HELEN ARMSTRONG

This semester Miami graphic design students from my Print Design Systems class collaborated with graduate creative writing students from Professor Ann Fisher-Wirth’s course at the University of Mississippi. Together they created the first issue of a hypothetical new poetry journal. Ole Miss students first wrote an original body of work and then Miami students developed [...]

All typefaces are modular to some extent, but in this assignment Miami graphic design sophomores pushed modularity to a new level. The assignment began with each student consulting their cell phone and then sharing their latest text message with the class. The text message content inspired the look and feel for a new modular typeface. [...]

View Book Launch Presentation In November, MICA graciously hosted a Design Double Feature Book Launch celebrating the release of my new book Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content (Princeton Architectural Press) along with Ellen Lupton’s new book Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming. Book launch highlights included a lively participatory exercise involving modular coasters, a mini-exhibition, and [...]

Designer and writer Andrew Shea took a break from The Big Apple to lead our design seniors in a Design for Social Change workshop. The workshop grounded students in this growing design focus, as well as supported their efforts to develop impact-oriented thesis topics. Shea’s upcoming book, Designing for Social Change, provided ample material for [...]

Digitizing a text divorces it from a fixed reality. These dematerialized words float in cyberspace waiting for someone—anyone—to assign form. Organizations like Project Gutenberg have made digitized public domain texts freely accessible. Mechanisms like the Expresso Book Machine, courtesy of  NYC’s McNally Jackson bookstore, give users the ability to materialize previously inaccessible out-of-print texts in [...]

We’ve been busy preparing for the 2012 senior year. This year, thesis projects will have a general theme of “Design for Social Impact.” To support this concept, we are bringing in exceptional speakers/critics to work with the seniors. (photo of Ellen Lupton shown here) Andrew Shea will come in October. Andrew is a designer and [...]

LINKED: An Experiment in CoCreation developed by Helen Armstrong, Miami University, and Zvezdana Stojmirovic, The Maryland Institute College of Art. 35 MICA students in Baltimore, MD / 22 Miami students in Oxford, Ohio—our project began with this question: How can 57 students in three sections from two very different institutions collaborate across time and space? [...]

Crowdspeak: A co-created student project/exhibition developed by Helen Armstrong, Miami University, and Zvezdana Stojmirovic, The Maryland Institute College of Art “Workflow—the order of tasks in the realization of a project—is as important as outcome. This experiment explores how different workflows affect authorship and help build community. In this cross-institutional assignment, sophomores at MICA and Miami [...]