Education Forum

THURSDAY, JULY 25

11:50a–12:00p
Opening Remarks
Sharon Oiga & Guy Villa Jr


CURRICULA & PEDAGOGY

12:00p–12:20p
Design Engagement with Indigenous Languages
Leo Vicenti

This presentation highlights research that occurs amongst critical, creative, social, academic, and ecological spaces, and is first rooted in the question of “What might design support?” in the context of Indigenous Language Revitalization, Preservation, and Reclamation. Imagine teaching design on unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw and Səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ peoples. Add to the variety of challenges by establishing research directions and envisioning an indigenous design curriculum, while also inheriting unique collaborative relationships. Attendees can expect to learn insights from this first year interdisciplinary design course, how indigeneity might inform academic structures like curriculum and program development, while touching on student experiences and project outcomes.

12:20p–12:40p
Visual Grammar: Teaching the Fundamentals of the Graphic Design Language
John Paul Dowling

A comprehensive overview of the core principles and methodologies essential for understanding and mastering graphic design language. Grounded in theoretical frameworks and enriched with practical applications, this paper explores the intricate interplay of visual elements such as typography, color, imagery, layout, and composition. Drawing on pedagogical strategies and instructional approaches, the paper offers insights into effective teaching methods tailored to cultivate students' proficiency in visual communication. Through an analysis of existing curricula, case studies, and educational resources, the paper identifies key challenges and opportunities in teaching visual grammar within the context of graphic design education. Furthermore, it discusses the implications of incorporating emerging technologies and interdisciplinary perspectives in shaping the future of graphic design pedagogy. By synthesizing theoretical concepts with practical considerations, this paper serves as a valuable resource for educators, practitioners, and researchers seeking to enhance the teaching and learning of visual grammar in graphic design education.

12:40p–1:00p
Institutions Reproduce Themselves. It’s a Problem
David Cabianca

Institutions reproduce themselves. It’s something that I often say to my students. This claim refers to the notion that we teach what we were taught as students and/or what interests we pursued as students. This is a problem because as learning becomes more about a transactional relationship, i.e. “What’s in it for me?” learning becomes less about exploring the world and more about repeating the world. Learning and education become vocational, less concerned about how design can interact with and discover connections in the world than about how graphic design can be applied to a problem, like plumbing, carpentry, or refrigerator repair. I do not think less of vocations, but I do think that an emphasis on vocational learning has a detrimental impact on graphic design’s place among the already recognized disciplines. When limited to just a transactional relationship, graphic design ignores its own history, its effective engagement with culture writ large, and hinders if not obstructs its ability to overcome the competing demands of clients, marketing and account managers. This presentation will attempt to make this problem clear to others and hopefully suggest aspirational paths.


1:00p–1:10p
Q+A


1:10p–1:25p
Coffee


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ANALOG, DIGITAL, POST-DIGITAL

1:25p–1:45p
Process Potluck: Finding Joy & Meaning in the Act of Making
Kelsey Dusenka

This talk will present an overview of an elective course, Process Potluck, which is composed mostly of School of Design juniors and seniors at Carnegie Mellon University. Through a collection of critically playful process investigations with emphasis on affordances of tools and materials, this elective aims to equip students with the ability to form their own fruitful methodologies to adopt within their practices. The course is divided into three parts: (1) Ingredients: single-week process studies to sample a variety of conceptual and technical methodologies; (2) Recipe: student-defined multi-week process explorations; (3) Potluck: cohort-developed event to showcase work, share insights, and let attendees “taste-test” the class through a participatory prompt. This talk will walk through the course’s three parts, using in-class activities and students’ outcomes to highlight the most salient takeaways: adopting a low-stakes mindset, thinking through making, embracing constraints and chance, and reframing failure. We’ll look at how students use a short timeline and humble means to (un)learn what it means to be process-oriented and to discover what drives them when freed from solution-oriented briefs.

1:45p–2:05p
Rendered Reality: Developing Experimental Type in Augmented Reality
Grace Spee

Reality Rendered presents an augmented reality experimental type project from a Digital Media class. Most motion graphics classes focus upon moving typography and its origins in cinema. As a lover of kinetic dimensional typography, I introduced my students to the future of moving type. We collaborated on a new project designed to think about type existing in hyperreal spaces. The future of kinetic typography isn’t just watching on a screen – it’s interaction. We started by discussing typography in video games, and learning about pixel typefaces. Students then created pixel letterforms, and we explored how rules of type anatomy might translate, or not translate, to 8-bit parameters. Next, students were introduced to Aero, an AR application. Students had to fluidly switch between 2D and 3D, with a workflow that stretched from sketches to laptops to mobile phones. Additionally, we discussed differences in virtual versus analog play, and what it means to recreate physical actions in hyperreality. Students filmed their AR type in locations around Chicago and presented it in a class exhibition. Finally, we played with our typeface in a virtual whiteboard together.

2:05p–2:25p
Typographer Research — Sculptural Letterforms
Annabelle Gould

This presentation will cover an assignment in an introductory Type class for 60 sophomores majoring in ID, IxD and VCD. The students pair off to research an assigned typographer, foundry or influential studio. The students first give (well-designed) pecha kucha presentations covering the individual/studio's background and contributions to the field of typography. The students then take inspiration from their research to make a sculptural letterform that is at least 10 inches tall and able to stand alone. The letterform must be beautiful and recognizable. This project covers research, collaboration, designing for a screen, improving presentation skills, design process, prototyping and working with varied materials. Final letters have utilized 3D printing, sewing, baking, the woodshop and more. There are many learning opportunities along the way and the students are usually very proud of the outcomes.

2:25p–2:35p
Spatial Typography Design Education in the Post-digital Age
Jialun Wang

This presentation focuses on teaching typography through spatial forms, highlighting class projects and workshops that enable students to delve into typography using both digital and tangible approaches, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and physical crafts. It moves typography beyond the two-dimensional plane, fostering student collaboration within digital culture and encouraging them to consider typography within 3D spaces. This approach diverges from canonical typography education, prompting our community to reconsider and explore the diverse cultural relationships between humans and typography. It transitions from form-making to questioning accessibility and critically examining future typography. Can typography be viewed as a spectacle? How does typography perform and interact within digital mediums, and how can it probe specific topics through space? What potential relationships might exist between the community and typography in the digital sphere?

2:35p2–2:45p
Q+A


2:45p–3:00p
Coffee Break


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PRACTICAL FRAMEWORKS

3:00p–3:20p
Strategies for Researching the History of Type
Paul Shaw

This talk will provide an overview of strategies and advice for researching the history of type both in person and via the Internet. It will look at how to tailor search terms for optimum results, how to assess the quality and reliability of sources, identify the best online resources (including those hidden from Google) as well as the best in person type archives, and discuss the advantages and limitations of digital research.

3:20p–3:30p
Rethinking Grid Systems in Adobe InDesign
Chris Swift

This presentation will explore the limitations and assumptions of Adobe InDesign's grid systems and page shaping, particularly how they impact the planning and research phase of a project. By detailing a script developed to enhance InDesign’s capability for complex grid creation, the talk will showcase how this tool has been and continues to be iteratively refined through collaboration with senior design students. The aim is to illustrate the potential for scripting to transform InDesign into a more flexible and powerful tool in the design process, enabling designers to transcend traditional constraints and foster innovation in typographic design.

3:30p–3:50p
Type Speaks!: Developing Popular Media About Typography in the Classroom
Sean Schumacher & Lena Hall

Typography in the digital era is inherently public art, and conversations around it increasingly include publics beyond those in the type design or graphic design community. From Helvetica to Comic Sans, those outside design increasingly recognize—and have their own strong opinions about—type designs from their use as font software. What is often missing from these conversations about type outside the field are the necessary historical and cultural context important for these works to be properly understood as art. This presentation explores the use of popular emerging media created in an undergraduate design classroom to broaden the typographic conversation to include more publics. The process of developing the show “Fontroversy” as an educational tool in the guise of a comedy podcast will be explored from both an instructor and student perspective. The challenges of bringing podcasting into a graphic design classroom, and exploring how to translate inherently visual works into a non-visual medium, will also be discussed.


3:50p–4:00p
Q+A


4:00p–4:15p
Coffee Break


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Typography & Letterform Design

4:15p–4:35p
Gibberish to Shibboleth: A Graduate Thesis on Experimental Orthography and Multilingual, Multiscriptural Design
Liyang Zha

This presentation is a reflection on graduate thesis research, which proposes an approach for designers to improve multiscriptural and multilingual design. As the project examines the multilingual relationship between the ethnic Bai language and the dominant Han language of southwest China, this case study explores different optimizations for multiscriptural designs through typography and type design. The case study constructed a theoretically feasible alternative orthography around the typographic concept of visual shibboleth, which designers can utilize in their type/typographic design. This research proposes an approach that is expandable to other multilingual settings, which can be applied to the ideation, testing, and evaluation of communication designs to improve language and scriptural equality.

4:35p–4:45p
Typographic Culture
Rob McConnell, Hanna Rogers & Lan-Xi Lin

Most students that enter our classroom are experienced consumers of typography. Their aesthetic, typographic preferences, and way of decoding visual cues have been shaped and influenced by their surroundings to create their own personal typographic culture. For the project, students explored one aspect of their own typographic culture. They researched the style, dug into the history, defined notable characteristics, and created their own calligraphic interpretation. This presentation shares a few examples of student led research and the framework we used to help cultivate these explorations.

4:45p–4:55p
Unpacking the Emotional Power of Six-Word Memoir Posters
Jan Ballard

The past few years’ challenges have impacted students and projects in class. The Six-Word Memoir projects showcase typographic hierarchy and self expression with subject matters of trauma and mental health for many current students. Stemming from Ernest Hemingway's famous challenge, the Six-Word Memoir trend took off in 2006 via Smith Magazine, inviting people to share personal tales in six words. Situated within a sophomore typography assignment, the project delves into crafting impactful memoirs and designing visual responses. Students, limited to six words, explore introspection, selecting potent language to convey their stories' essence. These memoirs, emphasizing concise storytelling, evoke complex emotions, highlighting typography's role in conveying messages visually. Students reflect on personal experiences, crafting visual responses guided by typography, minimal imagery, and color. By honing narrative compression and visual composition skills, students deepen their storytelling and design abilities, culminating in poignant typographic posters that reflect on their experience of personal trauma of living through a time of significant change and challenge.

4:55p–5:15p
A Collaborative Amalgamation of Grapheme, Acronyms, Initialisms, Contractions & Crasis
Chad Reichert & Susan LaPorte

Developing collaborative projects among faculty in higher education is essential, especially in the post-pandemic environment. Faculty members have been impacted in various ways, including a heavier teaching load, reduced funding for faculty development, and shifting demographics with a greater need for emotional support. As faculty, it’s crucial to find ways to rebuild college communities, rethink methods of making, and model playful collaborative practices that students can learn and grow from. In this presentation, Susan and Chad will showcase the outcomes of their recent collaborations. They’ll discuss how chance played a role in establishing the rules of engagement and what the design process looked like. They’ll conclude by showcasing the full range of outcomes that include print ephemera, textiles, and motion.


5:15p–5:25p
Q+A


5:25p–5:30p
Closing Remarks


5:30p–6:30p
Networking Cocktail Hour

Location: Revolution Hall
1300 SE Stark St #203, Portland, OR 97214

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