Undergraduate, Graduate, and Collaborative Labs outside of the US
TEACHING North Carolina State University and prior.

In graphic design, user content and contributions are often part of looking at design within larger (designed) systems, but this kind of scope and cultural context is larger than any one discipline. Through 2006, I developed courses and worked with students based on my original area of expertise at NCSU.




Between 2006 and 2010, the curriculum shifted to a very different educational philosophy based on designing within large, overlapping systems of users, contexts, interaction, branding, and service. Therefore, over this period I had to redefine what and how I taught. I worked to introduce interaction design and information visualization, along with methodologies tied to user issues. This included motion and gesture in interface design, thinking through multiple touchpoints in a service environment, and designing for users with different needs in terms of accessibility.



In 2017, I offered the first international experience in design and social innovation. This allowed me a certain autonomy to build on our approach to large, overlapping considerations of context while introducing a very different framing for design than our regular curriculum. One of my collaborators in Greece, Maria Patsarika (PhD, Sheffield; Sociology and Architecture; learning, participation and place-making; co-design and community engagement), and I formed a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to design and education that included service learning.

Making images (so-called imaging courses in parallel to typographic courses)

I. Beginning sophomore

Introduction to applied semiotics, especially as a way to ideate communicative visuals. Introduction to basic software use. Photography (staging a photoshoot); montage (previsualizing components and then combining them into a single composition); and “symbol” (images simplified and reduced based on Gestalt principles). This was accompanied by critical yet accessible readings.






II. Intermediate sophomore

From making and communicating a concept or idea, the next level introduced narrative techniques. Introduction to sequence, tying into the history of graphic design through photo-essay layouts, visual editing, and film title work, as well as simple rubrics such as McCloud that condensed basic film ideas from precedent. This also included cross-disciplinary examples such as Eisenstein and sequential montage ideas, and the order and organization of visual books. Timelines (for example, simple, comparative, and granular) and other simple visualization ideas were introduced as comparative examples of storytelling.



III. Junior/senior

Synthesis of the above, including film title work looking at simple ideas that “hold” a segment together, including gesture as sign—in other words, thinking through objects in motion as creating a “scratch track” that can be applied to typographic movement and later to simple visual branding. Dynamic visualization included script writing, shot lists, storyboards, and audio, using simple working precedents—for example, geological “deep time” as a parallel to Powers of Ten— with simple analogies often performed or demonstrated.

(link)— 



Studio work

I. Early sophomore studios. Introductory ideas and curriculum-wide framework of interaction service and branding.

Introduce complexity using a common rubric of users and context through bibliographic research at an early level, based on a curriculum-wide scaffold.

This kind of framing, as in the social sciences, puts a lot of weight on social and historical “structures” rather than on people and agency. My interpretation of this put students in situational experiences where equal weight is given to observation and documentation, with simple interpretation rubrics.

Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s concept of “structuration,” I introduced students to the relationship between structure and agency: people operate within existing systems but also modify those systems through their actions.

For design, this provides a useful way to think about feedback and feedforward, variability in use and interpretation, and the possibility of unexpected outcomes.

The objective was therefore not simply to produce greater empathy for a predetermined “user,” but to question the assumption that designers can fully determine how people will use, interpret, or respond to a design.

Students were encouraged to recognize users as participants with agency rather than as fixed types or objects of research. As Giddens describes the relationship, it is one of “agency and structure in which primacy is granted to neither.”



II. “Design and social innovation” courses. Primarily service design ideas in a larger, participatory context via Manzini.

Objectives: how can this kind of variable complexity be applied to designing and design education? How can participation by “users” be brought into the mix?

How can we move from qualitative and participatory research into design scenarios that are owned by participants and that use available in-kind resources?

A second set of objectives was to again change the underlying assumptions in GD/UX of a single “persona,” and instead see people in relation to their environment and to each other within design solutions. Some of the ideas I introduced, both here and abroad, included the use of human geography and simple ideas from ArcGIS so that students could begin to conceptualize communities in greater depth and balance the inherent social bias in GXD of a single targeted “user/consumer.” Secondly, I introduced specific ethnographies connected with the idea of critical readings in early imaging courses, rather than what was usually offered in sponsored courses, where the user was created beforehand as a simplified typology. And finally, working in a different culture and language precluded student designers from making tacit assumptions about the people they were designing for. In the Study Abroad courses, students saw the gaps in their interpretations of “users” and could not easily or unconsciously make assumptions about who they were designing for.

This helped diminish both “cardboard histories”* and “cardboard” personas and user scenarios.



* The idea that simplification/reification in education, especially of history, may diminish how students see the subject/discipline in more complex ways. See Gould, S. J. (1988). Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Vol. 2). Harvard University Press.