Poster Session
Asynchronous Session
The Power of Change to Go Green: Renovating School Buildings to Promote the Sustainable Culture in Taiwan View Digital Media
Poster Session Hong Yi Shih
The concept of “Green School” has become one of the solutions for the ever-more serious environmental issues. “Green School” being a viable solution is because schools can model best practices for energy efficiency and sustainable design, and can teach students, staff and faculty the sciences behind the concepts and encourage them to also carry those concepts as sustainability culture forward into their own lives and those of future generations. Schools are not only great places for educating, practicing, and demonstrating the culture of sustainability, but they can also provide healthy, applicable, efficient and environmentally friendly spaces for teachers and students in their daily lives. As the sciences behind the Green School concepts are applied and taught, the health and wellbeing benefits are experienced first-hand, with students, staff and faculty as the primary beneficiaries. The goal of this renovating for sustainability thesis project is to establish a set of guidelines for Green School design, by creating a flexible, comprehensive, and universal design system tailored to the unique conditions, culture and climate of Taiwan. The guidelines will be used to redesign one of the school buildings in Taiwan to promote the Green School concept and sustainable development. Also, the design will be utilized as a lead for local community to promote sustainable culture and develop the interdependent relationship between conservation efforts and environmental education.
Empowering Youth and Strengthening Communities Through Community Asset Mapping View Digital Media
Poster Session Samira Shiridevich
This initiative represents a collaborative and iterative endeavor between an Iranian graphic designer and educator and Project YouthBuild (PYB) students and staff in Gainesville, Florida. The project's primary objective is to foster sustainable communication and collaboration between the local East Gainesville community and PYB participants, who strive to support youth facing educational challenges. By embracing co-design methodologies and involving PYB students at every stage, the project has crafted an interactive game and map, facilitating PYB's Community Asset Mapping initiative. Aligned with the principles of Asset-Based Community Development, the CONNECT project addresses a fundamental question: how can we effectively uncover latent knowledge within vulnerable communities and visualize it to drive profound social change? Integral to this transformative journey is co-design workshops centered around conversational trust-building, radical mapping techniques, and serious games. These workshops have proven instrumental in unearthing innovative solutions that emphasize horizontal problem-solving. The process thrives on diverse disciplines and the invaluable insights of PYB students. CONNECT empowers PYB students by providing valuable resources and support to establish reciprocal and respectful relationships within the broader community, particularly with elderly residents near the PYB campus in East Gainesville. By fostering meaningful connections between youth and their neighbors, the project aims to cultivate a sense of community ownership and shared responsibility, culminating in sustainable social transformation. The session will openly discuss the project's outcomes, challenges, and invaluable lessons learned. It also will underscore the transformative power of horizontal problem-solving and stress the essential nature of embracing diverse perspectives within community development endeavors.
Substrate Fantasia: Speculative Fabrication of a Co-evolving Future With More-than-humans View Digital Media
Poster Session Nanyi Jiang
Substrate Fantasia is a speculative fabulation of a substrate-centered world called Substratocene in 2180 - a transitional era between current Anthropocene towards an ecological utopia. Through a short film, a living mushroom chair and a series of livable sporing suit, the project takes a radical position to use design objects and lifestyles to portray a more-than-human future. Rather than consuming constructed objects, humans use bodies to co-create objects with fungi: human body weight becomes the shape transformer of chair seating area while the mycelium is growing. A new kind of wearable also is also being invented to help transport spores of fungi. This material possibility enables a new social system of sporing via human bodies, representing multispecies co-evolution and entanglement.
Nouns So Abstract - Part One, Birth: Marginalized Images in Generative AI View Digital Media
Poster Session Zhifang Li
“We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis. Nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft.” -Ocean Vuong, **On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous** Inspired by Vuong’s metaphor of medical terminologies’ equivalence to witchcraft and the inaccessibility of language through intergenerational assimilation, Nouns So Abstract explores the visualization of a “Chinese Witch.” Part one, Birth, explores the designer’s experience giving birth to her first and only child, from midwife pre-natal visits, failed doula coaching, acute hospital trauma, and postpartum depression. For Birth, she has created interactive animations from collected AI still renderings of keywords (aka nouns) that include: “chinese” + “witch” + “natural” + “bonding” ++. The AI platforms are all open-access and includes DALL-E 2, Midjourney and DeepAI. The AI renderings showcase what the Internet believes is a Chinese Witch, highlighting misconstructions, demonization, and stereotypes inherent in these AI learning algorithms; and questions who owns the images of marginalized people?
Scheme and Methodology for Graphic Designer’s Conception: Individuality Through Layers and Assembly View Digital Media
Poster Session Marcos García-Ergüín Maza
This poster exposes a methodology questioning digital media and its homogenisation of the image conception, which has absorbed graphic design and the images’s construction by a re-mediation of previous procedures (photography, illustration, etc.). We take, therefore, Manuel DeLanda’s ‘assemblage theory’ to show how digital creation takes into account numerical and digital assembly. Then we confront our results to show its application by a system of composition based on layers. Consequently, we expose our methodology and the layer system to provide the creative individuality of designer remaining in digital procedures against the homogeneity of the Internet, software and AI.
Unleashing the Future: A Speculative Design Project that Explores the Relationship between Individual and Generative AI through Fictional Scenarios that Apply a Human-centered Mentality View Digital Media
Poster Session Michal Rotberg
McKinsey Global Institute’s report on the economic potential of generative AI emphasizes the capacity of generative AI to dramatically transform our world and our purpose in society. However, it also calls us to act now to contain the potential of generative AI to upset our lives and livelihoods. The author of this speculative design project seeks to understand the realities of the ‘AI race’ and its effect on our humanity by developing a speculative scenario where AI experiences human struggles for independence and equality. Thus, the author presents the audience with a human-centered mentality applied to a fictional AI-centered world. The first phase of this project is a fictional social media campaign for an AI-led protest movement on Instagram. It promotes safe and responsible AI practices and opposes unethical training and use of AI. The account shares activist messages generated with publicly-available generative AI models and prompts used to create them. This project widens an accessible and inclusive discourse about the human aspect of new technologies and our responsibilities as their creators.
Material Design in English for Design Education Using Ren'py Visual Novel Engine: NDL 1.0 - an Interactive Comic for Design Terminology View Digital Media
Poster Session Meral Şentürk, Semin Kazazoğlu, Umut Tasa
The proliferation of educational materials and resources in design education has witnessed a notable surge, owing to the evolving paradigm of education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancement of new technologies. However, there is a valid argument to be made regarding the relative lack of progress in the field of design when it comes to the development of professional English. While the field of design has grown and become increasingly complicated over the past few years, little has changed in terms of how English for design is taught in countries where the English is a foreign or second language. This study addresses the aforementioned shortcoming and makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature in the domain. Our objective is to present a comics, and its open-source interactive comic adaptation that has been developed using the Ren'py visual novel engine. Aiming at facilitating the acquisition of professional terminology by aligning it with the fundamental principles of interaction design and visual communication, the instructional materials have been developed to enhance the learning experiences and professional language skills of communication design students.
The Smallest Book in The World: An Exploration of Identity Through Multimodal Design View Digital Media
Poster Session Thomas Marotta
This practice-based research utilises design to explore the metaphor, “the smallest book in the world,” a disingenuous colloquial phrase that, when prefaced with the question “what is?” can then be associated with the speaker’s choice of “punchline”, answers, sometimes as a light-hearted look at the world and on other occasions transforming the seemingly benign question into a derisive statement of ridicule with racist connotations. An example of the phrase’s racist connotations has been its association with Italian military performance in World War II. The research uses images, text and sound from an autoethnographic viewpoint. It allows the researcher to reflect on their experiences using multimodal communication forms to understand identity through broader cultural, social and political phenomena. The research contemporises storytelling through design, using found primary elements of images, prisoner-of-war letters, and artifacts as catalysts for new insights. It combines past, present, and future, extending the meaning of these found objects through digital interpretations expressed through image, video, and sound modalities. These modalities are enhanced by AI and augmented reality technologies, making tangible the researcher’s experience of the metaphor “smallest book in the world.” The resulting work intends to contemporise the storytelling of first-generation Italian migrants and to give a presence to those whose very being and contribution were omitted or diminished from post-World War II histories and popular culture.
Emotional Landscapes: An Analysis of Student Designs for Columbarium Gardens View Digital Media
Poster Session Qing Luo
This study explores the potential of design students to create environments that elicit emotions and reflections through physical design elements. Ten students were tasked with designing a columbarium memorial garden in a cemetery, incorporating natural beauty, reflective qualities, intimate spaces, and sensory experiences. Faculty conducted an in-depth evaluation of the students’ design drawings, focusing on various physical design elements and layouts. This led to identifying six key themes: soothing natural aesthetics, contemplative spatial design, symbolism and metaphors, serene sensory experiences, intimate and secure spaces, and interactive and creative elements. The results show the students' diverse use of design elements, like the calming effect of water, the vibrancy of native plants, reflective sounds, life-stage water features, sound barrier hedges, and guiding arc circulation, significantly contributing to these themes. The study underscores the importance of physical design elements in creating spaces that promote tranquility, reflection, and emotional well-being. Analyzing the students' work reveals that a harmonious blend of these elements can enhance the quality of landscape spaces, making them suitable for contemplation, healing, and connecting with nature. While some students focused more on physical layout than emotional impact, future designs could benefit from a deeper integration of these elements, resulting in spaces that are impactful and meaningful.
From Screens to Swatches: Transforming Digital Textiles into Tangible Reality View Digital Media
Poster Session Amanda J. Thompson, Trevor Collins (Hill)
Textile swatches historically are important in the design and prototyping of new products for accessories, apparel, footwear, interior and exterior design, and many other areas of design. Originally, creating a textile swatch meant cutting up fabrics or materials into small pieces to be sent to interested parties or provided a reference. While making these swatches is still very important, virtual swathes are now seen as an avenue to pursue prototyping without as much associated waste. With the increasing demand for virtual textiles, the researchers wanted to evaluate and compare large websites that provide digital swatches to users for their virtual designs. The primary focus of this study was to see how simple it was for users to turn their ideas or virtual swatches into physical textiles. To do this, a ranking scale was created, and the researchers evaluated the asset websites, accordingly, based on ease of use. The researchers discovered that there is much room for improvement on these websites. Many of the websites reviewed provided the digital swatch, and occasionally the vendor information. However, it did not give users access to order fabric from the vendors, except for the one brand that had an integrated website. Users still need to contact the vendor directly or go to the vendor's website to order, which could be difficult as not every vendor lists their contact information. The researchers concluded that it would be beneficial for these websites to integrate a method of ordering from the vendors and simplify use.
