Growing Capacity (Asynchronous Session)
Professional Practice for Graphic Design and Portfolio Capstone: A Tale of Two Courses View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicole L. Arnell
This paper offers a description of the development of and requirements for both Professional Practice and Portfolio Capstone classes that prepare senior-level undergraduate design students for the transition from academia to a successful career. These courses are taught by the presenter within the BFA in Graphic Design curriculum at Arkansas State University. Many colleges insist on stuffing all elements taught in these courses into one semester-long course, but this is impossible to do at the level explained in this presentation. The Professional Practice coursework begins with a logo. The brand is developed from positioning and tone to full visual identity. All elements evolve from this, including cover letters and resumés, website, business forms, a social media presence and plan, and a full brand book. Ensuring students understand how to apply these materials for a successful career, a business plan is developed that displays comprehension of legal aspects and taxes in relation to the cost of living. This ties into the comprehensive Job Hunt Journal developed throughout the semester. The cover letters are written to creative directors and then tie into the networking and interviewing skills taught in the course. An overview of the Portfolio Capstone course will also be provided, including why it is impossible to develop a professional-level portfolio (vs. a collection of student work) in addition to the demands of the Professional Practice class. Other work produced from this course includes captions and talking points, a leave-behind, and even how (and why) to write a press release.
Designing Tools for Participation: A Norm-creative Method for Co-constructing Personas with Children with Disabilities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Britta Teleman
Child participation in healthcare requires tools that empower children to co-produce their care. Development of such tools should involve children, but participatory design with children raise challenges, particularly when involving children with disabilities. However, using the right participatory approaches can bring more effective tools for this group. Personas is a method for strengthening user perspectives, through representation without user presence. However, research on persona generation in this context is limited. This study aims to develop a participatory, inclusive persona generation method, adjusted to suit children with disabilities. The method development was based on three rounds of image-based workshops involving 16 children with various disabilities in persona generation, through co-creation of characters and scenarios. Eight children without disabilities, 1 young adult with disability and 1 rehabilitation professional also participated in validating the results. Throughout the process a qualitative thematic design analysis was used. The results consist of an iterative co-construction method, accompanied by personas that were generated and validated within a games for health project. The results show effectiveness in enabling flexible communication and co-construction, through salutogenic and social model perspectives. The method is discussed in terms of norm-creative tradeoffs, participation levels, and salutogenic descriptions of barriers. The method may influence design projects towards more inclusiveness and enable increased representation for disabled children in research. Using this method successfully will need a norm-critical awareness as well as extensive facilitation. Suggestions for further research include applications of the method in similar contexts or user groups.
Educating Designers to Practice in the Public Realm: Developing Hybrid Courses Between Design and Policy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sofía Bosch Gómez
The intersection between innovation, new capacity building, and the public sector has merely been explored from an educational perspective. With the rise of innovation spaces in governments that promise to shift the state of affairs, or at least start to steer the administrative apparatus to enable preferred futures, the circumstances seem to be favorable to consider how to train designers otherwise as to be able to respond to the complexities of public bureaucracies from an emergent and local perspective. These innovation offices aspire to carve space to envision and device novel forms of creating public policies and implementing them, many times through enhanced or digitized public services. Thus, as design thinking, systems thinking, and service design become central to their operations, trained designers are falling behind with what they can contribute. They are not prepared to perform in such intricate environments which require designers with the capacity to adapt and reframe the issue from multiple perspectives. Design education has the potential to spearhead an educational transition towards disciplinary hybridity, where hard and soft skills are developed with equanimity in the classroom. As these new avenues of practice open for designers, this paper aims to illustrate the structural form in which a hybrid course between design and policy might be constituted. Two case studies are presented, the first within the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh and the second at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, in Mexico City.
Avant-garde CAD: Generative Design View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarvpriya Raj Kumar, Viktor Malakuczi
With the advent of Additive Manufacturing (AM), it is possible to realize complex shapes and structures which would have been difficult to manufacture by conventional processes, therefore AM offers an unprecedented morphological freedom. It enables a wider diffusion of Generative Design (GD), a design approach empowered by advanced computation, allowing the designer to define initial constraints and objectives, then instruct an algorithm to generate numerous variations and optimize the design until the desired solution is achieved. The idea of generative potential was present already at the birth of CAD over half a century ago, but emerged mainly in the past decade through widely publicized experimental research projects both in academy and in the private sector. GD is expected to spread across various industries due to advantages including optimized weight and mechanical performance, better use of raw materials, but also because it enhances the creative process by helping designers to explore solutions in a brief timeframe. The paper starts with describing the place of GD in the evolution of CAD, then it outlines current technological directions, including topology optimization, morphogenesis and biomimicry. Afterwards we examine how the design research community and design professionals use GD to achieve various goals, with a particular attention on transportation design. Finally, the study concludes by observing how the designer’s role is shifting towards being a “curator” of input data and output geometry, with the consequence that they will need to adapt their tools and their skills.
