Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

Adrien Contesse, Ésad, Amiens, France 

Vocal Grammatics:
A digital design project that has produced a comprehensive writing system for beatbox along with a functioning app that enables the techniques and sounds of beatbox to be written, learned, shared, and created. This project is founded on a convergence of research in language, typography, phonetics, music, and digital design. The team consists of a collaboration of professional type designers, linguistic researchers, sound engineers, musicians, professional beatboxers, digital designers, and computer programmers.

Beatbox has roots in the late 1970s Hip Hop culture. In the beginning beatboxmainly copied instrumental sounds. Over time, beatbox evolved into a singular art using a wide and rich spectrum of sounds. The sounds produced in beatboxing rely on the skillful coordination of the vocal chords, breathing, and various combinations of mouthparts that cannot be seen when watching a beatboxer.

The method for understanding and writing out these sounds, which has been developed by Vocal Grammatics, is based on a phonetic approach that analyzes the production of sounds with two basic parameters : the place where it is located in the mouth, and the way the air is moved to make the sound. In the Vocal Grammatics system, this basic information is represented by two different types of glyphs. When combined together, the glyphs create a compound sign. This award winning project has established a definitive glyphic system, which is able to write out all the thousands of sounds made by beatboxers using less than 30 glyphs.

The Vocal Grammatics beatbox project opens the conversation about how design and type design offer new solutions to many language issues. Perhaps more importantly, the principles behind this system can be carried over into linguistic research and used to help researchers work with many different aspects of sound production, including research involved with speech disorders.

Adrien Contesse is the founder of “Vocal Grammatics,” and is a French award-winning designer that specializes in graphic design and type design. He graduated from Ésad Amiens, France, where Vocal Grammatics was began as his master’s project. Since then his work has been published in several art and design magazines.

Besides his work for corporate clients and cultural and institutions, Adrien Contesse is involved in several language/type research projects. He is part of the “Gestual Script” team and works on “Typannot”, a glyphic system that transcribes sign languages.

This was a Poster Session on June 3, 2017. 11:00–11:30am (SCI Lobby)

Barbara Sudick, California State University, Chico
Frank Armstrong, California State University, Chico

An epic drought and a mandate for the development of a sustainable groundwater management plan in California has brought together a team of diverse scholars, researchers and designers. Digital evidence of groundwater flow and understanding its relationship to other components of this complex natural system are critical to planning its sustainable management.

Although the state is currently experiencing an unusually wet rainy season, the recent five-year drought significantly lowered the levels of surface water in our lakes and rivers. In many areas of the state, this shortage of regulated surface water resulted in over-pumping unregulated groundwater.

An economist, a geographer and hydrologists collected data on water and land use in Northern California for the last 30 years. They needed a way to engage and educate a diverse public in a participatory process of co-creating a sustainable groundwater management plan. Working with the designers, the team is currently building an interactive data-visualization tool for understanding the patterns, behaviors and relationships of the water system.

Visualizing complex data over time and space reveals the patterns that emerge from the behaviors of natural systems: agricultural land-use, supply and demand of water resources, fluctuating crop prices and changing environmental/weather conditions. These patterns can expose the ill effects of human actions on the environment, like the occurrence of subsidence (the sinking ground that results from over-pumping groundwater). Simultaneously showing events that are separated by time and space, visualizations can also explain how small events have the potential to cause significant changes in complex systems. Interactivity will allow users to filter data and create new relationships that invite comparisons, raise new questions and provide alternative explanations. This tool will help people to understand complex relationships, reach consensus, and make informed decisions about the future of California’s water system.

Barbara Sudick is a Professor and Graphic Design Program Coordinator in the Department of Media Arts, Design + Technology at California Sate University, Chico.  She has an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and for 15 years was a partner in an interdisciplinary design firm whose clients included IBM, ITT Programming, United Technologies, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York Public Library, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Barbara has taught Graphic Design at SUNY New Paltz, University of Connecticut, University of Hartford and lectured at The Cooper Union and University of the Arts. In 2008-09 she was distinguished professor and Nierenberg Chair at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design. Her research explores how design can contribute to the vitality of environmental, economic, social and cultural sustainability. She has been an advocate for sustainable design education in her teaching at CSU Chico and more broadly as the Chair of the Education Committee, Center for Sustainable Design, AIGA and facilitator at the Global Summit on Design Education and Sustainability in conjunction with The Designer’s Accord. Barbara has presented her research in sustainable design internationally in Seoul, Korea and Doha, Qatar and at workshops and conferences throughout the US. She is co-author of “Redesigning the Bottom Line: How Design Thinking Can Help Business Become Sustainable” (with Phil Hamlett) in Praeger’s The Business of Sustainability: Trends, Policies, Practices, and Stories of Success.

Frank Armstrong is a Lecturer in the Department of Media Arts, Design + Technology at California Sate University, Chico, teaching coding and design. He has a BA in Economics from UCLA and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. As a design consultant, Frank worked for clients including Bell Communications Research, IBM, ITT Programming, Kenan-Flagler Business School and MIT Press. As a design educator, he taught at Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, University of Connecticut and Yale University. His research and teaching integrate dynamic information visualization and typography. In 2015, he gave presentations on “Exploring Conditional Motion” with Barbara Sudick at the MODE Summit in Dublin and “Behavior Design” at the KSBDA International Conference in Seoul. His professional work has been published in numerous books and journals, including Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Typographic Design: Form + Communication and American Typography Today. His essay “Hearing Type” was published in AIGA: Loop, Baseline and The Education of a Typographer.

This was a Lightning Round Session on June 2, 2017. 4:30–5:00pm (SCI 108)

Jessica Parris Westbrook, DePaul University
Adam Trowbridge, DePaul University

The design and development of systems, including products, games, and experiences requires the expertise of a wide range of creative people who need to share their ideas and communicate with each other. Some of these people are designers, some are researchers or data scientists, some are writers, some are architects, engineers, programmers, some are artists or media producers. Each person involved has discipline-specific skills and is trained in the use of discipline-specific language, tools, conventions, and methods. This paper/presentation collects and investigates visual thinking methods used in a range of creative practices. It seeks to go beyond the all too familiar Post-it note and traces histories and evolutions of established visual methods for generating, planning, capturing, sorting, and communicating in-progress ideas.

Jessica Parris Westbrook is a media artist, designer, researcher, and creative coder. She uses design to negotiate and organize the joys and struggles of information and understanding. Westbrook is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Design, College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago, IL (2016). Before taking a formal interest in higher education and learning, Westbrook worked professionally in a range of capacities from front-end web developer and interactive designer to creative director while maintaining an active independent interdisciplinary studio practice. Westbrook has an MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA (1998), and a BFA in Photography from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 1996.

Adam Trowbridge is a designer, programmer, and code media researcher. His current work focuses on biobehavioral interface design, mobile health, programming pedagogy for designers, and geolocated augmented reality. He is currently developing an OS for and by designers, starting with assembly language, as a speculative design and open source project promoting creative autonomy. His previous projects employed augmented reality to highlight police omnipresence and security theater. Trowbridge holds an MFA in Electronic Visualization from the University of Illinois Chicago and worked professionally in design and UI/UX in range of capacities including: Information Architect, Director of User Interface and Design, Web Developer, and Director of Project Management.

This was a Long Paper Session: Practice and Process on June 2, 2017. 10:30–12:00pm (SCI 106)

Dori Griffin, Ohio University

This collaborative working session will bring together design educators who use digital archives as a tool for teaching design history, facilitating the sharing of resources and strategies. Both studio-based and scholarly historical teaching modes are welcome. Before the workshop, participants should reflect on their own praxis and bookmark their favorite resources. In what contexts are digital archives most useful as a resource for teaching history? How can digital resources expand our concepts of design history beyond the scope of the traditional Modernist canon of western Europe and North America? Which assignments have fostered successful learning experiences? What are the pedagogical goals of these assignments, and which digital archives have been most useful in meeting them? How might we guide the process of engaging with image research in the digital environment? We’ll use the questions above as a starting point. Further foci may emerge from participants’ dialogue around these introductory questions.

The immediate goal of the session will be for participants to share resources and strategies with one another. The broader goal is that participants will generate collaborative content for a multi-authored journal article. This article will document how design educators use digital archives to foster critical engagement with global historical source material. Many design educators teach graphic design history as an addendum to their studio teaching practice, often without significant institutional support or prior training. Developing a body of case study literature benefits educators and students by providing access to practical yet critically-engaged pedagogical strategies. However, the indexed literature offers little record of the vital yet ephemeral conversations taking place at conferences. This workshop seeks to facilitate and record a substantive, multi-vocal dialogue that will be of lasting practical use to design educators. Participants with on-going investment in the topic may wish to work collaboratively as co-authors after the conclusion of the session. Others may wish to contribute only through participation in the workshop’s dialogue, which will be documented so that contributors may be properly credited.

Explore the digital archives that make accessible the global design history artifacts in the header image (top). From left to right: A 1925 artist’s book by Hagiwara Kyōjirō, Shikei senkoku, in the Monoskop digital archive of Avant Garde magazines; an 1833 Cherokee hymnal in the Duke University Religious Materials collection; a copy of Two Technological Treatises, an Arabic language manuscript copied in Shawwāl 691/12 (1292 CE) and made available by the Qatar Digital Library; an anonymous 1967 Chinese papercut asking viewers to “Support the Army and Cherish the People” from the University of Michigan Digital Collections; and The Kalpasutra, a 1503 Prakrit manuscript (item #L0034105) in the Wellcome Library.

This was a workshop on June 1, 2017. 3:30–5:30pm (SCI 209)

Dori Griffin teaches graphic design and design history at Ohio University. She researches and writes about the history of popular visual culture in the twentieth century, as well as exploring issues in contemporary design pedagogy. Dori has published articles in Visible Language, the Journal of Communication Design, Dialectic, and Imago Mundi. Her first book, Mapping Wonderlands, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2013. Currently, she’s at work on a book about the history of the type specimen as a visual form and a professional practice. This project emerges from her 2015 research fellowship in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

MiHyun Kim, Texas State University 

Design as a professional discipline has undergone a tremendous evolution in the last generation from a practice focused mainly on aesthetic style to one with a clear and explicit focus on the “user” (aka: person or group of people who use a product or service) and their hopes, desires, challenges, and needs.

By establishing empathy with the user, designers are able to work toward outcomes that meet those needs more successfully. This user-centered approach known as “design thinking” enables designers and others to address a wide range of complex business and social issues.

Nowadays, design is measured by how well it fulfills our users’ need. When we shift the conversation from one about features and functions to one about users and user outcomes, we deliver more useful, usable, and desirable solutions. By doing so, more importantly, the design earns the trust, respect and repeat from the users.

This poster contains hands-on activities for practicing collaboration and putting the user at the center of our design projects. There are 5 activities; 1) hope and fears 2) stakeholder map 3) empathy map 4) scenario map 5) prioritization grid. This poster explains each activity by establishing the design thinking framework, understand your user’s problems and motivation, explore new concepts, prototype designs and evaluate.

1. Hopes and fears: 10-15 minutes
   This activity helps you get to know each other, expose aspirations and concerns and prepare everyone to start
2. Stakeholder map: 20-30 minutes
   This activity helps you identify project “stakeholders”, their expectations and relationships. “Stakeholders” can include teams, team roles, project leads, executives, partners, customers and end users.
3. Empathy map: 30-45minutes
   Empathy maps helps to rapidly put your team in the user’s shoes and align on pains and gains
4. Scenario map(As-is/To-be): 25-40minutes
   As-is Scenario Maps help to document collective understanding of user workflows and are best used as processors to exploring new ideas. To-be Scenario Maps tell the story of a better experience for your user.
5. Prioritization grid: 25-40 minutes
   This activity helps your team evaluate and prioritize them by focusing discussion on importance and feasibility.

MiHyun Kim holds MFA from University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth and she currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. As a graphic designer, artist, educator and maker, she has always been interested in the relationships between binary pairs; Eastern and Western, Art and Eesign, and You and I. The in-between spaces are often hidden, secretive and few people pay much attention to them. For the past 10 years She has been teaching Graphic Design, specializing in typography, web typography, interactive design. Currently, she is teaching at Texas State University as an Assistant Professor of Interactive Design within the School of Art and Design.

Reference
IBM Design Thinking: https://www.ibm.com/design/

This was a Poster Session on June 2, 2017. 4:00–4:30pm (SCI Lobby)

Jessica Keup, JSTOR

Monographs are increasingly making the print-to-digital shift that journals started twenty years ago, yet many of the popular platform options for accessing scholarly books simply mirror the existing discovery structure for journals: books are presented as a sequential list of “journal article”-sized chapter files for downloading, a practice that “journal”-izes the book and arguably fails to take full advantage of the rich long-form argument that unfolds across chapters.

JSTOR Labs, an experimental platform development group, convened at Columbia University a group of scholars, librarians, and publishers in October 2016. Together, they tackled this design question: if we applied data visualization and design thinking techniques to the existing corpus of digitized monograph files, how could we improve the discovery and user experience for scholars, students, and general readers? Over the course of two months, we conducted an ideation workshop with the scholars, librarians, and publishers; tested sketches of various ideas with more scholars to decide which concept to pursue; iteratively refined and tested alternate design ideas with increasing fidelity over time; wrote a whitepaper about our findings; and completed a working prototype during a “flash build” that aims to help users currently assess the relevance of books to their research and quickly navigate to the relevant parts.

This cross-/multi-/inter-/trans- disciplinary digital scholarship project presented many design challenges and opportunities. The bulk of the presentation will focus on the design principles and the lean, user-oriented product design processes used to carry one of the product ideas through from concept to working prototype. We will show how design activities and principles proved indispensable in the quick and lean creation of a useful, quality product. There will also be a demonstration of the Topicgraph prototype that was created in November.

Jessica Keup is a User Experience Prototyper on the JSTOR Labs team. The team experiments with new ways to present, explore, and discover scholarship and Jessica works to design, test, and implement the user interfaces they create. She formerly taught Human Computer Interaction and introductory programming at East Tennessee State University, and she moonlights as a pianist.

This was a Long Paper Session: Print to Digital on June 2, 2017. 2:30–4:00pm (SCI 106)

Danielle Oprean, PhD, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Penn State University
Peter Lusch, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Penn State University

Design communication relies on a designer’s ability to represent and present design ideas through multiple forms of visualization. From images to movies and now even virtual reality, designers are beginning to capitalize on newer forms of representation and subsequently in their presentations. With the digital medium becoming more prominent in the design disciplines, it is necessary to consider how representations across multiple modalities (visual, audio, etc.) can be presented in a digital format that is cohesive. So, how do we support presenting multiple forms of visualization? We build on our early development of a multi-modal interface to explore this question and what the implications are for multiple design disciplines. A proof-of-concept interface for exploring the potential of multi-modal presentations was developed earlier and has being further improved for intended use in design courses using a large-screen display that is virtual reality capable. This portion of this development research focuses on understanding student designer use of the alpha-version of the interface, where not all functionality such as loading student work into the interface are working. For this study, we focused on the role of student designer perceptions of the ergonomics of a large-screen display where the interface is being used and the perceived usefulness of the developed interface. We captured student interactions with the interface in its current state through simple user tests and asked students to elaborate on their perceptions of such a tool. We will present on the challenges faced by the sample of students engaging with the interface and how preliminary take-away from the study will be used for improving the interface.

Danielle Oprean is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the Stuckeman School and Chorophronesis at the Pennsylvania State University.Her background is in 3D visualization and its intersection with human-computer interaction. She focuses her research on the relationship between immersion and presence and how that relationship is fostered through embodied experiences. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and allows for the study of different forms of technology to apply to different spatial and design applications. She holds a BS in digital media visualization and a MS in Engineering Technology  from East Tennessee State University, and a MA in Architectural Studies Design with Digital Media and a PhD in Human-Environmental Studies from the University of Missouri. 

Peter D. Lusch is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Penn State. He instructs advanced and introductory courses in typography, studio design, and experience design processes and methods. Lusch has active research in design pedagogy, user experience design, and applications of technology and design for global humanitarian solutions in the developing world. He has studied and worked internationally with Shanghai University, China. He holds a B.F.A. from Eastern Michigan University, and a M.F.A. from Michigan State University.

This was a Lightning Round Session on June 3, 2017. 10:30–11:00am (SCI 108)

This panel will examine how critical practices in design are changing. Johanna Drucker, John Jennings, Michael Gibson, and Keith Owens will discuss how design educators and researchers can evolve their work, and find new projects and modes of publication.

This was a panel discussion at 12pm (SCI Lobby).

Dennis Doordan, University of Notre Dame
Brian Edlefson, University of Notre Dame

This project grew out of conversations between a Design Historian and a Visual Communications Designer. The focus of our conversations is a project to digitize and annotate an early twentieth century periodical called The Game. Between October 1916 and January 1923, thirty-four issues of The Game were published by Douglas Pepler; the calligrapher Edward Johnston and the artist and type designer Eric Gill worked with Pepler on the design of The Game.

Beyond practical concerns, our conversations quickly began to engage with the larger questions raised by the Converge Call for Proposals. What, for example, is the role of design in generating new knowledge? We argue that designers generate new knowledge through the reconfiguration of existing knowledge. Reconfiguration involves more than increasing access through the digitalization of rare print materials; it involves the enrichment of existing knowledge by connecting original source materials with subsequent scholarship and contemporary commentary. While there are models for making rare early modern art journals available on line the project described here aspires to more than just scanning and posting material online. We propose creating an online research portal that constitutes a digital tool for thinking. What does thinking imply? Thinking requires active engagement with a body of material and ideas that positions various types of information within some interpretive framework so that the user can make connections between disparate sets of information. Beyond expanding the set of examples readily available to interested parties, thinking leads to the formation of new questions that previously were difficult to conceptualize or to answer within the existing arrangement of resources and examples. These observations are developed using examples from The Game.

Since both the Design Historian and the Visual Communications Designer are faculty members at the same university they were keenly aware of the necessity to articulate the scholarly nature of their collaboration in terms that could be clearly aligned with the tenure and promotion criteria at their institution. The values and definitions identified in university RPT guidelines help frame the way the project is described. For example, our institutional RPT guidelines identify history as a humanistic discipline which investigates the interface between art and meaning …Through the examination and analysis of objects that are both original creations and, at the same time, historically and culturally determined. This same document rather than defining design in narrow professional terms describes design as an enabling catalyst, collaboratively increasing advantage and expanding opportunity between practitioners of different disciplines. We thus describe our digital humanities project as a truly collaborative effort that combines the investigative skills of the historian with the equally necessary enabling skills of the designer in a form that – again using our institution’s own language – innovatively promotes understanding. Complimentary skills sets are critical to digital scholarship and to the degree that the design community can articulate the distinctive nature of design skills and design thinking the value of design’s contribution to emerging research in digital humanities and STEM education will only grow.

Dennis Doordan is co-editor of Design Issues a journal devoted to the history, theory, and criticism. Doordan has published books and articles on a wide variety of topics dealing with modern and contemporary architecture and design. In 1999 Doordan was on the organizing committee for the first international conference on doctoral education in design. He has spoken about design education and interdisciplinary research at international conferences and been invited to participate in workshops and seminars on various aspects of design education

Brian Edlefson co-founded Thesis, a design consultancy that helped product manufacturers connect with architects and interior designers.  As a member of Whirpool Corporation’s multi-disciplinary Global Consumer Design team, Brian was responsible for merging graphic design with the product design of household brands like Whirlpool, Maytag, Kenmore and Amana. He has also worked with the design team and curatorial staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was a senior graphic designer for Herman Miller—where he redesigned the corporate brand and all of its applications.

This was a Long Paper Session: On Collaboration on June 3, 2017. 11:30am–1:00pm (SCI 106)

Daniel Jasper, University of Minnesota

Since 1999 I have been using the formal and conceptual language of products as a means of research, and creative discovery. This mode of production falls under the rubric of “critical design”. Critical design describes a process whereby a designed artifact, its use and the process of designing it perform as an embodied critique or commentary on environment, economy, politics, culture—or design itself.

For instance, in this scenario wall paper patterns I’ve had commercially produced call in to question basic assumptions about the purpose of textile designs for domestic applications. In addition to being decorative and aesthetically pleasing can textile patterns also be emotive and consciousness-raising with regard to current topics including the United States’ drone program or casualty rates among armed service members?

Former head of the Design program at Cranbrook Academy, Kath­ryn McCoy said ‘Design is not a neutral, value-free process; however, we have trained a profession that feels political or social concerns are either ex­traneous to our work or inappropriate.’ (McCoy, 1994 p.111) McCoy alludes to a sort of tacit knowledge (and knowledge production) that became codified within the Western academy after World War II in which formal design pro­duction typically results in concrete statements couched in positive terms, which celebrate consumerism, consumer products and the munificent cul­ture that produced them. Theorist Guy Debord characterized the psycho­-philosophical underpinnings of this mediated environment in the following terms, ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’ (Debord, 1967 p.15) In this regard design (graphic, product, apparel) acts as the process by which this self-congratulatory monologue is made flesh, expressed physically in the form of what seem to be ideologically in­ert objects. As design educators, practitioners and scholars in a historically incurious profession one might be forgiven for asking is this all there is? Is client-based practice the only prescribed outcome for our intellectual and creative endeavors and those of our students? In addition to critical think­ing and critical writing, is there room for critical design in design research, pedagogy and practice?

In one Writing Intensive graphic design course at the University of Minnesota students are asked to perform an examination of material culture—the very culture they propagate through work in their chosen profession. They critically examine their own patterns of consumer behavior within the simultaneous contexts of design, society, economy and culture. In a sequence of assignments, they express their findings not only with writing, but also the principles and practices of data visualization, using traditional 2-D com­puter-aided methods, or 3-D methods made more expressive through attention to materiality and physical presence. Without being expressly told to ‘make critical design’ the students nonetheless perform criti­cal practice not as an end unto itself but simply as a method of interrogation. It is within this context that critical practice works in tandem with the traditional writing and research processes as an extension of writing. Here students are asked to place themselves, as designers, within the broad­er framework of design, society, economy and culture not as an ancillary consideration but as something central to their role as authors and producers of culture. Within this context, students are taught that being critical isn’t a job description for cranky elitists—it is something that should be done by designers as a matter of course.

Daniel Jasper is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

This was a Long Paper Session: Practice and Process on June 2, 2017. 10:30–12:00pm (SCI 106)