Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

Meta Newhouse, Montana State University, and DSEL (Design Sandbox for Engaged Learning)
Patricia Murphey, Northern Arizona University, and VisualDESIGNLab

Interdisciplinary collaborations are intrinsic in Design—and are increasingly part of the daily life of a design educator. As such, we collaborate with our colleagues on research opportunities, we partner with clients; academic departments; and non-profit organizations, and we work relentlessly to expose our students to interdisciplinary projects, knowing how impactful such experiences are for their education and for their future professional lives. We decided to join forces and share our experiences of scholarly and project based collaborations and the process and struggles we encountered in our universities during the course of each endeavor.

With similar interests but different academic settings and departmental realities, we came together with the purpose of revealing our stories of collaboration, in research, in teaching and in the intersection of the two. Looking at our own institution’s mission and strategic plans, their differences, similarities, barriers and incentives, our own collaboration will result in suggestions of ways in which you can educate your departments, promotion and tenure committees and upper administration on the value of collaborative work.

We believe the countless hours of searching for meaningful and fruitful connections for cross-pollination should be recognized and rewarded by any institution of higher education. We’ve had some moderate success ourselves, in that we’ve brought in over 200K in grant funding and started design labs that focus on design thinking and civic engagement. We’ve walked the walk, and are now prepared to talk the talk on how others can strengthen their abilities as advocates for collaborative research and learning.

Meta Newhouse is an award-winning creative director, graphic designer, and filmmaker with over 20 years of experience in the visual communication industry.

She has worked for clients such as The American Heart Association, Dallas County Community Colleges, FedEx/Kinkos, GTE/Verizon, Motorola, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Meta has been a design educator since 1995 and currently is the Founding Director of the DSEL (Design Sandbox for Engaged Learning) at Montana State University. She is passionate about typography and consistently presents workshops around the country (and the world) on topics such as experimental typography, type in the vernacular and how to overcome creative blocks. http://www.metanewhousedesign.com/

Patricia Murphey began her career as a graphic designer 25 years ago. She holds a MFA from The Academy of Art University–San Francisco, and a BFA from Faculdade da Cidade–Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Patricia has worked as a designer and art director in Chicago, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Flagstaff, Arizona.

In 2001, she moved to Flagstaff to teach, and is now an Associate Professor in the Visual Communication and President Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Her focus is on teaching design in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment. Her passion is to inspire design students to be responsible professionals that positively impact society. At NAU, Patricia founded the VisualDESIGNLab, a design studio where undergraduate students engage in collaborative projects with local community partners. Behance.net/patriciamurphey

This was a Long Paper Session: Improving the Case for Designers on June 3, 2017. 11:30am–1:00pm (SCI 108)

Ameer Ahmed, Polytope Ventures
Caspar Lam, Parsons School of Design
YuJune Park, Parsons School of Design

Pluto is a smart learning platform that captures feedback from teachers, mentors, and peers and brings it into focus. Centered on the individual and built on a collaborative, peer-to-peer model of learning, Pluto weaves together feedback across courses and over time to allow students to connect learning across courses and over time.

Qualitative feedback is an important tool that helps students develop a growth mentality, succeed academically, and build connections across areas of study. In higher-education, evaluations may occur during formal learning assessments or through spontaneous teacher-student and student-student interactions. This is especially true for project-based and problem-based courses often used in design, engineering, and medical programs. The content of such interactions, including ongoing project assessments, references, and directions for growth, is not formal enough to be captured by learning management systems but is lost among various communication platforms like email, chat, forums, or backchannels.

For students, this means that there is no personal, centralized repository for retroactively accessing and evaluating such feedback across courses and years. Students rely on memory, haphazard notes, and vague intuition to discern the steps needed to improve their academic performance. Self-regulation is an important aspect of learning and academic achievement. A system that pairs feedback with resources can lower barriers to self-evaluation, increase the potential for academic success, and help develop a life-long growth mentality.

• It is the reverse learning portfolio, built around process and discovery rather than the end product/artifacts.
• Learning occurs through reflection. Traditional education systems feedback is course-centric, but the best students are those that can synthesize from a variety of fields, across courses and time.
• It opens up all of the resources that are now available online: the internet becomes a student’s library, and feedback, their subject guides.

Pluto video- https://vimeo.com/189258968

Ameer Ahmed is expert at conceiving and delivering innovative solutions to tricky business problems using Java/J2EE and XML technologies. He wields excellent communication skills to identify business needs and constraints and quickly designs and prototypes elegant solutions using the latest advanced technologies. Ameer has vast experience architecting and developing custom systems for content management and licensing, workflow/BPM and marketing automation for such organizations as JPMorganChase, The Harry Fox Agency, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Time Inc. and ARTstor. Ameer graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration and Marketing from American College for Applied Arts.

Caspar Lam is a designer and writer. He holds an MFA from Yale and degrees in biology and design from the University of Texas at Austin. He formerly led design and digital strategy for Artstor, a non-profit serving universities and libraries to develop new products related to digital cataloguing, metadata and publishing. He has worked with the Guggenheim Museum, the Yale School of Architecture, and at Li, Inc. on fashion brands including Ohne Titel and Vogue China. Adobe, AIGA, and the ID Annual Design Review have recognized his work. He has been a visiting critic at the Hong Kong Design Institute and served as an Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University’s GSAPP. He teaches interaction design at Parsons the New School for Design.

YuJune Park is the director of the BFA Communication Design program at Parsons School of Design at The New School. She is the co-founder of Synoptic Office, a multidisciplinary design studio operating in the space between graphic, interaction, spatial and product design. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and a BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has worked for, freelanced and collaborated with several studios, including Base Design, Project Projects, Mother NY, Graphic Thought Facility, and Pentagram for a variety of clients including the Museum of Modern Art, Milk Studios, the Davis Museum, and the AIGA.

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

Aaron Winters, independent researcher

I have written and taught a 200-level UI/UX course which culminates in a quarter-long Product Design project spanning research, information architecture, content creation, visual design and interaction. Given the breadth of subject matter, classroom time is divided by demands of lecture (input), laboratory (output) and critique (review and response).

To support and facilitate ongoing project development, each weekly component includes further collaborative classmate review via online prototype sharing tools and dedicated small group sessions with the instructor. As a component of the final session, students are assigned to user test their peers’ work. The final deliverable includes an exit survey encouraging them to identify areas of success and struggle, both project-specific and as each relates to their own nascent practice.

Learning means also teaching… it changes the rules, responsibilities and hierarchies while bringing a very social direct and entertaining quality. Oliver Klimpel

The poster diagrams and describes the project lifecycle, with a focus on the various times for and methods of collaborative review. The process has been increasingly successful for me as I have continued to refine it over the past several terms. The school is pleased that the work created through this process yields relevant and employable portfolio work, while the students appreciate a more diffuse feedback model that allows for subjective iteration over objective perfection. The system tends to foster the creation of more considered work framed within a holistic understanding of design thinking (that extends beyond strict subject-matter silos).

Aaron Winters is a versatile visual experience designer whose professional career spans 20 years in Brand Identity, Packaging, Publishing, Front-End Development and User Experience. In addition to his studio practice, Aaron has taught graphic and web design at Sacramento City College and the Art Institute of California-Sacramento.

Aaron’s work, both written and visual, has been published in the pages of Slanted, HOW, Faesthetic, Wonderland, Semi-Permanent and idN, and has been shown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts and 111 Minna Street Gallery in San Francisco. His creative work currently focuses on collage and text-based abstract composition, which he has incorporated into his Cooper-Gold pwn & Thrift product line.

Aaron earned his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2014.

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

Eugene Park, University of Minnesota

Open data is the concept that public institutions across federal, state, and local levels should make government data available to all citizens. By providing access to databases from various sectors, proponents of the idea believe that it will increase government transparency, foster research and innovation, and empower more citizens for public engagement.

Despite their potential benefits, the current offerings of open data have been hindered with numerous access barriers. Many of its online portals lack the means for ordinary citizens to discover appropriate data, visitors are unable to find relevant and useful explanations about the data at hand, and there are no clear incentives for the public to explore these vast digital collections in the first place. As a result, their ambiguities and user experience issues have rendered many open data endeavors to be inaccessible for many.

Recognizing these issues, this presentation seeks to discover how designers can take advantage of open data while its implementation is still at its infancy. How can designers use these vast and ambiguous collections of data as an extension of creative and critical inquiry? Can they also expand the modes of representation of such datasets in order to promote public engagement? And what further opportunities can open data provide to the design community, particularly in education and research? This presentation first evaluates the current strengths and weaknesses of various open data portals in the United States, present student outcomes on how they were able to work with open datasets in the context of data visualization projects, and finally outline the challenges and opportunities for future endeavors.

Eugene Park is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design (Twin Cities) where he teaches courses in graphic design, interaction design, and data visualization. He has a MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in Physics from the University of California, San Diego. Combining his backgrounds in science and design, Eugene’s research interests focus on exploring the visual representation of knowledge from social and scientific datasets.

This was a Lightning Round Session on June 3, 2017. 10:30–11:00am (SCI 106)

Kimberly Long Loken, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Stout

Samantha Kufahl, student co-presenter

Austin Lewer, student co-presenter

Abby Anderson, Greg Bormon, Megan Daniels, Kelly Goedeke, Alex Greene, Jack Haessly, Curtis Leszczynski, Laura Bernadette Meeker, William Rutter, Peter Sowinski, Michael Swearingen, Collin Stremke, Walter Trush, BFA candidates.

We as a species share a symbiotic relationship with every other living plant and creature on Earth. The interconnectedness of plant communication echoes the practical and abstract binding of our societal structures.

Fifteen students from six majors worked together to respond to the Climate Chaos/Climate Rising theme of Northern Spark 2017, a nuit blanche festival in the Twin Cities. They designed an illuminated, polymorphic installation which visually represents the way in which plants transmit chemical messages to one another – an ecosystem our society should heed.

A collection of white, modular structures charge the negative space between park trees, acting as an extrusion of the mycorrhizal fungal network in the soil below. A place to meander, visitors are encouraged to physically engage these fibrous projection surfaces in several ways, thereby entering the dialogue. A projection-mapped animation anchors the grouping, completing the impression of sentience and vitality. Beyond these visual and haptic interactions, ambient sound and scent cues also communicate with the public. Both the animation and the modular structures share generative patterns derived from tree species on site. The frames and fibers of the modules are constructed of up-cycled materials.

A faculty/student co-presentation, we will highlight the process of developing – and focusing – concepts and studies by a broad group of collaborators toward a unified outcome.

Additional Notes

This project was collaboratively designed by junior and senior level students majoring in animation, film, illustration, industrial design, game design and sculpture. It will debut publicly at the Northern Spark festival on June 10-11, 2017, but documentation of full-scale mockups will be included in the June 1-3 AIGA conference presentation. A companion website (posting still active) is a growing repository of 360 VR content and extensive process documentation. https://transmediaworkshop.wordpress.com/

As an architect, Kim Loken’s creative research and pedagogy embrace a variety of disciplines to inform the creation of rigorously researched, highly sensorial spaces, whether in the built environment of virtual worlds. Her student collaborators draw upon shared foundations in the fine arts as well as intermediate and advanced coursework in their respective majors – animation, comics, film, game design, industrial design and sculpture. Loken is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

This was a Lightning Round Session on June 3, 2017. 10:30–11:00am (SCI 106)