Tag: history

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories 

A workshop that promotes the teaching of local design archives.

Dr. Christopher Dingwall
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Bess Williamson
Professor
North Carolina State University in Raleigh

Dr. J. Dakota Brown
Visiting Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Chicago

Amira Hegazy
Adjunct Assistant Professor
University of Illinois Chicago

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories is a workshop that promotes the teaching of local design archives in studio and classroom instruction at the college level. First held in June 2022, the workshop provides a dynamic forum for university teachers to develop more inclusive approaches to teaching design history in a variety of pedagogical settings and through a range of disciplinary lenses. For its second iteration in June 2024, we welcomed fifteen participants from around the country to explore methods of archival pedagogy in Chicago. In two virtual meetings afterward, participants developed teaching materials to bring design archives into their own classrooms.

Chicago Designs joins a broader movement of scholars and practitioners who are expanding the definition of design history beyond established canons that emphasize the commercial output of mostly white or European men. Because the teaching of design history is not yet firmly established in either design schools or humanities departments in the United States, we organized the workshop to help teachers gain facility in archive-based pedagogy: the art and craft of using archival materials to make history come alive. Combining hands-on archival exercises, seminar-style reading discussions, and peer mentorship, the workshop provides a rare opportunity for teachers in design and in the humanities to learn from each other while modeling community-based design research.

The interdisciplinary approach is represented by the workshop organizers: two historians who study design (Williamson and Dingwall) and two designers who center historical research in their practices (Hegazy and Brown). Together we led site visits, discussions, and exercises at major museums and libraries as well as community arts organizations. At each site, participants explored the significance of design to Chicago history from its rise as a hub of global consumer capitalism to the level of everyday neighborhood life. Ranging from themes of labor activism in printing trades to the typographic politics of graffiti and commercial sign painting, our five days of activities showed participants design histories from the bottom up while surveying the city’s rich landscape of archival collections and practices.

Our institutional host and base of operations was the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where we met the first morning to discuss readings that set the intellectual and practical agendas for the week. What is design history? What does it mean to make that history inclusive of diverse design cultures? How can archival materials advance those goals in the classroom? In our afternoon session, we visited the Newberry Library — a major repository of Chicago social and cultural history – where J. Dakota Brown and curators Paul Gehl and Jill Gage led a workshop on the labor history of print culture in the city. On Tuesday, we visited the Jane Addams Hull House Museum where Bess Williamson led a discussion on accessible teaching followed by a tour of the museum and critical discussion about historic house museums as an archive for design and immigration histories. On Wednesday, Amira Hegazy led a visit to Pilsen Arts and Community House focused on the history and impact of Chicago gang writing and printing with graffiti writer Sir Charles, followed by an afternoon exercise in neighborhood-based design study. On Thursday, Bess Williamson led a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago for discussion of design and library management with curator Leslie Wilson followed by a gallery teaching exercise with curator Elizabeth McGoey, followed by an afternoon visit to Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection to examine its zine collection. On Friday, Chris Dingwall led a visit to Hyde Park Art Center where textile design and fabric artist Robert Paige and curator Allison Peters Quinn guided us through Paige’s exhibition (The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige), followed by an afternoon visit to the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of African American History where Dingwall and archivist Beth Loch modeled an archival exercise featuring print culture from Chicago’s Black Renaissance.

Building a cohort was one of our major ambitions and accomplishments. Selected from an open application call, our fifteen participants consisted of university teachers in design schools and humanities departments as well as museum educators. After the week in Chicago, we reconvened twice virtually to share and develop curricular projects that connect archival materials with their teaching goals. Projects include:

  • Design history modules based on artifacts that represent diverse racial and ethnic histories
  • Field-based observation exercises connecting with neighborhoods, local media, and non-human species communities
  • Study trips and out-of-class experiences for art and design students in Chicago, Baltimore, Fresno, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia
  • Critical theory and research modules on community-based design and artifact interpretation
  • Classroom and public engagement projects in identity design, interactive exhibition design, and accessible media

We envision the workshop as a living resource. The teaching projects are publicly available as an online resource hosted by the Design Museum of Chicago. It is a resource for educators to understand how to effectively utilize collections and engage in communities where they teach. These projects applied the workshop’s themes to their own teaching environments internationally and in online communities. In addition to the teaching resource, the website features a scholarly bibliography as well as descriptions about each of the sites visited during the workshop with the goal of raising their profile for design history study.

Chicago Designs is an effective model for supporting the teaching of design history by providing educators a space to learn new teaching methods, develop teaching materials, and build professional networks. Thanks to funding from the Terra Foundation of American Art, each participant received a stipend of $250, as well as support for travel up to $600. We prioritized supporting contingent faculty and graduate student participants by providing them with an additional stipend to offset the costs that are generally covered through academic salary research benefits. Our application review process was centered around ensuring a diverse cohort with at least one third of the participants coming from non-tenure track positions to be able to emphasize and build mentorship and professional development opportunities.

Chicago Designs: Teaching Community-Based Histories

This project was the 2023 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Teaching.

Biography

Dr. Bess Williamson is a historian of design and material culture and Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the NC State University in Raleigh. She is the author of Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (2019) and co-editor of Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (2020). Her work explores diverse histories and practices of design that extend expertise to users and communities, and challenge designers to address access and power in their work.

Dr. Christopher Dingwall is Assistant Professor of Design History in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a historian of American and African American culture, with interests in material culture, political economy, and race. He is currently working on Black Designers in Chicago (for the University of Chicago Press), a chronicle of African American artists and craftspeople in the American design industry during the twentieth century. This project began as an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2018 and is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Dr. J. Dakota Brown teaches and writes on the intertwined histories of design, labor, and capital. After studying graphic design at North Carolina State University, he completed an MA in visual studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, he graduated from Northwestern University’s PhD program in Rhetoric and Public Culture. He is currently a visiting associate professor at the UIC School of Design. Dakota’s writing has appeared in Jacobin, Post45, and the edited volume After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy. A short collection of his essays was recently published in Portuguese translation by Brazil’s Clube do Livro do Design.

Amira Hegazy is an artist and design historian investigating the relationship of design artifacts to memory, belonging, and community identity. Trained as a printmaker and book artist, Amira earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches design practice and theory at the University of Illinois Chicago as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. She is the curator of Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types at the Design Museum of Chicago supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition centers the typography in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods to illuminate design legacies and their contemporary echoes, especially alternative modernisms and love as an organizing principle in design. Amira has exhibited her visual work at the International Print Center of New York, The Grolier Club, The William King Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Bird Show Chicago, and other venues internationally.

Chicano Independent Publication Masthead Design

Made during research visits at university libraries in Texas and California, hubs of the Chicano movement.

Joshua Duttweiler
Assistant Professor
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Alexandria Victoria Canchola
Assistant Professor
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

We demonstrate how the design of Chicano independent publication mastheads from the 1960’s and 1970’s in the United States used the visual language of the Chicano community to engage directly with their audience. In publication design, mastheads serve as the reader’s first indication as to a publication’s purpose and credibility. Our analysis of these independent publications is based on observations made during research visits at university libraries in Texas and California, hubs of the Chicano movement. Based on our research, the mastheads used typography, icons, and organization symbols to attract readers in service to the publication’s goals of raising awareness on local issues such as labor inequality and racial violence. The efforts made by these publications not only mobilized their audience to fight for social justice but utilized visual means as a way of uniting their readers toward a cause.

These Chicano publications, not typically referenced in the traditional white graphic design canon, provide an opportunity to learn from past designers in a parallel time of societal unrest and analyze their successful methods of advocacy and activism. The political climate of the time cultivated diverse printing practitioners; far different than the editorial staffs we see today. Activists, many without formal design training, worked to combine text and images into design that would speak to their audience. By observing the evolution of masthead design throughout the Chicano movement we can observe the progress of the publication designers’ skill as they sought to increase their audience and ability to communicate.

By understanding the role and unity of the visual language of independent Chicano newspapers, we encourage designers, historians, and students to further investigate the design semiotics of community-focused publications both within its historical context and contemporary practice.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.2: Annual CAA Conference 2023 (Virtual) on Saturday, February 18, 2023.

Cradlr: A Design Project for Refugee Children

Scholarship: Creative Works Award Winner

The growing global refugee crisis in the recent decade has reached a staggering height—in nearly 80 million displaced people, 26 million are registered refugees—and over half of the refugees are under the age of 18. The phenomenon of displaced people has existed since the dawn of human civilizations caused by wars, famines, mass migrations, pandemics, climate change, political persecutions, natural disasters, and more. In these calamities, children have been the first victims of conflict and displacement experiences. As of today, no digital platforms have been built for displaced children—the most vulnerable group who doesn’t have cell phones.

The Cradlr project was created in the hope of developing not only a digital tool but a vision for a global network that might help displaced children to overcome many adversities in life and receive more love and brighter futures. After examining historical evidence and current situations, this project goes beyond the realm of digital product design in an attempt to find a humanitarian solution for a complex social challenge. The final product embraces the connection and communication among the displaced children, their families and temporary guardians, education affiliations, international and regional organizations, as well as volunteers and donors. The stories and personal data of displaced children accumulated by adults are stored and protected by the Cradlr Network Database, which becomes a collective digital memory. Cradlr offers a blueprint whose purpose is to serve as a possible testing ground envisioning a digital network system that transcends political boundaries so that various parties can connect to rescue and nurture young lives collectively on a global scale.

* Cradlr is a United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) project at Monmouth University.

Rationale

The seed of this project was sown two years ago when the designer started the Jiang Jian project [www.jiangjianz.com/eng]—a research and design project that sheds light upon the forgotten stories of Jiang Jian and the Mothers’ Movement in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)—a major achievement of the Chinese Women’s Movement in the first half of the 20th century. Supported mainly by donations, the Mothers’ Movement rescued and educated 30,000 displaced children during the war. Based on this research, the designer learned many aspects of wartime refugees—forcibly displaced people—in China and complex stories behind the scenes. She soon started to question how other countries protected and rescued children at that time and acquired historical evidence in European countries during WWII. Through her study, some social patterns gradually unveiled, from which the inception of this project began to sprout.

Furthermore, the growing global refugee crisis has reached a staggering height in the recent decade. Lining up incidences from different regions and eras, the designer recognized ineffable human suffering repeated continuously in devastating and grotesque ways, such as mass killing, abduction, raping, child trafficking, the fact that refugee parents murdered or abandoned their children due to untamable obstacles, and so on.

Although incapable of stopping wars and adversities, the designer hopes to learn from facts and history to help displaced children today. In this digital age, many refugees have access to cell phones, so creating mobile apps to assist humanitarian work is not a novel idea. However, the project presented here goes beyond the realm of digital product design in an attempt to find a humanitarian solution for a complex social challenge by connecting various parties to rescue and nurture refugee children worldwide.

Click to access JingZhou_Cradlr-Evidence-1.pdf

Jing Zhou is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and Associate Professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey. She works at the intersection of visual and interaction design, interactive media, animation/video, and fine arts. Her work has been shown and collected internationally including: Triennale Design Museum, Milan; British Computer Society, London; Asian Cultural Center, Manhattan; SIGGRAPH Art Gallery; ISEA; IEEE; CAA; Les Abattoirs Museum, France; Royal Institution of Australia; Danish Poster Museum; Athens Digital Art Festival, Greece; Taksim Republic Art Gallery, Istanbul; FILE, Sao Paulo; Korea Visual Information Design Assn.; Stanford University; Yale University; public collection of the WRO Media Art Center, Poland; Waikato Museum, New Zealand; Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic; and Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. Ms. Zhou has received many awards in the U.S. and Europe.

https://www.monmouth.edu/directory/profiles/jing-zhou

Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2020 recipient

Explorations of Data Lists: How Type, Hierarchy, and Color Reveal the Stories About the Titanic

Level one typography students think about data and typographic hierarchy.

Peggy Bloomer
Adjunct Professor
Quinnipiac University
Southern Connecticut State University

In this project I hoped to make level one typography students think about data and typographic hierarchy with. In my experience, students are not concerned about the data that is collected about them. I hoped to broaden their understanding of the power of data through their creation of a large format poster (24” x 26”) using lists about the passengers on the Titanic purchased from the “Encyclopedia Britannica.”

The textbook for the class is Ellen Lupton’s Thinking About Type. This assignment is an adaptation of Lupton’s hierarchy assignment “Long Lists.” According to Lupton, hierarchy is the organization of content using the spatial clues of indents, line spacing and placement. Other graphic elements that distinguish content include size, style and color.

Researching the list of passengers, students were asked to find human stories. The lists contained information about 1st, 2nd, 3rd class passengers and employees of the Titanic. Surnames, servants, gender, age, nationalities and origin of embarkment were provided. The poster was created in InDesign without photographic images. Students could use and InDesign tools to create color elements and many created ships, funnels, waves and other shapes.

The traditional process of information gathering, sketching and mocking up was used for designing the posters. In-class critiques of 3 smaller 11 x 17” versions helped students realize what was successful or not. Final versions were created to the larger size, printed, presented in class and hung in the department hallway for viewing.

In conclusion, most students realized the economic and gender consequences for passengers. One student used color to emphasize families and the impact was powerful: families died from infants to parents. The students gained knowledge about the power of simple data and almost all of them used size, style and color effectively. The use of indents, line spacing and style guides were not as successful. In the future, I plan to incorporate a slide show of memorials that include powerful images such as Flanders Field, The Vietnam Memorial and the Holocaust Memorial.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 6.1: Quinnipiac University on October 5, 2019.

Teaching the History of Graphic Design to Visual Learners

Solution: add a significant drawing component to the curriculum

Ingrid Hess 
Assistant Professor 
University of Massachusetts Lowell

I teach the History of Graphic Design to art and design students. Most of them are visual learners. I find it an exciting challenge to teach in a way that inspires learning among these students. Below are excerpts from an article I wrote for the international journal Visual Inquiry in 2013 entitled, “How Drawing Helps Keep History Present”.

When I was an art student, one of my favorite classes was art history. I remember my professor’s lectures to be fascinating yet I remember almost nothing about art history itself. The information she shared with the class didn’t stick with me. Two decades later I was asked to teach a History of Graphic Design class. I was thrilled and terrified. How could I teach a class as interesting as the one I took years before yet help my students retain the information they were learning? My solution was simple: add a significant drawing component to the curriculum. By having students create work based on the lectures I presented they put their knowledge into immediate use. The results were astounding. On tests throughout the semester, questions relating to the drawing assignments were much more likely to be answered correctly than other questions.

A pleasant surprise—regardless of a student’s inherent drawing skill, using drawing was an effective tool. My class consisted of both art majors and non-art majors. I graded not on the expertise of the rendering, but rather on how each student integrated new knowledge of graphic design history into the drawing assignments.

The most rewarding part of the course was seeing how much the students loved the drawing assignments. At the end of the class when I asked the students what they thought they would remember from the semester, all of them stated a lesson that went along with a drawing assignment.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.3: Merrimack College on March 30, 2019.

Visualizing Historical Arguments

A Hispanic identity has been part of the United States since long before the massive immigration of the last decades. I explore the process as a form of research over finished forms.

Camila Afanador-Llach
Assistant Professor, Graphic Design
Florida Atlantic University

Visual representations of arguments based on historical events have the potential to shed light on contemporary issues. The graphic formats to structure such representations can include maps, data visualizations, and interactive archives. In this presentation, I show a series of projects where I use the tools of design to explore contemporary questions about the identity of places with a historical perspective. Using datasets and existing archives I seek to make evident the argument that a Hispanic identity has been part of the United States since long before the massive immigration of the last decades. I explore the process as a form of research over finished forms. With each iteration I continue to understand how arguments developed in long narrative texts can be communicated through visual forms.

In my engagement with historical narratives, I pursue more inclusive frameworks and decentralized ways of telling stories. Representing an argument in a visual format is also an act to bridge design practices with the humanities in the hope to establish methodologies for collaborative interdisciplinary endeavors.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.4: Parsons Integrated Design on Thursday, June 14, 2018.

Espiritu, Texas 1886-2015: An Essential Part Of American History

Andrés Vera Martínez
Assistant Professor,  Cartooning and Illustration
Lesley University College of Art and Design
Cambridge, MA

The Spanish term Mestizos, meaning mixed, came into popular usage during the 16th century to describe the offspring of Spaniards and Native Americans. Vaqueros, or the first cowboys, were Mestizos and their cowboy culture has been mythologized and marketed; but too often stripped of the ethnic origins before presented for popular consumption. Tejanos, or the first Texans, were borne of the mix of Spaniards and Native Americans and were the original cowboys of the United States. This culture lives on today in Texas through the food, language and ranching culture.
Espiritu, Texas 1886 -2015 will tell the story of a Texas built upon the struggles and triumphs of diverse people. This presentation will focus on one chapter, Lamesa, TX 1961: Andrew Martínez.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 2.0: The City College of New York, CUNY on Wednesday, June 3, 2015.