Engaging with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents.
Chen Luo Lecturer Boston University
My research is centered on pedagogical workshops and embodied publishing that encourage cultural exchange through collective practicing and community building.
I believe the pedagogical workshop as an interrogative exercise is a place where practice has no preconceived outcomes, but engages with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents. The workshops bridge making and thinking, focusing the process rather than the final results. They serve as a tool to gather individuals who want to practice together without hierarchy and institutional pressure.
The programs and writers, such as Typography Summer School, Workshop Project, Vilém Flusser, etc. inspired me to think about workshops as a place to gather discussion and craft on the need for today’s graphic design curriculum, and the relevance of typography in design history and the part it plays in today’s society. Etc. A workshop I designed with designer Chuck Gonzales, we asked students to list vocabulary related to their identity, culture, love/hate, methodology and previous work. Then they connect any two listed words into a final deliverable which is not disciplined in a certain format, but visually and sensorly engaging. The goal is to build connections among one’s beliefs and interests by considering materials, languages, performance, identity, scales, spaces at a fast pace. There are workshops that transform research into collective visual experiments. My methodology begins with trust-building exercises and instructional constraints, allowing unexpected possibilities to happen during the process. In the “Pen+Pen-Pen” workshop, hosted in multiple Art Book Fairs, Designer Bella Tuo and I made a set of creative pen tools that provide variable lengths and multiple participants to hold a pen at once. By using the pens to experiment with symmetrical typography patterns, we questioned how to create sustainable tools built upon the existing art material, and what exchange would affect in a group practice. The prompt was inspired by artist Job Wouters’ methodology.
Through transforming participants’ responsive creation into performative and installation typography through the process of writing, sharing, and moving. We explored the boundaries between bodies and language, typography and space, the individual and the communal. In “Embodied Making as Collective Publishing: The Body and Hanzi”, hosted in Boston Art Book Fair 2022. Mary Yang and I designed this workshop to explore embodied making and publishing. During this workshop, we explored the relationship between the body and Hanzi (Chinese characters) through a series of hands-on exercises to create collaborative, large-scale wearable posters. With participants who have/have no Chinese background, we proposed questions including what does collective publishing look like through collaborative labor in a shared space and time and how can this workshop create a space for cultural exchange and expression. The workshop was not only a typography experimentation, but also more lively with posing, collective moving, dancing, and photography. I have enjoyed practicing the phonetics and hieroglyphics of Hanzi through letterform writing. My aim is to create a new interplay of workshops by activating the body and traditional graphic design mediums. It fosters a sequence of processes, discourse, culture expression, and prolongs the conversation after the completion of a project.
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.
Examples of sophisticated, intelligent design from many cultures around the world
Kaleena Sales Associate Professor Tennessee State University
This book has its origins in Beyond the Bauhaus, a series of short essays Sales developed through her board service with AIGA’s Design Educators Community Steering Committee in 2019. Her goal with that series was to amplify design work from underrepresented groups who have been left out of the design canon. The first article featured the beautifully designed West African Adinkra symbols from the Akan people of Côte d’Ivoire and discussed the deep meaning within the symbols, as well as the use of common visual principles within the designs. What she hoped to demonstrate to readers was that there were examples of sophisticated, intelligent design in many cultures around the world, many of which were developed prior to movements like the Bauhaus. The next essay was on the work of AfriCOBRA, a civil rights–era artist collective based in Chicago. While the work of AfriCOBRA has made its impact within the fine arts scene, gaining notoriety during the height of the Black Power Movement, she sought to share their work through the lens of design. Though the group did not self-identify as designers, if educators and practitioners are interested in learning from diverse design methodologies, it makes sense to look beyond the boundaries of our professional discipline to find examples of successful design. In AfriCOBRA’s work, we find a delightful use of expressive lettering, rhythmic patterns, and bold colors. This work is particularly inspiring because these artists found a way to codify their visual language. They decided on a shared aesthetic vision and executed it time and again. Working against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, these artists intentionally pursued a Black aesthetic, reflecting pride in their community and identities.
As the article series grew, contributors began to submit essays about other design histories worthy of inclusion in the canon. Caspar Lam and YuJune Park wrote an essay about the Chinese Type Archive featuring the evolving typographic language of modern Chinese. Stephen Child and Isabella D’Agnenica contributed an article on the Gee’s Bend Quilters, a group of Black women from Alabama who mastered an improvisational style of quilting. Dina Benbrahim wrote an essay titled “Moroccan Design Stories, with Shape and Soul,” analyzing the typographic and geometric designs found within Moroccan design history. Other early contributors to the article series were Ali Place, who examined the role of women in computer programming, and Aggie Toppins, who investigated the story behind the I AM a Man placard from the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.
As this work moved from an article series to a book, there was space for some of these essays to develop into fuller writings with more in-depth research. A critical component that she hoped to achieve was to peel back the aesthetic layers of the designs to allow each reader to understand the social, political, and cultural contexts surrounding the making of the work. In examining the contexts, readers will discover how different cultural groups determine meaning, and how non-canonical ideologies and methods offer additional ways of making than what is offered by the grid-based Swiss styles of mainstream graphic design.
When she began this book process, she envisioned a neat and streamlined series of essays, matching in length and format. What developed over time became something much more organic, with essays and interviews of varying lengths. Often, she was left speechless and humbled at the generous sharing of knowledge. Nuveen Barwari’s essay, “Kurdish Fragments: Mapping Pattern as Language,” discusses the displacement of millions of Kurdish people and its impact on decorative art practices. She examines Kurdish rugs as artifacts of erasure, explaining how identity is employed through metaphors and floral themes. In her interview with Sadie Red Wing, she explains how Indigenous tribal communities have used Traditional Ecological Knowledge to inform their understanding of design and how visual sovereignty is at the heart of her work. In her conversation with Saki Mafundikwa, he explains how the colorful visual landscape of Zimbabwe offers a counter to the white space of German and Swiss design. She also draws comparisons between design and American soul music, bringing to light the creative genius of Black people across cultures and disciplines. Other essays and interviews in the book offer similar insight into perspectives and ideologies that aren’t reflected in modernist design. Further still, design leaders Ellen Lupton and Cheryl D. Holmes Miller offer perspective on the future of design, its pedagogy, and ways to reconcile the past. Practitioners Tré Seals of Vocal Type and Zipeng Zhu discuss the relationship between their work and their identity.
This small sampling of stories offers more than a quick glimpse into design artifacts. she asks of the reader to consider what we don’t know, and what questions have yet to be asked. she asks the reader to rethink the definition of design to expand beyond contemporary and digital practices and beyond the boundaries of the Western design canon.
Kaleena Sales is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Tennessee State University, an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) in Nashville, TN. Her research is rooted in racial justice and equity, with a specific focus on the ways culture informs aesthetics. Kaleena is co-author of the book, Extra-Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Non-Binary Field Guild for Graphic Designers, alongside Ellen Lupton, Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh A. Halstead, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara. Through her service on AIGA’s Design Educators Community Steering Committee, Kaleena advocated for a more inclusive view of design history through her Beyond the Bauhaus writing series, which served as inspiration for her new book, Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design, published by Princeton Architectural Press. Kaleena is currently researching the intersection of Black culture and design as a doctoral student at North Carolina State University.
Students visit local and online archives, and conduct research online to contextualize their artifacts in local and graphic design history
Christina Singer Assistant Professor University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Undergraduate Design Research students at UNC Charlotte have been investigating local graphic design history as part of an ongoing project since Fall 2021. What artifacts do students decide to illuminate, and why? This presentation clusters and analyzes 183 local graphic design artifacts and topics that 61 students have chosen to research, write about, and contribute to the People’s Graphic Design Archive. The project teaches students about biases and factors that contribute to who and what has been included in graphic design history. Students visit local and online archives, and conduct research online to contextualize their artifacts in local and graphic design history. Through this process, students research ways of making, social movements, and graphic design history in order to construct and write a story for each artifact. Students review each other’s writing and create a class book, which combines their essays and sources with a collaborative timeline of the local graphic design artifacts they selected to research. The collection of individual choices that students make regarding what they choose to contribute to the PGDA’s effort to democratize design history has become a separate topic of inquiry for both research and pedagogical purposes. This presentation analyzes the students’ choices and the stories they tell.
How sustainable thinking can become the foundation for framing and solving a design problem
Maria Smith Bohannon Assistant Professor Oakland University, MI
Today our world faces complex problems, just a few of which include climate change, overpopulation, deforestation, pollution, poverty, water quality, and issues of inequality and food scarcity. The data and the facts are irrefutable and cannot be ignored, but how can designers become the architects of change?
Graphic design education needs to include sustainable design thinking at the forefront of the process, enabling graphic designers to think about and solve for greater impact within their communities.
This presentation focuses on how sustainable thinking can become the foundation for framing and solving a design problem by going beyond development of a logo and identity system to thinking more broadly at the start. Sustainable thinking will be implemented at the beginning of the design process with a goal that it can become routine and foundational for all design process.
Developing a creative brief that includes factoring the impact on people, planet, prosperity and culture will yield a more sustainable design solution—one that clarifies the project goal and fosters creative solutions with a plan for execution. This process will provide steps for identifying, researching and understanding complex problems within local communities, and framing solutions that are more sustainable from research, to the designs of visuals and artifacts.
Dori Griffin, Assistant Professor, University of Florida (Editor)
The history of graphic design as expressed in survey texts is well-known for being overpopulated by white Euro-American men. I believe that escaping this disciplinary echo chamber requires active, intentional effort from scholar-practitioners within the discipline. My own position as a design scholar and educator is one I’m determined to operationalize for inclusion. Therefore I was excited when Mike Zender, editor of Visible Language, invited me to guest-edit a special issue devoted to the history of visual communication design. As the longest-running peer reviewed journal of visual communication design research in the United States, Visible Language has played a significant role in both constructing and deconstructing a canonical notion of graphic design history, a subject I examined in the journal’s fiftieth anniversary issue (Griffin 2016). In cultivating submissions for the history issue, I was determined to facilitate as global and diverse a range as possible. It was vital for the issue to contribute to the ongoing work of building a more inclusive history of graphic design. Part of this work relies on an active critique of the power structures which have led to a canonical history based on exclusions around race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, professional identity, and geography. And part of the work requires intentionally and explicitly inviting as-yet unheard voices to contribute to the disciplinary dialogue. Though the term “decolonization” is often used to describe such efforts, I’m cautious about its application. In the words of Tuck and Yang (2012), “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” Instead, I’d describe my editorial goal as recuperative, opening up the dialogic spaces of design-historical discourse to include individuals, ideas, and practices too long excluded from that narrative.
It’s a truism that graphic design history is predicated on a shallow understanding of stylistically conceptualized movements and that the discipline lacks an evidence-based, critically-informed history (e.g. Blauvelt 1994-5; Woodham 1995; Triggs 2009, 2011). Yet as I worked on this editorial project, I became convinced that this conceptualization is invalid. As I noted in the introduction to the special issue, it is not the case that histories of visual communication design, beyond style or connoisseurship or visual data, do not exist. Rather, they inhabit spaces conceptualized as external to the core of our discipline. There are scholars and practitioners already at work conducting historical research which significantly expands familiar, survey-text style notions of graphic design history. Their work may be published in adjacent fields in the humanities and social sciences, rendering it less familiar to design educators. Or historical research might undergird a contemporary studio design practice rather than a scholarly publishing practice, and thus it escapes representation in the formal literature of design history. It is vital to make room for these voices within our field. As I shaped the history-themed issue of Visible Language, I actively cultivated participation from both kinds of researchers. Including their voices within graphic design’s established communities of dialogue greatly enriches the conversations which can take place in these spaces.
The four authors whose articles were selected for publication through the journal’s double-blind peer review process expand the narrative of graphic design history through specific case studies. Each illustrates the complexity of our discipline’s historical narratives. Collectively, the authors’ research speaks to the intersections between canonized Euro-American design conventions and the diverse ways design practice occurs and is understood in a wide range of local and global contexts. The authors’ contributions to the dialogic disciplinary narratives of graphic design history are the most important outcome of this project. In “The Implications of Media,” Islamic art historian Hala Auji undertakes a close contextual and material reading of the Nafir Suriya, a series of Arabic-language broadsides originally printed in Beirut in 1860 and re-issued in 1990. In “Ismar David’s Quest for Original Hebrew Typographic Signs,” practicing designer Shani Avni contextualizes David’s design process for the David Hebrew type family (1954), documenting David’s negotiation of the tension between tradition and innovation through a research-based design process. In “Mana Mātātuhi,” practicing designer Johnson Witehira documents Māori visual culture’s incorporation of Latin-alphabet lettering and typography into culturally specific ways of seeing, knowing, and expressing. In “Lower Case in the Flatlands,” design historian Trond Klevgaard explores the adaptation and application of Avant Garde Modernist strategies in locations traditionally defined as “peripheral.” The abstracts for all four articles are included in the “evidence of outcome” section.
Serving as guest editor for this special issue of Visible Language led to an invitation to join the editorial team as the associate editor for statements of practice at Design & Culture, the journal of the Design Studies Forum. The July 2019 issue is the journal’s first issue under the direction of its new editors in chief, who describe their “conscious formation of an editorial and advisory board of accomplished scholars who work beyond the silos of their disciplines and who hail from regions not always represented in design’s dominant canons and conversations.” They note that they “are also attentive to the politics of citations and are committed to broadening the scholarly dialog to include voices too frequently dismissed or engaged only at the margins” (Adams, Keshavarz and Traganou 2019, 154). Within this conceptual framework, the issue’s statement of practice is by Nadine Chahine, whose insightful essay discusses her work as a designer of Arabic typefaces and the complex role typography plays in a diverse range of Arabic cultural and political expressions. I’m honored to contribute to this ongoing work of diversification, in however small a way. It’s thrilling to collaborate with practitioners and scholars who prioritize a global, participatory, and inclusive notion of design history and praxis. Editorial work is not glamorous. But approaching it with a passion for cultivating diversity and inclusion holds the power to shape future histories of graphic design into narratives more representative of all peoples and practices within the domain of design. [989 words]
Bibliography
Adams, B., M. Keshavarz and J. Traganou. 2019. “Editorial.” Design and Culture 11:2, 153-6.
Blauvelt, A. 1994-5. “New Perspectives: Critical Histories of Graphic Design.” Visible Language volumes 28.3, 28.4, 29.1.
Griffin, D. 2015. “The Role of Visible Language in Building and Critiquing a Canon of Graphic Design History.” Visible Language 50:3, 6-27.
Tuck, E., and K. Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1:1, 1-¬40.
Woodham, J. 1995. “Resisting Colonization: Design History Has Its Own Identity.” Design Issues 11 (1): 22–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511613.
Dori Griffin is an assistant professor of graphic design in the University of Florida’s School of Art + Art History. Her research centers around two interrelated areas of inquiry. Her historical research expands the narrative of graphic design as it has been practiced and consumed in the past, with particular focus on how popular visual artifacts and print media shape national and international dialogues about culture, politics, and identity. Her pedagogical research explores how to develop globalized curriculum and diverse, learner-centered practices for design history pedagogy, particularly in the context of studio education. She is a frequent contributor to the peer-reviewed scholarly dialogues of the discipline, with publications in Dialectic, Visible Language, Design & Culture, the Journal of Communication Design, and the Journal of Design History, among others. Currently, she serves as the associate editor for statements of practice at Design & Culture.
Many artists use personal experiences naturally, which often include traumatic memories.
David Graves Adjunct Professor Bristol Community College
Art and design educators often encourage students to use
personal experience in their creative practice, and many artists use these
experiences naturally, which often include traumatic memories. Through this
process, art education implicitly utilizes techniques developed and used by art
therapists, almost always without the formal training and education of an art
therapist. How are these practices beneficial, and what are the potential risks
of this kind of teaching/learning, specifically when the educator is not using
these approaches intentionally? Is this mode of teaching exclusive to art and
design, or can it be found ingrained in pedagogy throughout the Humanities, and
beyond?
By understanding how memory works, and which parts of the
brain are activated when recalling and talking about traumatic experiences versus
creating work about those same traumatic experiences, we know that different
biological responses are triggered. This includes the fight/flight/freeze
response. Avoiding that trigger is the basis of many art therapy approaches,
and is part of the appeal of creating art about trauma rather than talking
about it. If we as art and design educators are utilizing this and other
therapeutic approaches in our classrooms and studios, perhaps we would benefit
from some formal training by professionals in the art therapy field.
This research was initiated by self-exploration into my art
and design practice during my graduate studies, before ultimately exploring the
experiences of others, in and outside of the creative fields. My research
includes an exploration of the making process to cope with trauma, art therapy
techniques in children and adults, as well as candid interviews with others
about traumatic memory.
This tool allows students to rapidly develop a small game-like interactive experience with a minimal amount of coding.
Brian James Assistant Professor St John’s University
Teaching computer coding to students of design presents a unique
context, with its own set of challenges. Design students may lack deep intrinsic
motivation toward the subject, perceiving code-related classes as unwelcome, stress-inducing
requirements in the curriculum. Additionally, they may be intimidated not only
by the task of coding in general, but also by the complexity of the software
development kits used by more experienced coders. Finally, the time and
cognitive load required to code even a small interactive project can be
daunting even to the most motivated learner.
Design students do, however, bring unique strengths to the
table. Designers are often highly motivated to learn tools that help them make
tangible creative pieces. They typically bring skills such as illustration,
photography, and project management to their work. And design students who have
internalized the lessons of working with grids, character styles, and similar visual
systems are primed to work with analogous systems in a coding context.
The Mini UnGame ENgine (MUGEN) is an attempt to bridge these
challenges and opportunities by presenting design students with a simple, pedagogically
oriented JavaScript library, developed by the author, that allows them to
rapidly develop a small game-like interactive experience with a minimal amount
of code. MUGEN offers teachers a flexible tool that can support an
instructional approach focused on visual design, or an approach focused more on
coding, or on an approach that balances the two.
This presentation will describe MUGEN’s aims and current state of development, share tentative results of its first deployment in a design classroom, and consider possibilities for future development and applications of this pedagogical work-in-progress.
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 presentation will discuss tactics and strategies for critique within the design school classroom that go beyond the archetypal “group crit,” and into innovative and unexpected ways of engaging students in critical dialog.
Mitch Goldstein Assistant Professor School of Design Rochester Institute of Technology
Educating designers is a complex and layered process — a chaotic mixture of facts and opinions disseminated primarily through critical discourse. This presentation will discuss tactics and strategies for critique within the design school classroom that go beyond the archetypal “group crit,” and into innovative and unexpected ways of engaging students in critical dialog.
The AIGA “Designer of 2025” suggests that students need to learn a number of emerging competencies while attending design school, including working with complexity, understanding accountability for their design decisions, and embracing new forms of sense-making and dialog within their work. In addition to teaching the formal and methodological elements of design, educators need to make sure students have a clear understanding of why and how their design decisions resulted in work that accomplished its goal or missed the mark. This understanding primarily comes from critique.
Educators place a high value on critique, for many of us, it is how we spend the majority of our class time. Traditionally, critique has happened in a large group setting, with all members of the class and the instructor discussing each project one by one and offering feedback as a group. This method has value but is too often about social baggage and performance art, with the same handful of outgoing students doing most of the talking, drowning out students who are quieter or more anxious in large groups. This presentation asks a simple question: what are the most useful, most effective ways to give and receive feedback in the classroom? We have all had students we know are excellent thinkers but never speak in a large group critique — it may be time to move past the traditional models of feedback into other ways of helping students better understand what is happening within their work.
