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Lisa M. Abendroth

Professor and Coordinator, Communication Design, Metropolitan State College of Denver

From the Ground Up: How design in the public interest is engaging the requirement for social justice, economic development and environmental conservation

Lisa M. Abendroth is a Professor and Coordinator of the Communication Design program at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. She earned a BFA in Communication Design from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1991 and an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Seeking a balance between design research and classroom pedagogy, Lisa works across disciplines in order to embrace community-based design focused on issues of social equity towards marginalized audiences. She is currently collaborating on an interdisciplinary project in the public interest entitled SEED: Social, Economic, Environmental Design. SEED proposes an evaluative tool for the diverse disciplines of design, promoting a transparent dialogue between designers and communities that supports triple-bottom line goals of social justice, economic development and environmental conservation. In her professional practice, Lisa promotes projects for culture and collaboration through her firm Culture/Language/Dialogue. Lisa has presented, exhibited, and published nationally and internationally.

Helen Armstrong

Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Miami University

What does it mean to design for participatory culture?

(Co-presented with Zvezdana Stojmirovic)
Design increasingly lives in the actions of its users. As users actively participate in the creation and distribution of content, we see a transformation of the role of designer, from producers of finite products to makers of interactive platforms that require user content for completion.

As professors at two undergraduate design programs, we have been experimenting with new modes of collaboration. We’ve explored modular work structures and the practical, theoretical and ethical issues they bring up. We believe that by welcoming user participation, designers can open their work to surrounding locales/ideas rather then interpreting and delivering top down client messages.

Our presentation includes a discussion of professional and student work. Each project considered utilizes evolving forms of production/distribution (Lulu, Flickr, VIMEO, Googledocs, Amazon, and Etsy.) This technology opens design up to multiple voices. Ultimately our presentation explores the shift in our field toward a more democratic expression of local messages through participatory design.

Helen Armstrong is a designer and an educator based in Oxford, Ohio. She has an MA in English literature, an MA in Publications Design and an MFA in Graphic Design. Currently she is an assistant professor of graphic design at Miami University. In addition to teaching, Armstrong also works as principal and creative director of her company, Strong Design. Her design work—for such clients as Sage College of Albany, US Internetworking, and New College of Florida—has won regional and international awards. Her work has been included in numerous publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, including How International Design Annual, The Complete Typographer, The Typography Workbook and Design Elements. Her first book, Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field (Princeton Architectural Press), came out in spring 2009.

Alyson Beaton

Assistant Professor, Columbia College Chicago

Re-Claiming Leadership: The designer’s overdue response_ability.

(Co-presented with Gary Rozanc)
Designers have the ability to see the global view surrounding a given situation and translate that view for others to understand by combining seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts into a new whole. This is why designers are effective communicators: they are able to form instantly understandable visual metaphors for situations that are difficult to understand. This attribute, excellent for communicating complex messages, is particularly powerful when used to locate connections between needs and resources in local, regional, national and global communities. Design education has to reclaim its response_ability to students by fundamentally changing design programs from the foundations level through senior level portfolio classes to create leaders prepared to serve society in meaningful ways utilizing design strategies.

Alyson Beaton’s practice includes publications and experimentation within the graphic realm with consumerism and its relationship to the designed object. Her artist’s books include: Sunny, Consumed, Baby Book, First Word Cards, Grow: An Environmentally Friendly Book and the upcoming Imagine, residing in artist’s book collections including: Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection (Chicago), Printed Matter (NYC), Collette (Paris), and are distributed globally. Alyson received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kristian Bjørnard

Designer and Sustainabilitist, Baltimore, MD

Principles of Vernacular Design (and their application today)

Contemporary designers, upon hearing the word “vernacular,” often conjure images of hand-painted signs and quaint candy wrappers. But the vernacular is more than a collection of quotable styles and false nostalgia—it is way of thinking. Vernacular objects progressed through a cautious, evolving methodology at the foundation of which were the principles of constraint, durability, and thrift. Incorporating these principles in new and inventive ways will help guide our modern-day designs towards the sustainable. 

Kristian Bjørnard is a designer and sustainabilitist who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. In May of 2009 Bjørnard completed his MFA in graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where his work investigated the question “what does sustainable graphic design look like?” When not managing his freelance practice and calculating the carbon footprint of laser printing. Bjørnard's time is divided between bicycles, obscure music, and frequenting farmer's markets. More of Kristian's writing, research, and design around the topic of sustainability can be found at www.betterlivingthroughsustainability.com

Clinton Carlson

Faculty, University of Northern Colorado

PCollaborative Design of Health Communications in Micro-Community Settings

The design of health, safety or community messages for small community settings such as schools, corporations, immigrant or rural populations can be problematic due to budget, cultural or organizational issues.

This presentation explores non-traditional design methods that pull from participatory, human-centered and “post design” theories and influenced by the fields of health communication and community development. These methods explore a shift in focus from artefact design to the design of tools for community use. 

Attendees will be challenged to consider how the field of design engages the unique issues faced by non-profit, government or educational organizations including: ownership, cross-cultural communication, utilization of community assets, replication and budget. 

Clinton currently teaches part-time at the University of Northern Colorado and serves as the Chief Creative Strategist for HuebnerPetersen Marketing and Branding, He has over 10 years of design experience in a variety of settings in the U.S. and Canada. He received a Masters of Design degree in Visual Communication and Design from the University of Alberta, Canada and has held adjunct teaching positions at the University of Alberta, the University of Nebraska at Kearney and now the University of Northern Colorado. His design interests include information design, typography, brand identity and design methods that integrate participatory, community development and health education theories in addressing the challenges faced by small-scale communication settings such as school, immigrant populations or rural communities.

Laura Chessin

Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University

Design and Public Engagement: A Visual Dialogue on Predatory Lending

Talk description coming soon!

Laura Chessin is an associate professor of the Graphic Design Department in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. She teaches courses in typography, photography, and publication design as well as interdisciplinary courses in documentary studies. She writes about ways to incorporate current trends from other views of teaching into a re-visioning of current design pedagogy, with a particular interest in the early childhood pedagogy of the Reggio Emilia Approach. She is an editor for the online journal MULTI. Her work includes documentary work and oral histories as well as traditional graphic design. She plays Appalachian old time fiddle: sometimes in class.

Patricia Cué

Assistant Professor, Graphic Design, San Diego State University

Designers and Non-Designers: Visual Diversity and Inclusiveness in Graphic Design

Graphic design has asserted itself as a powerful tool for instituting the presence of transnational corporations through a universal style that consistently applies visual standards through strict guidelines. The uniformity that this practice has brought to visual culture threatens native and local forms of representation that have managed to survive in the form of subcultures and vernacular graphic design that exists and operates on the margins of the professional design practice. This presentation proposes a framework and design methodology that fosters cultural sustainability in design education through ethnographic field research, the participation of audiences, and the reinterpretation of vernacular forms of design. Personal explorations and a series of case studies in branding and visual identity systems show how, through shared and decentralized design solutions, designers can act as conduits for diversity and cultural sustainability.

Patricia Cué, a native from Mexico, completed her graduate degree at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland in 1992. Cué currently holds a full-time teaching position as Assistant Professor in graphic design at San Diego State University.

In her research and teaching, Cué explores cultural sustainability and ethics in the practice of graphic design. She has developed cultural identity projects for Mexican indigenous populations through the government of Puebla and Mexico City. She is currently working on a book documentation of vernacular wall painting for music in Mexico and a series of articles on cross-cultural branding. Her research has been published in the AIGA Voice Journal for Graphic Design, AIGA XCD, and in Fahrenheit Contemporary Art.

Cué’s professional life as a graphic designer is rooted in an intense exchange between Mexico and the United States and in fostering collaborations between the two.

Karina Cutler-Lake

Assistant Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Show me where you find yourself, and why it matters: Students map it out

For the past six years, Cutler-Lake has been teaching a project based on maps and cartography. The assignment was re-imagined in early 2008 after she attended a workshop, which challenged members of her institution’s faculty to revise existing course content to address issues of sustainability. In revising the course, she had expected to simply add a passionate lecture or two about better paper and ink choices, but ended up understanding that the relationship between sustainability and graphic design goes far above and beyond technical issues into something more personal: our relationships to the places we find ourselves in. We can learn to honor our unique geography by recording the experiences we have had there. Many of the maps that result from this assignment concern the nature of what it means to live somewhere, and how one may move around it.

Karina Cutler-Lake is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where she has taught graphic design for five years. She is graduate of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (B.A. 1996) and the University of Iowa (M.A. Library Science 1998, M.F.A. Art 2004). Maps have been a life-long interest of hers, and she sincerely hopes that the omnipresence of Google maps and smartphones doesn’t mean the end of the extemporaneous hand-drawn map.

Peter Fine

Assistant Professor, Graphic Design, New Mexico State University

SReBrand and ReNew (the total package)

In this case study the package is investigated for ways to increase efficiency, decrease waste and advocate for sustainable practices. Students reconsider their assumptions about the role of design both as agent of consumption and agent for social change, undoing damage, embracing new material options and rejecting standard issue design. The power of design to visualize complex environmental issues is demonstrated by infusing theory and criticism with studio practice.

Peter Fine is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at New Mexico State University. As a designer, writer and artist, he explores the role of Design past, present and future, seeking ways to integrate Design history, theory and criticism with practice. He is currently exploring ways to make environmental concerns a vital component of the Graphic Design curriculum at NMSU. He continues work on his book Graphic Design Reconsidered an introduction to the subject of green design for students and professionals.

Michael R. Gibson

Associate Professor, The University of North Texas

Educating Design Process Educators as a Means to Educate Ethically Minded Designers

One of the most crucial objectives in contemporary university-level communication design programs should be to educate design students to become very effective “design process educators.” This doesn’t mean that all of these students need to be educated to become professional design educators—it implies that they need to be confronted with projects that challenge them to teach themselves and a wide variety of people from outside design about how design processes can and do affect real economic, social, political and technological change. It also implies that these students should be immersed in learning situations that challenge them to articulate the “why” of what they do much more than the “how.” It encourages designing that requires empathy-building to function as a primary element of its ethical foundation, and it challenges students to design the processes that guide their decision-making so that they can begin to question answers rather than answer questions.

Michael R. Gibson teaches communication design studio courses, as well as design research, criticism, history, theory and interactive media at The University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design. He has managed a strategic design consultancy since 1987, which has afforded him several opportunities to attempt to bridge the divide between the practical demands of professional practice and the need to account for how the results of design processes affect and are affected by a broad spectrum of social, technological, economic, environmental and political issues. His original and applied research projects have addressed issues in freshwater conservation and management, the marriage of positivistic and aesthetic research paradigms in interactive visual systems design, children’s and women’s health, media ethics, and the introduction of design pedagogy in select middle school settings.

Suzanne Glover

Assistant Professor, Champlain College

Making the Future Present through Integrative Learning

Graphic design graduates today are faced with urgent and emerging challenges. They are being asked by both the public and private sector to solve social, governmental, environmental and cultural problems. To address these needs, it will be necessary for students to become broader visual thinkers and more holistic problem solvers. Education must turn to a truly integrative approach that goes beyond specialization and forges thinkers capable of arriving at the necessary creative solutions. Rather than training students to plug into the existing professional tracks of consumerism and corporate capitalism, graphic design programs could instead facilitate student engagement by raising the immanent cultural changes that are unfolding within their lifetimes. Our responsibility, now more than ever, is to foster an open eyed willingness to see transitions as they emerge and to provide students with the intellectual tools and creative understanding necessary to shape sustainable and socially responsible solutions.

Suzanne Glover is currently faculty at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, teaching design and integrated capstone projects. She is also Chair of Education for the Vermont chapter of the AIGA. As a practioner, her focus has been developing brand identity systems and both print and web communications for a range of regional and global companies. Suzanne completed her MFA at Towson University and her BFA at University of the Arts. Gordon Glover received his BFA in Film and Animation from the University of the Arts and his MFA in Digital Imaging at Maryland Institute College of Art. He’s taught in the Baltimore City Public Schools, received an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship, and was a founding board member of Wide Angle Community Media. His research examines the effects of consumer culture on democracy and childhood development. Gordon is faculty at Champlain and Burlington Colleges.

Jon Hunt

Assistant Professor, Kansas State University

Making realistic, tying down to the real world

(Co-presented with Jeremy Merrill)
Unlike generations past, today’s design students rely almost solely on computer technology for visual communication and inspiration.  This approach encourages students to disconnect themselves from the real exterior world. Land art is an art movement which requires one to physically engage with the landscape using materials readily found on site. By embracing land art installations in a graphics class, students have more incentive to engage with the outdoors and integrate that experience into their graphic design. When exposed to land art, students have the opportunity to explore, study, and question their designs.  Land art allows students to physically connect to the land while strengthening visual communication skills.  Making. Students are encouraged to create art which physically responds to their personal reflections about the place. Experiencing. Students repeatedly explore and study the physical nature of their built work. Representing. Students translate their experiences into graphic means.

Jon Hunt is an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University. He teaches in the Landscape Architecture / Community Regional Planning in the College of Architecture, Planning and Design. He teaches drawing and graphic design course and landscape architecture. His research interest include drawing, graphic design, and visual thinking. He previously worked as a professional graphic designer producing magazines and other publications.

Jeremy Merrill

Graduate Student, PhD program in College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University

Making realistic, tying down to the real world

(Co-presented with Jon Hunt)
Unlike generations past, today’s design students rely almost solely on computer technology for visual communication and inspiration.  This approach encourages students to disconnect themselves from the real exterior world. Land art is an art movement which requires one to physically engage with the landscape using materials readily found on site. By embracing land art installations in a graphics class, students have more incentive to engage with the outdoors and integrate that experience into their graphic design. When exposed to land art, students have the opportunity to explore, study, and question their designs.  Land art allows students to physically connect to the land while strengthening visual communication skills.  Making. Students are encouraged to create art which physically responds to their personal reflections about the place. Experiencing. Students repeatedly explore and study the physical nature of their built work. Representing. Students translate their experiences into graphic means.

Jeremy Merrill is a graduate student in the PhD program at Kansas State University in the College of Architecture, Planning and Design. His research interest include post‐occupancy evaluations of built landscapes and the use of rhetoric in graphic representations.

Pamela Catherine Napier

Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design, Herron School of Art and Design

A case study of Participatory Design Research

Talk description coming soon!

Professor Napier was appointed to the Visual Communication Design faculty at the Herron School of Art and Design in 2009.

Napier was graduated from Herron School of Art and Design with a BFA degree in Visual Communication Design, as well as an MFA in Visual Communication Design with focus on Design Thinking and Design Leadership.

Linda Felipez Nelson

Professor and chair, Department of Technology, Walla Walla University

Design class serves local community

Each year, our upper-division Graphics Services class, takes on one major design project as a community service opportunity. Students form a design team, elect leaders, accept individual assignments via detailed job descriptions, and solve design problems toward a meaningful, achievable solution for a local, non-profit organization. Having offered the class for five years, our experience has been that this arrangement can be win-win. Students perform within the parameters of a real world design assignment, acting as team members and team leaders—the participating organization receives a multitude of design solutions to meet their needs, all within their oft-times severely limited budgets. This presentation will be offered from two perspectives—that of the professor and of the student Art Director. Illustrations from this year’s class will be used to provide detailed information on how to deliver a class such as this.

Linda Felipez Nelson joined the Technology Department faculty at Walla Walla University in August of 1998. Her teaching expertise is in the area of Graphic Communications and she has also worked in the industry as a Graphic Designer and Prepress Operator. As department chair, her department duties include administration of three diverse program areas, staffing for all classes within the department, curriculum development, marketing and recruitment, and participation in the WWU governance system. Her career goal is to follow God's leading in academia and she is passionate about knocking down barriers to success for those around her.

When Linda can find a little free time she likes to spend it on her three favorite pastimes; spending time with family, motorcycling on her Harley-Davidson (often accompanied by her husband, Richard), and ballroom dancing.

Keith Owens

Associate Professor, Communication Design, The University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design

Ethical Education: Transforming a Maximum Into a New Minimum

The 2009 AIGA Living Principles for Design is the latest in a long line of idealistic declarations exhorting designers to engage with supererogatory design problems. Inevitably, many of these noble aspirations run aground on the harsh shores of pragmatic responses to the selfsame issues.

Living Principles and the sharp-edged realities cutting into its realization highlight the challenge design educators face as they help their students navigate the gulf separating maximum and minimum responses to increasingly complex moral landscapes. Key is providing aspiring designers with occasion to reconcile professional altruism and pragmatism.

This presentation will introduce one such opportunity: a graduate course in design ethics that allows students to refine their capacity for ethical analysis while quickening their moral imagination. Specifically it will contextualize the foundations upon which the course rests, the learning outcomes at which it aims and the teaching strategies it employs.

Keith Owens is an associate professor of communication design at the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design. Articles by him advocating and justifying the need for increased design responsibility have appeared in Design Principles & Practices, the International Journal of the Humanities, Industry and Higher Education, Design Philosophy Papers, Design Philosophy Politics and Visual Communications Quarterly. Professor Owens has also taught at Texas Tech University and worked as a designer, design director and design firm owner in Houston, San Francisco and Dallas. More recently as a design volunteer in Haiti for Partners of the Americas and the Association Nationale des Transformateur de Fruits (ANATRAF), Owens engages in socially focused design practice.

Elizabeth Resnick

Professor in Graphic Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston

Curating Socially Responsible Design Exhibitions: Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness posters 1985–2010

Posters have been a powerful force in shaping public opinion because propagandists have long known that visual impressions are extremely strong. The main objective of posters, as with other communications media is to influence attitudes, to sell a product or service or to change behavior patterns. The poster has played a special role in promoting AIDS awareness and safe sex education across cultures—different aims, messages, visual metaphors, and strategies have strongly influenced the content and design of AIDS posters. Regardless of cultural differences, AIDS posters are meaningful to viewers because they frequently draw on images from popular culture and express the living habits of people, which can vary in approach and style. As such, the messages in these posters can illuminate how public health educators and activists see themselves and their audiences, and how they conceptualize disease and define “normal” behavior within each given culture.

Elizabeth Resnick is a Professor in Graphic Design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. She holds both a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Graphic Design from RISD. Elizabeth is a passionate design curator who has developed and organized many design exhibitions starting in 1991. Her current exhibition “The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Social Justice and The Environment 1965–2005” with co-curators Chaz Maviyane-Davies and Frank Baseman, is still traveling within the U.S and abroad. A new exhibition “Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010” is currently being organized with co-curator Javier Cortes. Elizabeth’s book publications include Design for Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics for John Wiley & Sons (2003) and Graphic Design: A Problem-Solving Approach to Visual Communication, Prentice-Hall (1984). She writes commentaries, event reviews, and has interviewed prominent designers and design educators for international design journals.

Gary Rozanc

Assistant Professor, Columbia College Chicago

Re-Claiming Leadership: The designer’s overdue response_ability.

(Co-presented with Alyson Beaton)
Designers have the ability to see the global view surrounding a given situation and translate that view for others to understand by combining seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts into a new whole. This is why designers are effective communicators: they are able to form instantly understandable visual metaphors for situations that are difficult to understand. This attribute, excellent for communicating complex messages, is particularly powerful when used to locate connections between needs and resources in local, regional, national and global communities. Design education has to reclaim its response_ability to students by fundamentally changing design programs from the foundations level through senior level portfolio classes to create leaders prepared to serve society in meaningful ways utilizing design strategies.

Gary Rozanc, having worked in the design industry since 1996, decided to trade in the 9 to 5 work-a-day life for one blending civics, clients and students. This metamorphosis gave Gary the ability to focus on civic-minded projects such as Stories That Soar, Pavement Memoirs, Use A Concept, Epic and the upcoming Tips for Green. Gary’s design process was documented in A Designer’s Research Manual in 2007. Gary received his MFA from the University of Arizona. Gary is engaged in a design and teaching career as an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Joe Schwartz

Computer Graphics & Design Instructor, Spotswood High School, New Jersey

Rethinking the Scaffold: Making the Case for K-12 Design Education

Talk description coming sooon!

After graduating in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, Joe worked for a variety of studios, including a stint with Debbie Millman. After spending a decade with the National Basketball Association as an art director, he left in 2002 and was offered an opportunity to teach at his local high school. Getting his feet wet by teaching fine arts for two years, Joe was offered the chance to reboot the traditional graphics program and update it for the 21st century. He rewrote the curriculum to make it more a design-centered program, which is now in its fifth year and is highly successful. Joe’s writing has also been published nationally and he presents as often as possible on the subject of K-12 design education. He is also currently pursuing an MFA in Design through Marywood University. He currently resides in Spotswood, NJ with his wife Dawn and their two sons.

Andrew Shea

Graduate Student, Maryland Institute College of Art

Strategies of Design for Social Change

Some call it “design for the greater good.” Others call it “design for social change.” Most people skip a few syllables and call it “social design.” Whatever you want to call it, graphic designers are drawn to it because they want to use their skills to help people live better.

A year ago, I began to research how social design differs from the larger practice of graphic design and focused one single question: what strategies can improve the process of designing for the greater good? To date, I have identified eight of these strategies and will talk about how they were used—or forgotten about—in a couple of community-based graphic design projects.

Andrew Shea is a writer and designer who is he finishing his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, where he also teaches. He researches and writes about all aspects of design for social change and his design work has featured in Print, Adbusters, Core 77 and Metropolis Magazine.

Zvezdana Stojmirovic

Associate Professor of Graphic Design, Maryland Institute College of Art

What does it mean to design for participatory culture?

(Co-presented with Helen Armstrong) Design increasingly lives in the actions of its users. As users actively participate in the creation and distribution of content, we see a transformation of the role of designer, from producers of finite products to makers of interactive platforms that require user content for completion.

As professors at two undergraduate design programs, we have been experimenting with new modes of collaboration. We’ve explored modular work structures and the practical, theoretical and ethical issues they bring up. We believe that by welcoming user participation, designers can open their work to surrounding locales/ideas rather then interpreting and delivering top down client messages.

Our presentation includes a discussion of professional and student work. Each project considered utilizes evolving forms of production/distribution (Lulu, Flickr, VIMEO, Googledocs, Amazon, and Etsy.) This technology opens design up to multiple voices. Ultimately our presentation explores the shift in our field toward a more democratic expression of local messages through participatory design.

Zvezdana Stojmirovic holds degrees from the Cooper Union and MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art. In addition, she was a fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and has taken graduate writing workshops at City College in New York. Her design clients include The Audubon Society, The New York Times, and AIGA Baltimore. In 2005, she joined the undergraduate graphic design faculty at MICA. She works to help equip her students for ever-changing professional practice while focusing on design entrepreneurship and collaboration. Her research topics include the overlap of fashion and graphics, and recent design trends in the Balkans. Check out her work at zvezdana.stojmirovic.org.

Doug Whitton

Professor, Sheridan College in the York/Sheridan Design Program

Sustainable Consumption

" Who's deciding what's green? " is the question posed on the ecolabelling.org web site. Senior students in the York/Sheridan Program in Design developed design strategies for a web site consisting of a global database of eco-labels. Students were confronted with the question — How are consumers to filter ‘greenwash’ messages from authentic claims of sustainability?  

Through the use of existing user centered design practices such as research, personas, scenarios, prototypes and iterations, students explored the complexity of motivation, behaviors and decisions that come into play in designing a web experience that supports sustainable consumption. Conventional models of consumption require designers to persuade. A sustainable model of consumption may require designers to inform.

Ethical consumption can involve a dizzying array of choices, information overload can overwhelm. Information technologies can offer possibilities for models of consumption that are part of a dynamic information system. Design can have a role in supporting a new culture of consumption through meeting the needs and desires of how people consume, not just what they consume.

Doug Whitton is an interaction designer with extensive consulting experience in North America. He is a Professor at Sheridan College in the York/Sheridan Design Program. He has designed web based intranet applications, web sites, information architecture, and interactive video installations. His research and teaching interests centre on innovative approaches to experience design and human centered design. Before coming to Sheridan, Professor Whitton graduated from the Interactive Telecommunication Program at NYU and taught design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Holly Willis

Director of Academic Programs, Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California

Literacies for the Near Future

Advances in pervasive computing, 3-D imaging and gestural interactivity all point to a world that asks us to interact with information – and each other – in very different ways. When computational intelligence is embedded into the environment around us, how do we extend our understanding of contemporary literacies as well? When information takes the shape of what urban computing theorist Adam Greenfield calls “ambient informatics,” how do we rethink information literacy? When media becomes immersive and 3-dimensional, what new critical aptitude do we require? This presentation will explore several models and metaphors for how innovations in media technologies might be understood within design education; how they might help extend design curricula to other educators, thereby serving as a vital cultural force; and how these models connect with and sustain the AIGA’s 2014 mandate.

Holly Willis is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts, as well as Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum. Willis also serves on the board of directors for the New Media Consortium, where she contributes to the annual Horizon Report publication detailing the tools and technologies destined to impact education in the coming years. She serves as well on the AIGA Design Educators Community Board, working to support design as a component in curricula, and has contributed to projects supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, including Critical Commons, a fair use advocacy resource, and Mobile Voices, a project uniting cell phone technology, digital storytelling practices and Los Angelesbased immigrant workers.

Mike Zender

Professor, Director Graduate Studies in Design, University of Cincinnati

Responsible Design for Social Change: Designing HIV/AIDS Prevention Curriculum in Southern Africa

This presentation reports on a classroom-based research and design project for the development of an HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum for Swaziland. The curriculum, called iMatter, sought to transform self-destructive Swazi worldviews and attitudes toward sexual practices. iMatter was designed by a University of Cincinnati School of Design faculty/student team that traveled to Swaziland to conduce user centered field research and collaborate with a global team of researchers, educational specialists, and indigenous experts. The design concepts created by the students were used in the deployed versions of iMatter in Swaziland and subsequently in South Africa with support of a 5 year US Government PEPFARS grant. In partial fulfillment of that grant, in the first nine months of 2009 5,198 teachers were trained to use iMatter and 845,828 students received it. Initial outcomes measures indicate a promising impact. The presentation concludes by proposing a model for classroom engagement in cross-cultural, socially conscious design.

Mike Zender is a third generation designer, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and now followed by his son Micah, making four generations of family design. Mike founded the design practice, Zender + Associates, Inc. after finishing graduate work at Yale University and became an adjunct Professor one year later. Mike has written two books on design and contributed to several others. He has lectured internationally at both university and professional venues. He is a National Fellow of the. Mike currently serves as Graduate Director of Design at the University or Cincinnati and while maintaining design practice in cross-cultural communication design with NGO’s and Christian ministries. For the past 5 years his research has focused on non-verbal communication through the exploration of principles for the creation of visual language systems and the how recent discoveries in visual perception can inform designers’ use of visual form.

Kami Ecker, MA, OneHope/Hope Educational Foundation, co-author