Innovation Showcases
Breathing New Life into Old Media: An Investigation of Augmented Reality as a New Element in Print Media View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Dennis Schmickle
As an associate professor of graphic design, I use posters, book covers, and album art as teaching tools. These are the formats I love most but could well be considered “old media.” It’s my mission to breathe new life into these formats by utilizing augmented reality (AR). The ubiquity of smart phones and other devices ensures that our future will be augmented by those devices. While virtual reality has many amazing applications, it does (currently) require specific equipment that is sometimes inaccessible to all audiences. Conversely, smart phones and the apps that deliver these AR experiences are already in most people’s hands. Therefore, I have developed a series of new projects that utilize both new and old media. The students still learn illustration, composition, typography, and other principles of graphic design. And in that way, they solidify those most basic fundamentals of design, and can therefore translate those to anything else they design, whether it’s new or old media, because those principles always apply. However, in this series of projects, students create those traditional design objects, but are then required to design an animated version of the album cover, movie poster, or what have you, and then use software to create an AR experience wherein viewers can hold the tangible object in their hand, or view it on the wall, and then simultaneously view the animated version, or a video, or audio, or whatever additional media makes sense for the project.
Featured Blueprints of Justice: How the Interaction between Design, Architecture, and Law Develop New Forms of Questioning and Problem-solving View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Nóra Al Haider
This study chronicles the project 'Blueprints of Justice'. This project examines the interaction between law, design, and architecture and was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic created a moment of accelerated change in the change-averse legal system. In a rare occurrence, legal practitioners opened up the doors to their discipline and invited non-experts for collaboration. The essence of this collaboration boils down to the following question: knowing different disciplines each play a role in the access to justice problem, can an interdisciplinary approach lead to better outcomes, and furthermore, point towards desired futures? Change at such a fundamental level never happens in isolation. Architecture, legal experts, and students worked together to examine the direct relationship between law and space to tackle pressing real time scenarios put forward by experts. We delve into the case studies, methods, and results produced over a two year period. This work, directed by Oana Stanescu at MIT and Nóra Al Haider of the Stanford Legal Design lab, spans between 2020-2023 and looks at this intersection in the themes of social justice, human rights, and environmental justice.
Featured Putting into Practice Evolving Design Thinking Methods at Technology Firms that Prioritize User Experience: The Evolution to Two-hour Design Sprints View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Teresa Cain
Many organizations have based their own design thinking process from Stanford's Design Thinking Method or using Google and Jake Knapp’s five day process from the book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. However, five day design sprints have had its challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic including the ability to conduct a remote design sprint using the same process effectively, loss of productive time and the ability to collaborate with multiple stakeholders in one room. The adaptation of technology firms to two-hour design sprints teach organizations, product managers, researchers and designers how to adapt to a two-hour process derived from design thinking and design sprint methods to increase the frequency and speed of solving problems whether virtual or in-person. This study looks at the success of the adoption and practice of two-hour design sprints at technology organizations that frequently release software updates and features to their customers.
Her Practice: Biases, Glitches and Oppressive Values or a Happy Domesticity View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Georgina Pantazopoulou
‘Her Practice’ is an interdisciplinary design research and project aiming to tell her story; to bring things to the front; to establish a new design practice following an intersectional feminist approach. This practice focuses on the tools and methodologies that are applied during the design process aiming to create future domesticities which not only satisfy and facilitate the user but that also shape social behavioral patterns. The proposal invites the audience in a participatory performance in order to explore my autobiographical story. Through my grandmother’s kitchen I question the gender performativity and patriarchal structures working as common ground, which allows the users to embrace their own truths as they compare facts, objects, spatial paths or behaviors with their own domestic environments. An intersectional approach entails the collection of multiple voices, memories and actions in order to be able to understand, analyse and create anew the given context. Extracting knowledge from the “current” means that we confront and recognize the blurred paths or uncomfortable vectors within our spatial realms. Through this practice I see myself as a critical practitioner rather than expert, believing that everyone can be a potential expert based on their own lived experience. Thus, I invite other users to explore, discuss and develop together this practice exercising in my grandmother’s house through the alternation of scale, spatial qualities and domestic rituals. This collective process drives us to exchange thoughts and common visions for a new design paradigm which reflects more equal and inclusive worlds using a feminist approach.
Guide as Enabler of Conscious Creation: Structure and Spontaneity for Inspired Design View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Sarah Harris
This presentation showcases a recent and active participatory design process that shapes space (physical - virtual and sentient) to direct time, effort, and action to create at the individual level. Participants will view low-fidelity process visuals and be asked to consider how this example could apply to participatory design and continuous learning engagement in their professional context.
