Tag: pedagogy

Generative AI for Visual Communication: Designing Human-Centered, AI-First Pedagogy

An introduction to foundational concepts such as training data, bias, authorship, and algorithmic influence.

Adonis Durado
Associate Professor
Ohio University

VICO 3456 / VICO 5456: Generative AI for Visual Communication is a vertically integrated studio course that brings together undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students in a shared learning environment. Designed as a yoke course, it intentionally collapses traditional academic hierarchies to create a collaborative space where emerging and advanced designers learn alongside one another. The course reimagines how artificial intelligence can be taught within design education by positioning AI not as a shortcut or productivity tool, but as a collaborative system that reshapes authorship, decision-making, and creative responsibility.

The course was developed in response to a widening gap between the rapid adoption of generative technologies in professional practice and the limited pedagogical frameworks available to support meaningful learning with them. Students often encounter AI informally through social media or commercial platforms, without guidance on ethical, cultural, or conceptual implications. By bringing undergraduate and graduate students together, the course leverages varied levels of experience and disciplinary perspectives while modeling how learning communities function in professional and research contexts.

At its core, the course is grounded in the belief that meaningful engagement with AI requires intentional design and critical awareness. Students work with generative image, video, and multimodal tools while examining how these systems shape authorship, aesthetics, and power. Early modules introduce foundational concepts such as training data, bias, authorship, and algorithmic influence. These shared conceptual anchors allow students at different academic stages to engage in layered ways, contributing diverse insights while working toward common learning goals.

Instruction is structured around three scaffolded projects that move from exploration to authorship to public-facing communication. Early projects emphasize experimentation and inquiry, allowing students to test tools within defined constraints while observing their limitations. Subsequent projects demand increasing conceptual clarity, ethical reasoning, and intentional design decisions. Graduate students are challenged to operate at a meta-level, articulating frameworks and critiques, while undergraduate students build foundational fluency and confidence through guided practice. This vertical integration fosters mentorship, peer learning, and shared accountability across experience levels.

The culmination of the course is a public exhibition titled Generative Sparks, which serves as both a learning milestone and a platform for community engagement. The exhibition features work developed across all three major projects and invites audiences to reflect on authorship, ethics, and creativity in the age of generative AI. By situating student work in a public context, the exhibition reinforces professional standards and positions students as contributors to broader cultural conversations around emerging technology.

Reflection functions as a central design practice throughout the course. Students regularly document their processes through written and visual reflections that examine how AI influences their thinking, choices, and creative identity. These reflections support metacognition and allow students to trace their evolving relationship with generative tools. Peer critique further deepens this process by encouraging dialogue across experience levels, fostering a studio culture grounded in mutual learning and critical exchange.

Pedagogically, the course integrates experiential learning, studio critique, and inquiry-based practice. Students learn through cycles of making, testing, revising, and reflecting. Guided constraints prevent overreliance on automation and encourage engagement with the affordances and limitations of generative systems. Faculty guidance emphasizes authorship, accountability, and ethical responsibility, reinforcing that AI-generated work remains a human-centered practice shaped by values and intent.

A significant outcome of the course is a shift in student mindset. Many enter viewing AI as either a threat to creativity or a shortcut to production. Over time, students develop a more nuanced understanding of human–AI collaboration, recognizing both its possibilities and its limitations. This shift is evident in reflective writing, process documentation, and increasingly sophisticated visual outcomes that demonstrate intentionality rather than automation.

The course has produced strong and visible outcomes. Students generate portfolio-ready work that demonstrates conceptual depth, technical experimentation, and reflective authorship. Projects have been exhibited publicly through Generative Sparks and shared in academic and professional contexts. Students report increased confidence navigating emerging technologies, and many leverage coursework for internships, interdisciplinary collaborations, and advanced research.

Beyond individual outcomes, VICO 3456/5456 functions as a transferable pedagogical model. Its structure, assignments, and assessment strategies have informed broader curricular conversations around AI literacy, ethical design, and experiential learning. By bringing undergraduate and graduate students into a shared learning environment, the course models how design education can cultivate mentorship, complexity, and critical engagement across levels of expertise.

Ultimately, VICO 3456/5456 positions design education as a space for intentional experimentation rather than technological reaction. Through its vertically integrated structure and the public-facing exhibition Generative Sparks, the course demonstrates how educators can guide students to engage emerging technologies thoughtfully, creatively, and responsibly within contemporary design practice.

Durado_Documentation__Evidence

Biography

Adonis Durado is an Associate Professor in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University, where he teaches design, storytelling, and generative AI–driven creative practice. His work centers on human-centered pedagogy, ethical technology use, and the thoughtful integration of emerging tools into design education. He developed one of the university’s first AI-first courses, positioning generative systems as collaborators in learning rather than replacements for human judgment. His teaching emphasizes reflection, authorship, and critical inquiry, preparing students to engage creative technologies with intention, accountability, and agency. Durado’s pedagogy bridges theory and practice through experiential, project-based learning and community engagement. His work has contributed to curricular innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of AI literacy frameworks in design education. He is also an award-winning designer and writer whose research explores authorship, visual culture, and the cultural implications of artificial intelligence.


This project was the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Teaching.

Shearing Layers: A Framework for Reframing Contemporary Graphic Design Education

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.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.2: Annual CAA Conference 2026 (In-person only) on Thursday, February 19, 2026.

The Empathy Points Method: Integrating Identity and Bias Recognition Into Design Education

Leveraging the diverse experiences of design teams.

Andrea Hempstead
Associate Professor
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

This presentation reviews practical tools and methods for guiding students through an understanding of identity and bias definitions and connecting these concepts to the design process. Delivered in a workshop format, the approach combines identity reflection with design methods that foreground empathy and critical awareness. A central focus is the Empathy Points method, which challenges conventional assumptions about empathy in design. This method argues that genuine empathy requires shared lived experiences, applying this idea through the identification of overlapping social identity traits between designers and users. By leveraging the diverse experiences of design teams, group members can establish more authentic connections with users and increased inclusive solutions, particularly in contexts where students lack direct access to end users.

The workshop also emphasizes how implicit bias shapes design interpretations. Participants are guided through an examination of their biases in relation to their social identities. They assess how these align or diverge from user identities and connect the impact of user identities to the design problem. The process concludes with creating a strategic plan, by using team empathy points effectively while continuously checking for bias throughout the design process. Workshop outcomes will be revealed via classroom examples, results, and student reflection.

The integration of identity, empathy, and bias into design education equips students with tools to critically engage with users’ perspectives while remaining mindful of their own positionalities. By framing empathy as relational and grounded in shared experience, the Empathy Points method expands the potential for inclusive and socially responsive design practices.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.2: Annual CAA Conference 2026 (In-person only) on Thursday, February 19, 2026.

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.

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships

A practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio.

Meaghan Dee
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech

Jessica Meharry
Visiting Assistant Professor
Institute of Design at Illinois Tech

Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships is a book for design students and educators seeking to integrate real-world client projects into their curriculum. Born from extensive research, interviews, and the authors’ years of experience running a successful student-run design studio, this book offers practical advice, tools, and frameworks for navigating the complexities of client-based learning.

The studio is a core strand of design education, and working with real clients is one of the most valuable ways for students to develop their professional design practice skills.

The book is a practical guide to working on client and community work in the design studio – how to collaborate with and connect to communities, find and retain clients, and manage real-world design problems.

The book is structured in four parts:

  1. Why: Establishes the pedagogical value of client projects, emphasizing their role in fostering industry connections, experiential learning, and student empowerment.
  2. What: Focuses on the practicalities of community engagement, client selection, and structuring studio experiences to achieve learning goals.
  3. Who: Examines the roles and responsibilities of students, faculty, and clients, highlighting the importance of effective communication, collaboration, and articulating value.
  4. How: Offers guidance on launching and managing a student-run design studio, including financial management, operational logistics, and planning for long-term sustainability.

This is the book Jessica and Meaghan wish existed when they were thinking about starting a design studio and took over a design studio (respectively). This book addresses a critical gap in design pedagogy literature by providing a comprehensive resource for educators seeking to bridge the gap between academia and professional practice.

Key contributions include:

  • Practical Guidance: Offers concrete advice and actionable strategies for implementing client-based projects, from finding clients to managing budgets to assessing student learning.
  • Diverse Perspectives: Incorporates insights from numerous interviews with design educators, students, and industry professionals, representing a range of institutional contexts and pedagogical approaches.
  • Emphasis on Ethics and Community Engagement: Provides a framework for ethical client interactions, emphasizing the importance of designing with communities rather than for them.
  • Focus on Student Empowerment: Highlights the role of client projects in fostering student agency, leadership, and professional development. (Chapter 3 of this book also features Najla Mouchrek’s Model for Empowerment in the Transition to Adulthood)
  • Support for Student-Run Studios: Offers dedicated chapters on launching, managing, and sustaining student-led design studios.

This book aims for design educators to:

  • Integrate client-based projects into their courses.
  • Develop effective strategies for finding and managing clients.
  • Create meaningful learning experiences that foster student growth and professional preparedness.
  • Build and sustain successful student-run design studios.
  • Promote ethical and socially responsible design practice.

The book also hopes to empower design students to:

  • Confidently work with “real world” clients and community partners.
  • Be more prepared to graduate and enter industry.
  • Understand dynamics of client interactions.

By providing students and educators with the necessary tools and knowledge, this book will contribute to a more engaged, impactful, and relevant design education that better prepares students for the challenges and opportunities of the professional world.

Methodology

The book used a mixed-methods approach, combining:

  • Literature Review: Synthesized existing research on design pedagogy and experiential learning.
  • Surveys: Gathered quantitative data on client-based practices in design programs across the country and around the world.
  • Interviews: Collected qualitative insights from design educators, students, and industry professionals.
  • Case Studies: Via interview, examined successful examples of client projects and student-run studios.
  • Authors’ Expertise: Leveraged the authors’ years of experience in design education and running a student-led studio.

Overall, this book represents a culmination of the authors’ passion for design education and their commitment to preparing students for successful and meaningful careers. It is a resource they wish they had when they first embarked on their journey. They hope it will serve as a valuable guide for fellow educators and their students and contribute to a more vibrant and impactful design education landscape.

Chapter 1Download

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards runner-up recipient in the category of Scholarship: Publication.

Biography

Meaghan A. Dee is an Associate Professor and Chair of Graphic Design at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Her work centers on connecting communities through storytelling and immersive design experiences and by fostering collaboration between students, faculty, and industry professionals. Meaghan sees design as a tool for engagement, communication, and innovation.
In addition to her role at Virginia Tech, Meaghan is a docent emeritus for the Letterform Archive in San Francisco and served as co-chair for the AIGA Design Educators Community (AIGA DEC) Executive Board—a group dedicated to supporting and connecting design educators across the world. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jessica Meharry is a designer, researcher, and educator who develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. She teaches courses in the politics of design, critical contexts of design, and the philosophical context of design research. Jessica received a PhD from the Institute of Design (ID), an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a bachelor of science from Northwestern University. Jessica’s cross-disciplinary research interests focused on designing for equitable economies, strategizing processes that frame equity as an innovation driver, and developing inclusive design management pedagogy. Jessica’s current research projects include the development and testing of an anti-oppressive design framework focused on information and communication technologies. She is also a collaborator on a research project led by Hillary Carey, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, in which they’re using design methods to explore anti-racist futures in organizational contexts.

Pedagogical Workshops and Collaboration

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.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Mining for Ideas: Collaborative Collages as Spaces of Opportunity

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.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design

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.

Centered_DIDownload

This project was the 2023 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Scholarship: Publication.

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.

Analyzing Local Graphic Design History: A Pedagogical Approach

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.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.2: Annual CAA Conference 2024 (Hybrid) on Thursday, February 15, 2024.

Sustainable Design Thinking: Changing the Design Process

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.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 7.1: Oakland University, MI on October 17, 2020.