Making Meaning
Cultivating Socially Conscious Designers: An Innovative Approach to Participatory Design Practices in in Architectural Pedagogy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis, Debra Ruben
Urban spaces often lack child-friendly amenities that promote play and learning, particularly in underserved communities. This deficiency can hinder children's development, especially in areas with limited educational resources. To address this issue, a novel approach integrating playful learning installations into urban environments has emerged, transforming underutilized spaces into engaging learning landscapes. This innovative strategy sits at the nexus of child development and urban design, necessitating architects and designers well-versed in playful learning principles. A new college-level course, "Designing for Playful Learning," has been developed to equip students with the knowledge and practical skills needed to create these interactive urban installations. The semester-long course focuses on teaching students how to design urban installations that encourage meaningful child-caregiver interactions; facilitate playful exploration of concepts in literacy, math, science, and music and leverage unique urban environments as learning opportunities. Students engage in hands-on learning through partnerships with local community-based organizations (CBO), applying participatory design methods to create contextually appropriate playful learning installations. This approach not only enhances design education but also fosters civic engagement and social impact. The open-source model college-level “Designing for Playful Learning” class aims to scale up the impact of playful learning by disseminating the full course materials and instructions to other universities and potentially high schools. By cultivating a new generation of designers skilled in playful learning principles, this initiative addresses the growing need for child-friendly urban spaces. The community-engaged pedagogy nurtures professionals committed to promoting equitable access to enriching play and learning opportunities in public spaces.
The Impact of Bilateral Readability on Visual Communication View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Caglar Okur
The intersection of linguistics and typographic design provides a distinct viewpoint on visual communication design. This research seeks to inquire how these typographic expressions, such as variations in reading direction, affect the borders of visual communication. The importance of this kind of typographic expression is to attract the audience's attention, increase retention, and make them think about the content while conveying two different messages simultaneously. In this research, which is conducted using the quantitative research method, various case studies were analyzed by examining practical applications within the framework of visual communication design. This research inquires about the importance of the reading direction and exemplifies the situation through terms including but not limited to ambigrams and palindromes, accepted as typographic expressions. And emphasize their role in visual communication design. This research also uses implementation examples and typographic principles on readability to interpretively support design knowledge and provides a model for the design process that serves as a research blueprint. Therefore, this study questions whether or to what extent it is acceptable to compromise readability for an effective message transfer, and it also questions the practical value of creative typographic expressions that interact with the reading direction in expanding the possibilities of visual communication.
Type That Speaks: Shaping Meaning Through the Narrative Power of Typography as an Independent Visual Language View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session İpek Köprülülü
Typography is often seen simply as a tool for expressing textual meaning. However, is this view complete, or does typography, beyond its primary function, serve as an independent visual language capable of telling stories? This research challenges traditional perspectives by showing that typography can go beyond just communicating words; it can shift perceptions and create new layers of meaning beyond the text’s original intent. Using Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” as a case study, the project explores how a single sentence – five words and eleven letters – can be reimagined through typography to express the emotional journey of the novel. By integrating a combination of analog and digital techniques, the study offers new ways to interpret and experience the text, pushing the conventional literary practices. Typography here becomes more than just text; the emphasis on its visual aspects allows the letterforms themselves to carry meaning and tell their own story. The research begins with a simple example to introduce the central idea, then progresses through the creative process of the study, and results in complex designs. By focusing on the relationship between text and its visual representation, this work shows how typography can reshape literary interpretation, offering readers an alternative way to connect with the material. This research highlights typography’s potential to create multi-layered narratives, emphasizing its role as a powerful expressive visual language for improving the emotional and conceptual aspects of storytelling.
A Common Flower Garden: Reclamation of Diverse Voices through Print Design View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sumi Limbu, Riva Nayaju
“Sajha Fulbari” translates to A Common Flower Garden, a metaphor often used in Nepal to represent the country’s multiethnic and multilingual communities. Since its invention, printing has been a tool for both propaganda and liberation. Who tells a story, where, and how shapes its narrative. The creation and use of zine has been significant in covering marginalized voices that were excluded in mainstream publications. It offers a democratic and accessible medium for storytelling, enabling plural ways of knowing and making. The project uses zines as a lens to explore the intersection of social and cultural themes, focusing on lived experiences and community narratives. The project investigates the interplay between identity, belonging, and resistance through visual storytelling. The project challenges conventional approaches to knowledge production and dissemination by employing experimental design practices. It highlights the importance of shared authorship, community engagement, and the power of visual communication in creating inclusive narratives. The aim was to reflect the complexities of Nepal's pluralistic society and its ways of learning and making.
