social design – Design Incubation

Social Design: Bridging Two Continents Through Collaboration and Innovation

Students understand their role as designers/co-creators/catalysts within a global context to explore the problem of sustainability

Design Teaching Award Winner

Neeta Verma
Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

NVerma_EvidenceofOutcome_DIA_2021 Download

The aim of this advanced-level course in Social Design was for students to understand their role as designers/co-creators/catalysts within a global context to explore the problem of sustainability. This multi-disciplinary partnership brought together students from the University of Notre Dame (UND) and the National Institute of Design(NID) in India. The cohort of 14 students traveled approximately 17,000 miles, with 19 weeks of working together (3 weeks in India, 2 weeks in the US, and 14 weeks of working virtually). With an emphasis on problem solving and innovation, the learning goal was to examine the problem of sustainability through a cross-cultural prism, in India and the United States— two very divergent socio-economic constructs. The project was funded through a $30,000 grant awarded to the lead faculty. This semester-long collaboration was to help students develop an understanding of social constructs within two divergent economies and look through globally re-contextualized perspectives at the singular issue of sustainability. The course was designed as a solution solution-finding process for a singular problem, where students not only to sought a solution but gained a deeper understanding of complex cultural, social, and economic environments within which design solutions often need to find congruity. The students gained both a depth of understanding and breadth of social competency of the frame of reference within which their solutions were expected to function.

PEDAGOGY:

The course followed an 8-step pedagogical process used in the Social Design class.

Empathy: the understanding the needs, attitudes, and pre-dispositions of a people with whom the designers are working

Immersion: Daily engagement and involvement over a period of time

Awareness: Observations and knowledge gathering of a problem area within its cultural context

Definition: Determining the scope of research and inquiry

Engagement: Understanding stakeholders and their interconnectedness

Synthesis and problem framing: Structuring the context within which the problem is being defined

Design interventions: Collaborative encounters that facilitate solution-finding at the grassroots

Integration: Ensuring that the solution embeds itself within the context from which the problem emerged

OUTCOMES:

A total of six projects were completed. Of those, the one listed below is being showcased: Sustainable Packaging by Kacey Hengesbach (UND), Anupam Garg (NID)

The project looked at packaging trends in the current fruit and vegetable markets supply chain to document non-sustainable packaging trends and explore ways to replace existing packaging solutions with biodegradable alternatives in India.

PROFICIENCIES:

The students developed cultural competencies by discovering ways of navigating new environments. Within research students were introduced to ethnographic research; and empirical investigation through interviews, photo and film documentation, logging daily activity, contextual analysis, and partnering with local individuals working in the supply chains to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges. The project framework for the project focused primarily on a critical understanding of convergence and divergence in problem-framing that helped students position their research in two diametrically different geographies. In some cases, the research yielded similar results between the two contexts and in others, there was great divergence.

RESEARCH PROCESS:

The following steps were used within the design process:

1. Problem Definition

Researching statistics that quantitatively describe the acute problem of plastic consumption and the proportion that is specifically used for fruit and vegetable packaging. Also examined was the per capita consumption of plastics in the United States and India as they compare to world consumption.

2. Researching the market

Students researched the time and distance fruits and vegetables travel to get to markets. They examined the complexity of supply chains and journeys of fruits and vegetables as well as the needs that packaging had to fill along those journeys before arriving at the local wholesale markets.

3. Field research, interviews, and photo documentation

Over two weeks, students visited the wholesale and retail markets to understand the various needs of the vendors and where plastics were replacing traditional materials.

4. Exploring material

Students explored traditionally used regional materials like bulrush, banana, bamboo, and jute but ultimately chose the water hyacinth, a plant that is predominantly found across the world. It has both pliability and high strength in its various stages of drying.

5. Exploring materiality

Students explored the pliability and the tensile strength of the water hyacinth in its various stages of drying. They also examined how different surfaces could be created during each stage of drying to develop surfaces from soft (for protection) to hard (for support and bearing weight) to accommodate the varying needs of the markets.

6. The Design Intervention

For the final design intervention, the proposed solution was a packaging solution that offered a cradle to cradle method made out of naturally biodegradable materials, specifically using water hyacinth in combination with jute and bulrush. The packaging system was customizable, stackable, usable for display, reusable for future use, compactable, and transportable.

7. Project Design Impact

Environment: Creating a product that benefits the environment by ridding it of an invasive species without the use of harmful chemicals.

Economy: Adding income to rural areas that participate in manufacturing.

Culture: Supporting existing regional crafts and using their skills to create sustainable packaging solutions.

COURSE IMPACT:

The course due to its travel component and the complexity of the problem exposed students to contexts that they had never experienced before expanding the classroom globally. Challenges included differences in climate, language, and cultural etiquettes. The academic challenges lay in navigating the research as the students immersed themselves in unfamiliar environments. On the other hand, experiencing the richness of a whole new culture and renegotiating the sense of the self within a new context helped broaden perspectives. The opportunity provided an incredibly enriching experience for design students to immerse themselves within a new social, cultural, and economic order. The experience enabled the design students to gain global perspectives about the implications of design and the impact it can have. Above all, with social innovation at the core of design education today, this experience built confidence and resiliency within students as they situated themselves within diverse contexts and collaborated with others to manage complexity at both global and local scales.

Neeta Verma is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame and situates herself within the porous discipline of Visual Communication Design. Her areas of research and teaching focus on social equity and justice. She teaches Social Design at the intersection of social innovation and collaborative practices, and Visualization of Data that investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of representation. Her current research, supported by a prestigious grant, examines youth violence. She received her MFA from Yale and currently holds Faculty Fellowships at the Center for Social Concerns, the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies, and the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame. She is the recipient of several awards including Graphis, Core77, A’Design Awards, and International Design Awards. She has presented her research at both national and international conferences. She serves on the SEGD Academic Task Force and CAA Committee on Design.

Diseño y Diáspora Podcast

Service Award Winner
Jury Commendation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Service: Expanding the Canon

This is a podcast on social design for the Spanish and Portuguese speaking community. We publish 2 episodes per week. We have 10000 listeners per month which is currently the most popular design podcast in Spanish.

We have published 180 interviews with selected professionals working in the field of design, mostly in the area of social innovation. The topics on which we focus covers the contribution of design to education, development, health, sustainability, security and public administration. In addition, we have numerous episodes dedicated to communities of designers supporting informal education and designers doing a collaboration with indigenous communities.

The aims of this podcast are to connect researchers and designers in the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora with those communities living in their home countries and to bring together a variety of design researchers and practitioners. We connect designers interested in social change, while speaking and understanding the same languages, yet living in different parts of the world.

We gather and spread social design materials through our Instagram accou nt and our website, disenoydiaspora.org. For example, there are many listeners to our podcasts that regularly make requests for academic papers and publications that we share on our Instagram page. We have many thematic lists that can be accessed via Spotify and our website.

We also collaborate intensively with professors in universities that have used the podcast in their classes. On our blog, we have written four articles documenting this collaboration and the possible uses of the podcast in design education. At the moment we are exploring the possibility to do a series of books based on compilations of interviews done for the podcast. We are collaborating on this endeavor with researchers in the fields of health and public administration as the first two books that we will publish are on design and health and the contribution of design to government. Under Mariana’s initiative, we have gathered a group of designers doing podcasts in Spanish. Now we are 25 in this group and we are developing as a collective and considering our direction of growth. Mariana collaborated with another podcaster from this group to write an article about the state of the art of the podcast on design in Spanish.

This podcast is a team effort. Andrés Fechtenholz, Julian Pereyra, Antonio Zimmermann and Mercedes Salgado are key members. Andrés and Julian are sound designers and co-producers, Antonio does the original music and Mercedes is the community manager of Instagram.

Mariana Salgado is a senior designer and a researcher working in service and interaction design.

Currently, she works in Inland design, an innovation and design lab at the MInistry of the Interior: Inland design. This lab used to be part of the Finnish Immigration Service where she worked for two and a half years, leading it. In addition, she currently produces and hosts Diseño y diáspora, a podcast on design for social change (in Spanish and Portuguese).

Previously, she has worked in cultural heritage and global health projects always under a participatory framework. Her partners varied from project to project but the setting is always transcultural and transdisciplinary. She has worked in collaboration with different communities such as vulnerable groups of immigrants, professionals in memory organizations, global health experts, and rural citizens in developing countries.

She has a doctorate degree from the Media department (2009) and master degree from the Design Department at the University of Art and Design Helsinki (2002). Her bachelor degree is in Industrial Design from the University of Buenos Aires (1998).

Andrés Fechtenholz is a film director, storyteller, and podcast producer. After 15 years as a cameraman and editor, he gained experience and knowledge in new media exploring new ways of telling stories. He developed his career at the rhythm of the digitization of media’s tools and content. He works with new technologies, hybrid formats, in convergent companies. The starting point was a degree as a podcast specialist in cultural industries in the digital convergence era at the UNTREF (University of Tres de Febrero). He is a co-producer and sound designer in Diseño y diáspora.

Julián Pereyra studies music and sound production at the ORT Institute. He works as a functional analyst in the Secretary of Public Innovation. He is a sound designer in Diseño y diáspora podcast.

Antonio Zimmerman is a composer, teacher, and entrepreneur. He is currently working as a Professor at UNTREF (University of Tres de Febrero). As a composer and sound designer, he makes music and sounds for video games and media. He created the music for Diseño y Diáspora. Also, he developed Oir, an award-winning music game for iOS.

Mercedes Salgado Moralejo is a feminist anthropologist. She is the community manager for Diseño y diáspora. In her free time, she enjoys playing football or learning a new language.

Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2020 recipient

State of Flux

Natacha Poggio
Assistant Professor
University of Houston Downtown

The climate change debate is divided into two major sides. One argues that the current global warming is caused by human factors while the other side insists it is occurring because of natural forces. Scientists around the world have conducted research that shows human activities contribute the most to today’s climate change. Human activities like the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture and changes in land-use patterns contribute to tip the Earth’s energy balance by trapping more heat, leading to global warming. The increased temperature fluctuations on Earth lead to more frequent extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires) which are another indication that climate change is, in fact, a reality.

“State of Flux” is a poster design series on climate change issues, showcasing our planet in a state of flux. My presentation will address how students of different illustration skill levels learn about systems-thinking, design principles and the importance of raising awareness of natural and human interventions that led to climate change.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 5.2: CAA 2019 Conference New York on Thursday, February 14, 2019.

LEAP Dialogues: The Educators Guide

Service Award Winner

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

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

Jennifer May
Director, Designmatters
ArtCenter College of Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughtful Social Impact Through Scaffolded Design Methods and Well-Time Fieldwork

A spring 2018 design studio, case study—how to attain that balance of a good quality course and meaningful social design.

Cynthia Lawson
Associate Professor of Integrated Design
Parsons, The New School

Alik Mikaelian
MFA Transdisciplinary Design Candidate
DEED Lab Research Fellow
Parsons, The New School

Devanshi Sihare
Design Strategist

Megan Willy
MFA Transdisciplinary Design Candidate
Parsons, The New School

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest from the design academy in running projects and courses on design and social impact. The challenge remains, however, to have students get enough exposure on relevant competencies in the 15-week semester.

This presentation discusses a spring 2018 design studio as a case study in how to attain that balance of a good quality course and meaningful social design. Specific methods of both course development and delivery as well as conducting design research are discussed. The ultimate stakeholders of this course’s projects were in a different country and not easily accessible, adding a particular complexity.

The first part of the semester included exercises such as an Ecosystem Map and the Business Model Canvas. Students developed a Theory of Change placing special emphasis on the assumptions they were making about their stakeholders, which were clarified during the fieldwork research which took place in Guatemala over Spring Break.

The second part of the semester included expert interviews and guest visits, to support each project in becoming as realistic as possible.

We argue that while the design process is often used as the central point of discussion for studios, there are, in fact, other variables such as the weekly structure, the timing of fieldwork, and the explicit scaffolding of learning, which can yield more effective social impact design. The key is getting enough exposure on relevant competencies dealing with social impact design into the 15 week semester.

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

Teaching the Truth About Eric Gill in the Age of #MeToo: A Classroom Case Study

I believe we have a responsibility as educators to provide young people with honest information so that they are empowered to make choices that reflect their values.

Dave Gottwald
Assistant Professor
University of Idaho

When I was in graduate school, it was occasionally remarked that widely revered English artist Eric Gill was “a bit odd.” However, it was not until I had to prep a new History of Typography course that I realized this was a euphemism for “monster.” I knew that his eponymous san serif is essentially the Helvetica of the UK—you can find everywhere from British Rail and the BBC to the Church of England and many children’s books. Gill Sans is the face that advises all to KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

The truth is that Eric Gill molested two of his daughters from their teen years onward. He exposed himself to children and to women who worked for him. He maintained a sexual relationship with his sister for most of his life, and he even had carnal relations with the family dog. We know this from Gill’s own journals, which were brought to light in a definitive biography published in 1989. Yet in the two design history texts assigned for my course, one is completely silent about Gill’s crimes, and the other glosses over it.

I believe we have a responsibility as educators to provide young people with honest information so that they are empowered to make choices that reflect their values. Even though I teach at a rural campus in a conservative area, my students were more prepared to hear and talk about Gill’s crimes than I had anticipated. I will present a case study outlining the material presented, including highlights from our lively discussion about what responsibility one has in using a typeface. I will share the posters they designed about the subject, and quote from their written responses—both about Eric Gill and his typefaces, and their assessment of how I delivered the material.

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

Developing Citizen Designers: Our Civic Responsibility

Social Design is the practice of design where the primary motivation is to promote positive social change within society. As the design industry evolves, so too must design education.

Social Design is the practice of design where the primary motivation is to promote positive social change within society. As the design industry evolves, so too must design education. Developing Citizen Designers is a compilation of case studies written by design educators to address the notion that design, and the teaching of design, can empower students to play a more an active role in improving the way they live, interact and communicate with each other and their audiences. My presentation will address how social design pedagogy can be developed to address concrete social needs utilizing strategies like design thinking, collaborative learning and participatory design process.

Elizabeth Resnick is a Professor Emerita, former chair of Graphic Design and current part-time faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts. She earned her B.F.A. / M.F.A. in Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

Professor Resnick is also an active design curator having organized 7 comprehensive design exhibitions, the last 4 on socio-political graphic design: The Graphic Imperative: International Posters of Peace, Social Justice and The Environment 1965–2005; Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010; Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age: 2001–2012 and Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-based Inequality, Violence and Discrimination (2016) investigating gender-based inequalities deeply entrenched in every global society.

Her publications include catalogs for the exhibitions, plus Developing Citizen Designers, Bloomsbury Academic (2016), Design for Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics, John Wiley & Sons Publishers (2003) and Graphic Design: A Problem-Solving Approach to Visual Communication, Prentice-Hall Publications” (1984). She is currently working on ‘The Social Design Reader’ for Bloomsbury Academic (2019).

Elizabeth Resnick
Professor Emerita, part-time faculty, Graphic Design
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
621 Huntington Avenue, T617
Boston, Massachusetts 02115 USA

Elizabeth.Resnick@massart.edu

BMORE Than The Story

Teaching Award Winner

Audra Buck-Coleman
Associate Professor
University of Maryland College Park

The death of Freddie Gray and his treatment by police sparked anger, protest, and violence in Baltimore during April 2015. Mass media implicated area youth in the crime and destruction, whether they committed it or not. Their overriding narrative was pejorative and full of scorn. Students at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts (AFSIVA), a public high school in West Baltimore, lost control of their narrative. BMORE Than The Story brought together art and design students from AFSIVA and University of Maryland (UMD) to collaboratively produce an exhibit response to the Baltimore Uprising. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian affiliate, hosted the exhibit, which opened during the one-year anniversary of Gray’s death and closed in September 2016.

The project was successful for its end product—the exhibit— as well as its curricular structure, which allowed students to create meaningful relationships and delivered multiple “teachable moments” over two consecutive semesters. This timeframe enabled the students to build a sense of community and have rich conversations about the issues at hand before diving into the exhibit’s potentially divisive issues. Almost 60 students—24 from UMD and 35 from AFSIVA—participated. I know of no other undergraduate project that has had students co-design at such scale and duration.

UMD students learned how to research, synthesize and create design about complex issues. They researched the death of Freddie Gray, police brutality, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and Baltimore’s history of race relations, economy, and culture. They then connected these findings to larger issues: academic achievement, incarceration rates, political power structures, and the level of violence present in these communities. They produced information designs visualizing their results. This heavy content was difficult to unpack and yet critical to understanding the AFSIVA students’ challenges and opportunities. With today’s information overload and plethora of wicked problems, clarity and synthesis are essential. The UMD students developed research techniques and honed their design skills to communicate and unpack a wicked problem lurking in their back yard.

These students also co-designed compelling visuals that effectively communicated their most salient messages. In a post-project survey, the AFSIVA students said the exhibit represents the issues that are most important to them (100%), their friends (89%), their school (83%), and Baltimore (94%). Through this project they also gained a better understanding of how they might leverage art to address important issues (88%) and learned to collaborate more effectively (98%). Finally, they said that because of this collaboration, they feel like more people cared about them and their struggle for justice.

This project exemplifies and advances a critical need for social design curricula: ways to incorporate assessment mechanisms. We are able to quantify and qualify the impact of this project. Our research results indicate that the project had a significant, positive impact upon the AFSIVA community. Findings can enrich future social design research and curricula.

BMOREThanTheStory-DesignIncubation-F

Audra Buck-Coleman is an Associate Professor and director of the graphic design program at University of Maryland College Park. She has written, art directed, curated, designed, authored, led, and collaborated on numerous design projects including Sticks + Stones, an international multi-university collaborative graphic design project that investigates stereotyping and social issues. Her research focuses on social impact design, assessment mechanisms, design pedagogy and design’s role in culture, identities, and representation. She has led students through 16 whole-class collaborative projects, seven of which were with off-campus stakeholders and four of which were with on-campus ones. Seven addressed issues of underrepresented communities. One was an international collaboration with students from China, Germany, Turkey, and the United States. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelors of Journalism from the University of Missouri. She is currently pursing a PhD in sociology to connect to social design.

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2017.

Addressing Racial Disparity in Design Education

Audra Buck-Coleman
Associate Professor
Graphic Design Program Director
University of Maryland College Park

How do you engage undergraduates in complex, conflict-ridden issues such as social injustice, racism and police brutality? How can these students co-design meaningful objects and messages around such topics that resonate with its stakeholders and community members? Finally, how can you know if these efforts have been productive and successful? BMORE Than The Story offers one case study of how to answer these questions.

In April 2015, the death of Freddie Gray and his treatment by police sparked anger, protests and violence in Baltimore. People from President Obama to the mayor of Baltimore to countless others called the protesters “thugs” and strongly denounced the Uprising and the destruction taking place. The overriding media narrative was pejorative and full of scorn. West Baltimore schools and their students, including those at nearby Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts (AFSIVA), a public high school, were implicated in the crime and destruction whether they committed it or not. These students lost control of how they wanted to be defined and regarded.

BMORE Than The Story brought together AFSIVA students and graphic design seniors at University of Maryland College Park to co-design an exhibit that would address critical issues in their community: racial disparities, identity, disenfranchisement, equity, oppression, policing and self-agency. The students reclaimed their narrative and voiced counterpoints to the previous year’s one-sided media portrayal. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History in Culture in Baltimore, a Smithsonian affiliate, hosted the exhibit April through September 2016.

In addition, project authors incorporated qualitative and quantitative research to assess the project’s effectiveness. Results showed the high school students were empowered by the project and deemed the exhibit highly successful. Lessons include ways to engage students on difficult topics as well as ways to measure the effectiveness of such a project.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 3.2: Parsons Integrated Design on Thursday, Feb 16, 2017.

Design Teaching Award Winner

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Service Award Winner

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Teaching Award Winner

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