Trends and Traditions
Asynchronous Session
Exploring Cultural Inspiration: Utilizing Historical Elements in Design Practice and Experiments View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Setareh Ghoreishi
The world is a big place. Culture is the art of everybody. If we choose to focus on only one culture or part of the world, we limit our thinking, our growth, and our experiences of the world. As designers, we need to be widely exposed to a multitude of cultures so that we can fill our creative toolboxes with possibilities that best serve our clients with creative solutions. Since not every student can travel the world for a personal look at the many cultures it offers, it is helpful that design projects explore how visual design can connect various cultures. Even with a large design toolbox, without an increased comfort for using all of one's tools, decolonization will not occur. This paper focuses on how the design projects encourage students to include diverse cultures, interests, and identities through design projects, all with a focus on culture. Cultural, social, and conceptual issues are inextricably integrated with design. The focus on culture not only expands the learners’ design perspectives and assists them with defining their own design identity but also opens worlds and can change hearts. This paper explores the impact of introducing designers to the idea that the design art form has the power to change hearts and influence people to think differently and be more open to other cultures. The goal of exploring various cultures is to expand students’ knowledge of other cultures, help them feel more connected to and respectful of new cultures, and achieve decolonization of design.
Learning Typography through Graphic Comics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vaijayanti Ajinkya
This paper explores how comics can be a potential tool for teaching the basics of typography to enhance student involvement. A typical class takes students through the fundamentals, guidelines, and classifications. The question arises- is there a way to make typography education more captivating? Being constantly bombarded with advertisements, it makes people furious to read for leisure. As a result, it is challenging to read lengthy theoretical text and more so to retain it for a long-term. Typography, too, is perceived as a technical and theoretical subject and it becomes vigorous to read and understand theories. Comics can cover diverse genres such as action, adventure, science, fantasy, history and politics, that help deconstruct complex issues. This makes readers culturally aware and promotes understanding of different backgrounds. Comics present facts informally that make learning more enjoyable for visual learners with elements that help break the monotony over lengthy text. The integration of comics into education tries to make typography more accessible with the help of 20 students from the elective typography class who were asked to study various topics such as letterpress printing, ligatures, ink traps, font psychology, Book of the Dead and papyrus paper. They were taught how to develop a story by gathering information, converting it into action, depicting a conflict, and finally emerging with a resolution for the story. Though comics have been used as a method for storytelling and entertainment, their potential in education is slowly being recognized.
Education for Future Focused Designers - Developing Ecological Awareness Through Problem-based Learning: A ‘Futures Focused’ Pedagogical Intervention for Level 5 Textile Design Students View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emma Smith, Martyn Woodward
The climate crisis foregrounds a need for an ‘ecological literacy’ which can situate design practice as a critical activity to develop sustainable futures. Design Education, in turn, must meet this emerging challenge to a broad set of disciplines whose very moral and ethical frameworks are reframing not only what it means to ‘design’ but also ‘who’, or what, we design for. Design Futuring asks us to imagine the purpose and function of design outside of capitalist and neo-liberal frameworks, recognizing that what is ‘designed’ will design patterns of behavior shaping morals and ethics, whilst backgrounding others. Many are calling for a mode of design which pays more attention to ecological systems and the non-human when deciding what to design. This paper outlines a pedagogical intervention developed within Cardiff School of Art & Design to foster a mindset shift in level 5 Textile Design students towards ‘Futures thinking’. Adopting a speculative approach to design through a problem-based approach to learning, the project titled ‘CMF Design: What is the Future of Luxury Transport?’, asked students to engage with future and non-human ecosystems to challenge the status quo of material choices in transport design. Present in the students' outcomes, was a futures focused ecological attunement but also a critical approach to the future of their discipline and its potential to enact change, allowing further themes such as design hegemony, classism, and gender bias to be explored. All resulting in higher levels of engagement and attainment.
Thinking Through Making: A Self-Reflective Making Approach to Design-based Research View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angelica Sibrian
Although educational institutions are designed to expand knowledge and encourage growth, they also miss opportunities for self-reflection. It is in educational spaces where students begin to self-identify with race, class, gender, and cultural heritage. However, design-based research courses rarely discuss the importance of self-discovery and reflection. Drawing inspiration from bell hooks’ Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, a 500-level graduate studio course was designed to address this gap. Students were challenged to step away from traditional design frameworks and allow experiences, self-expression and counter-narratives to lead the making. Thinking through making—a self-reflective making approach to design-based research—attempts to generate dialogue around identity, race, class, and cultural heritage to meet the increasingly complex and ever-evolving design challenges in the classroom, and the world. The study offers a reflection of, approaches to, and insights to design-based research. This paper 1). Contextualizes the course through a CRT and LatCrit lens, 2). Shares details of the assignments through three student use cases: "Unequal Power Relations in Climate Change Mitigation: A Simulation on the Global Carbon Market”, “Exploring Alternatives for Neurodiverse Connections Among Children”, and “Visual Media, Black Girlhood, and Sexual Social Scripts”; and 3). Ends with a reflection on how design educators might better prepare students for the complexities of the design industry.
