites, and verified facts with faculty. The data contributes evidence for current practices and patterns of change in course titles and descriptions (which indicate common approaches and themes), textbook choices, and faculty training. The data will serve as a useful resource for educators looking to situate their curriculum in current discourse, and for administrators in positions to advocate for faculty hires and curricular revision.
Welcoming Cat Normoyle, incoming Director of Peer Reviews, and Camila Afanador Llach as Chair, Director-at-Large
This 2024 academic year has been busy and productive at Design Incubation. We have had many activities this fall, including the Design Educators Awards, currently accepting nominations and entries until December 31, 2024. In October, we had our first fully in-person colloquium since the onset of the pandemic and our largest one to date at Boston University with four sessions and more than 20 research presentations. This year, we celebrate our 10th year with new members and ongoing development. We continue to host the series, Design Your Research Agenda (DYRA), the latest one in November. We will be publishing this episode online shortly.
Starting this September 2024, we welcomed Cat Normoyle, Associate Professor at East Carolina University as the incoming Director of Peer Review. In spring 2025 she will be taking over this role from Camila Afanador-Llach, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has held the position since fall 2021.
Normoyle is a designer, writer, and educator whose research and creative activities focus on community engagement, interactive and immersive experiences, and design pedagogy. She has a strong record of contributions to design scholarship and community engagement, evidenced by publications, presentations, and grants. Notably her writing appears in articles and book chapters published by AIGA Dialectic, Design Research Society, AIGA Design Educators Community, Routledge, and others. She is a recent grant recipient of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for her work on the project, Our Story: The LGBTQ Stories of Eastern North Carolina, which is preparing for a fall 2025 exhibition of work. She is currently working on a book project, “Community-based Practices in Action.” We are excited to welcome her as the new Director of Peer Reviews at DI.
Afanador-Llach has made tremendous contributions to the peer review process at DI over the last 3 years. She has further developed the peer review process, ensuring the double-blind process is objective, anonymous, rigorous, and fair and that it offers the benefits of the peer review to our members by offering feedback to all who have participated in our colloquium submission process.
Afanador-Llach will be staying on as a Chair and Director-at-Large as she segues into other DI initiatives. We would like to thank her for her three years of service as Director of Peer Review and we are excited to be working with her in new capacities.
Afanador-Llach was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and is currently researching and writing about the history of graphic design in her home country Colombia. She recently completed a three-year NEH-funded project cataloging and translating metadata, developing an online resource. With her experience with metadata and from her role as DI Director of Peer Review, we hope to further the development of keyword analysis and implementation at DI.
Identifying differences by exploring the effects of emotional impact on an audience.
Violet Luczak Associate Professor McHenry County College
Many practicing designers create traditional graphic design for corporate work and art for personal expression. Little has been done to measure the difference in user engagement between Graphic Design and Art Design. Does an audience’s emotional engagement differ when experiencing traditional graphic design compared to art design?
The key objective of this research is to identify differences between traditional graphic design work and art design work by exploring their effect of emotional impact on the audience.
The methodology used in this study was surveys given to undergraduate graphic design students. Six Graphic Design and six Art Design pieces were shown to students using a projector. After viewing both sets of pieces, students were asked to fill out a user engagement survey to analyze the emotional impact of both sets of work.
To control for technique and skill the examples of Graphic Design and Art Design used in this study were pulled from the same subset of artists. Traditionally, Graphic Design is message-driven and Art Design is open to interpretation. Art Design typically aims for a stronger emotional response while Graphic Design focuses on clarity and functionality.
The designers used in this study are well-noted in the design field. Designers include Stephen Sagmeister, who designed for clients including the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. Paula Scher, who designed for clients including Bloomberg, Microsoft, Adobe, Bausch + Lomb, and Coca-Cola (Bucher, S. 2004). April Greiman, whose notable projects include a 1979 poster for the California Institute of the Arts, the 1980 China Club Restaurant and Lounge advertisements, and a poster, designed in 1982, for the 1984 Olympics (Heller, S 1998). Clay Hickson designed for clients including American Express, the Chicago Reader, Bloomberg Businessweek, Lucky Peach, and Refinery 29 (Johalla Projects, 2016). Mike Perry has worked for clients including Apple, Nike, Urban Outfitters, Channel 4, PlayStation (Anderson, R. n.d.), and Paul Rand who designed corporate logos, including IBM, UPS, ABC, and Westinghouse (Heller, S.1999).
The surveys given in this study have been modified from the user engagement scale based on the research of O’Brien, H. Cairns, P. and Hall, M. The scale items include cognitive and emotional engagement measured using a 5- 5-point Likert scale. Emotional engagement is measured through a framework with multiple dimensions to assess emotional impact based on valence, intensity, and specificity.
The role of the graphic designer as curator addressing identity and belonging, culture, social justice, empowerment, and civic responsibility.
José Menéndez Assistant Professor Northeastern University
Tatiana Gómez Assistant Professor Massachusetts College of Art and Design
As Latin American graphic design educators and practitioners, we recognize the need for further research and understanding of the diversity of graphic design histories and their contextual backgrounds—commonly addressed as a monolithic culture.[1]
Gráfica Latina is a research project that seeks to address these needs through a digital and mobile poster archive of Latin American and Latinx graphic design. The goal of the archive is to speak about the social, economic, and political contexts in which these posters were—or/and still are— created in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Perú, Brasil, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and the United States. The collection is curated to represent the diversity of printing techniques, vernacular languages, methods of representation (illustration, typography/calligraphy/lettering, and color), and messaging ranging from cultural to political, and environmental.
This project is led by Colombian graphic designer Tatiana Gómez, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Puerto Rican graphic designer José R. Menéndez, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Architecture at Northeastern University, College of Art Media and Design.
Gráfica Latina’s collection has been exhibited at The Fine Arts Work Center, at Rhode Island College’s School of Social Work, and at the 2024 Southern
Graphics Council International. It has been featured as part of the “Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico,”[2] the Letterform Archive “Salon Series,”[3] The Boston Globe Magazine,[4] and the RISD Alumni Podcast “Pulling on the Thread.”[5]
This presentation about Gráfica Latina illustrates, through curation, pop-up exhibitions, programming, and a digital archive, initiatives that investigate the role of the graphic designer as curator and how this practice can facilitate resources for education, engagement and dialogs with communities while addressing topics such as identity and belonging, culture, social justice, empowerment, and civic responsibility.
[1] Flores, Andrea. How UCLA is trying to break the myth of the Latino monolith. Los Angeles Times. 11/6/2023. www.latimes.com
[2] Menéndez López, José R. “Caribbean Contrast: Puerto Rican and Cuban Carteles and Their Representation of Distinct Political Relationships with the United States .” Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico. BIPOC Design History, 1 Oct. 2021, PROVIDENCE, RI.
[3] Llorente, Ana, and Menéndez López, José R. “Call and Response: Histories of Designing Protest.” Letterform Archive, Salon Series 39. Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest, 23 July 2022, San Francisco, California.
[4] Gómez, Tatiana, and Menéndez López, José R. “Gráfica Latina.” Boston Globe Magazine, 17 September 2023, p. Cover-Interior Cover.
[5] Gómez Gaggero, Tatiana, Speaker; Menéndez, José R. Pulling on the Thread, Season 6, Episode 2: Grafica Latina, Rhode Island School of Design, November 1st, 2021, https://alumni.risd.edu/podcast/grafica-latina. 11/22.
An experimental practice that bridges the gap between radio and design
Matthew Flores Graphic Design Fellow, School of Design University of Tennessee-Knoxville
How can you use an inherently non-visual and immaterial medium to generate, communicate, and disseminate ideas visually? This presentation will explore the first phase of an experimental practice that bridges the gap between radio and design – in particular, the use of “fuzzy modes”, a term coined by Murray Greenman (call sign ZL1BPU) to describe radio formats which employ digital transmission but human-readable reception.
Humans navigate a digital world with an analog toolbox of sense and perception, a fact made complicated when most contemporary methods of communication are intended to be read, interpreted, and translated by a computer. Fuzzy modes exist in the unusual space between machine and brain, leveraging technology for transport, but relying on a human user for interpretation. In practice, I express images and text through a variety of fuzzy modes (in particular, radio facsimile, Slow Scan TV, and Hellschreiber), allowing the idiosyncrasies of each form to become manifest in the message. In this way, noise and artifact highlight the literal and conceptual distance between broadcast and reception, and the act of transmission becomes a collaborative conversation between designer, medium, and receiver.
Transmitting visual information via fuzzy radio mode is full of contradiction: it’s non-visual by nature, yet produces a very particular graphic aesthetic; it’s immaterial, yet reception is bound by a specific physical space; it’s obsolete and niche, yet it creates an opportunity to interrogate our interaction with the digital world. Because of this unique position, I propose that adopting fuzzy modes as a tool for graphic production can refocus our relationship to digital interfaces, underscoring the importance of human perception when communication is necessarily mediated through technology. By turning my design practice fuzzy, I demonstrate that these techniques are more than a dusty set of protocols for ham radio operators, and can become a distinct and compelling means of graphic experimentation and expression.
A method founded in play and inspired by design history
Anna Jordan Assistant Professor Rochester Institute of Technology
I will present a method that I designed to help students and practicing designers come up with new and surprising ideas. The method, called “Mining for Ideas,” is grounded in collaboration and experimentation. It can be used in a classroom or design studio setting to effectively generate ideas about both form and concept. Designers begin with a collaborative collage game, involving an enormous selection of unconventional tools and materials, leading to spectacular sculptural creations. Each sculptural collage is altered by each designer, leading to truly collaborative pieces. Next, designers photograph the sculptures to create two-dimensional images that are mined for ideas, similar as to how a miner would chip away at earth to reveal valuable gems. Very quickly, designers generate many surprising ideas, each with corresponding examples of concrete design elements such as typography, grid, texture, color, and image. Then, the raw ideas are expanded into applied pieces of graphic design via a flexible morphology that is structured around these concrete design elements. The method is founded in play and inspired by design history precedent including my personal design practice, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawing game, and Skolos-Wedell’s form-to-content method for designing posters. In this presentation, I will illustrate how the method works with several examples from my classroom, explain how the method could be applied to various design problems, and cite student interviews as evidence proving that the process is successful.
