The Miami Graphic Design Program capped off the 2011-2012 year with a reception in honor of our BFA senior thesis exhibition. Each year, I work with the seniors to develop their projects. This year’s theme: Junction: Where Design Meets Social Change. Many thanks to our 2012 thesis critics: Mike Weikert and Ellen Lupton.

Good luck to our 2012 seniors! I’m going to miss you!

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Here’s a taste of this years projects:

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Jing Hang Huang
A New Brand and Signage System for Miami Bus System

Design Problem: A confusing, unclear signage system for the Miami University bus system.
Target Audience: Miami students, faculty and staff
Solution: A new brand designed to excite students about riding the bus. Magnetic bus signs that make buses easily identifiable by route. A revised pocket size map and brochure, as well as a new website and handy app for understanding bus routes and pinpointing the location of approaching buses.

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Kristen Whaley
Leave No Trace Backpacking Kit

Design Problem: How to teach first time backpackers about the Leave No Trace Principles in a way that makes them want to take ownership of their actions?
Target Audience: First time backpackers
Solution: A first time backpacking kit. This kit makes it easy for novices to plan and properly equip themselves to leave no trace while hiking. The kit includes various checklists and planning guides, as well as a waterproof containers useful for upholding the principles. As part of the system, a series of icons make the Leave No Trace principles more memorable. These icons are printed on the back and explained in more depth in detachable waterproof cards.

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Emily Drumm
My Daily Label Nutritional Tracking and Labeling System

Design Problem: Consumers find it difficult to understand current nutritional labels.
Target Audience: Consumers who care about their nutritional intake, but are unsure how to read current labels.
Solution: An alternative nutritional labeling system. Using the My Daily Label app, consumers can scan products and then use the new labeling system to better understand the nutritional value of the product. If the item is eaten, consumers can enter the scanned information into a personal database that builds daily and weekly visualizations of their nutritional intake, helping them to track and optimize their diet.

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Molly Mackin
Home Sweet Home Pet Adoption System

Design Problem: Potential adopters have developed negative perceptions about shelter organizations, and shelter organizations are wasting educational resources. How can a potential pet guardian’s experience adopting be more positive and educational?
Target Audience: First time pet owners and animal shelters
Solution: A comprehensive adoption system that encourages shelters and potential pet owners to partner in an attempt to find animals appropriate homes. The system includes a calendar worksheet to be filled out by adopters with help from shelter workers, a pet care template to be used first in the shelter and then taken home for the animals first weeks in a new home, and a website that helps potential pet parents find more in depth information about the program and pet care. These items are branded with the Home Sweet Home concept.  Cross stitching elements give the materials a warm and familiar feeling and help eliminate any previous misconceptions of a shelter’s inaccessibility. Wordplay taken from traditional sampler proverbs develops the idea further and appears on a poster series designed for in shelter use.

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Lauren Romano
Fibromyalgia Workout Kit

Design Problem: How can I help improve the everyday life of people living with Fibromyalgia by utilizing exercise?
Target Audience: People living with Fibromyalgia
Solution: Create a workout package and community program for Fibromyalgia patients, helping them feel better every day. Package includes a physical daily tracker and poster series of exercises, as well as an app and website to promote mobile use and community.

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Colleen Yates
LET: Let’s Learn Together Visual Schedule

Design Problem: Create a product that will help children with autism understand the sequence of events throughout the day.
Target Audience: Parents and educators working with autistic children, particularly pre-school through primary school age.
Solution: Create a visual calendar kit for the classroom and for home to help autistic children understand the sequence of activities they following throughout the day.

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Kara Isabella
The Neighbor to Neighbor Campaign

Design Problem: Help alleviate the effects of growing poverty in Olmstead Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
Target Audience: Residents of Olmstead Fall, Ohio.
Solution: A campaign designed to drive home that supporting The Neighbor to Neighbor Campaign will directly aid people in need that residents encounter in Olmstead Falls each day. The campaign includes a website, direct mail and poster campaign.

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Thesis Exhbition

Class Flickr Site

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Last week I traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee, to lead a participatory design workshop with University of Tennessee juniors.

The assignment: Find 20 people who have something unusual in common. Construct a flexible identity and supporting system through which the 20 users, and others like them, can coalesce as a community. The original 20 users supplied the necessary content for the identities, as well as functioning as a focus group to test out project iterations. Students worked in small groups to build sets of 20 users and then broke apart to develop individual design solutions.

UT juniors did a fabulous job developing innovative solutions.  I enjoyed working with them immensely. Here is a sample of their projects.

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Carter Kelton: Disposed
A community of people who have been virtually dumped

Using this iPad application, users fill out a quick questionnaire referencing their recent relationship experience. Info from the questionnaire feeds the flexible mark. Each user is added to the changing network of individuals in the form of a circle. The size of the circle indicates the length of the recent relationship. The position of the circle within the larger network connects the new users with others who have undergone similar break-ups.

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Chris Ruppelt: Scar
A community of people who have physical scars

This zine curates a collection of user-uploaded images of scars. Each scar includes a backstory that reveals the narrative behind the scar. The cover perfs off, allowing it to function as a stencil for scarring other items. Each issue of the zine explores a different category of scar.

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 Emma Mesk: Dear ________ Tattoo
A community of people who have tattoos they regret

This website allows users to break up with tattoos that no longer fit their lives. Each user fills in the blanks of a tattoo breakup letter and then officially submits it as part of the site gallery. In addition to adding text, each user also uploads an image of their tattoo. The first adjective in the letter and the image feed a flexible mark that updates in real time to include each contribution.

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Emily Hennen: Virtual Dumpsters
A community of people who have been virtually dumped

This iPad app asks users to draw the person who dumped them virtually  (i.e. through text messaging, e-mails, social networking, etc.). The drawing process help the user express their anger toward the individual. Each drawing becomes part of a virtual dumpster badge that states “I have no soul.” This badge can uploaded to the offending dumpster’s Facebook page.
The goal of the community is to educate the public about the importance of face-to-face relationships/communication.

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Emily Gilles: Invisible Scars
A community of people who have emotional scars

Through this website, or through a campus organization, users order circular templates. Each user is asked to draw their emotional scar on the appropriate template (head, arm, etc.). They then send the filled in template back to Invisible Scar. Invisible Scar turns the templates into wearable buttons. The participant then receives in the mail the same number of buttons that they originally submitted. The buttons, however, are not their own. Instead, each participant is asked to wear another’s invisible scars, thus making visible another’s emotional pain. Implementation of this project would take place in a limited physical space, such as a college campus, so that step two of the project could work. Step two asks each person wearing a scar button to trade with anyone else they happen to see wearing a button.

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Ben Smith: Newly-Marked
A community of people who have tattoos they regret

Using this iPad application, users can upload images of tattoos they regret. After adding their own images to this site gallery, users are asked to move on to step two. In step two, each user draws over another user’s uploaded bad tattoo image. In other words, to participate you must upload an image and then re-envision another’s tattoo mistake. The exercise is meant to be cathartic and fun. All resulting drawings are gathered in a gallery.

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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 a poetry journal around the content. The central theme for this new journal was the concept of “connections.” In addition to publication design, Miami students also explored mass customization. Each student had to develop a pragmatic system for mass producing but also individualizing each copy.

From the project brief:

“Publications are traditionally mass produced. Each copy is exactly like the next. Added value comes into play only when an author signs a copy, thereby making it unique. Recently, designers have begun to produce publications which are both mass produced and custom one off pieces. For example, Daniel Eatock’s monograph includes an area on the spine for his fingerprint. Eatock went to the warehouse storing his book and applied the fingerprint to each copy himself. Each copy is therefore unique. Copies that were not fingerprinted could be brought to book signings so that Eatock could literally add his individual touch. Designer Luna Maurer designed a publication in which the page numbers were written in by hand in charcoal. Although the rest of the publication appeared to be a traditional mass produced book, the handwritten page numbers added an individual quality to each copy. In addition to the fact that they were written by hand, the charcoal smeared as the book was handled leading to more customization. In both cases, the human touch fought the anonymity of computer generated design.”

Ole Miss students: Emileigh Barnes, Julie Ann Brandt, Wendy Buffington, Jessica Comola, Joshua Davis, Paul S. Dean, Tim Earley, Kevin Fitchett, Dorothy Knight, Michael Martin Shea, Travis Smith, Joe Zendarski

A sample of the resulting journals

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Sticky Mucky Gooey, designed by Adam Cassidy

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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.

For this project, they used Fonstruct.com , a free online resource.

To read more about the assignment visit: participatorydesign.net

Grace by Beth Hall: Download from fontstruct.com

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Ellyn Bordoshuk : Download font from Fontstruct.com

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CEG by Colleen Griffiths: Download from Fontstruct.com

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Azion by Jake Brennan

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Jane Manchester

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Kristen Gebhardt

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Molly Zilis

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Nick Peltz

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Aaron Retter

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Alex Mazzurco

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Andrea Fiegel

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Ann Schniechowski

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Austin Li: download from fontstruct

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Erik Seyferth

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Erin Riley

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Jarrett Bowling

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Katie Stewart: download from fontstruct

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Kaleigh Pawar

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We Are Almost There by Maria Bell: download from fontstruct

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Messerhaus by Sam Childs: download from fontstruct

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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 presentations by Ellen Lupton, Zvezdana Stojmirovic, Helen Armstrong, Keetra Dean Dixon and JK Keller, Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals of Post Typography, Lauren Adams, Christina Beard, Chris McCampbell, Ryan Shelley, Chris Hurley, and Aggie Toppins.

I brought 10 Miami design students along for the launch. MICA graciously housed our students. In one fast-paced weekend, students did a whirlwind tour of Baltimore, checked out the MICA MFA program, and helped install the launch exhibition. Miami professor Peg Faimon joined us, as well.

The presentation was video-taped. I’ll share a link as soon as it is available.

Photography by Peg Faimon

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Architect John Bertram asked me to design a cover to be included in his current book project: The Lolita Cover Project. This project is an expansion of Bertram’s essay that published in the Nabokov Online Journal. Marco Sonzogni, a literary translator and lecturer in languages at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is working with Bertram on the project.

According to Bertram, this book “explores the challenges and limits of representation (and mis-representation), and the relationship of a book to its cover through essays and graphic responses in the form of book covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Other contributing designers included: Jessica Helfand, Ellen Lupton, Michel Vrana, Chin-Yee Lai and David Gee.

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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 discussion.

His strategies for working with community groups to enact this kind of change included:
—Immerse Yourself
—Build Trust
—Prioritize Process
—Confront Controversy

Here are a few of the projects that he used to inspire our students
— pielab.org
—keysforthecity.com
—madeinmidtown.org

Andrew Shea is a graphic designer and writer. He earned his MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art, where he advised undergraduate design students who worked with community organizations. Shea has taught graphic design at MICA, Fordham University, and Parsons The New School for Design.

Shea’s writing has also appeared online at Designer’s Review of Books and Core77, where he writes about subjects from sustainability initiatives and unique funding strategies to book and product reviews. He was recently granted a Sappi Ideas That Matter award and his solo and collaborative design work has been featured in Print Magazine, Core77, Adbusters, and Metropolis Magazine P/O/V. Shea values collaborations of all kinds and looks for opportunities to use graphic design in ways that might spur lasting social changes.

This year’s graphic design senior thesis projects will fall under the larger umbrella of AIGA National’s Design for Good initiative. Spring visiting critics will include Mike Weikert and Ellen Lupton.

Andrew’s book is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

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The AIGA Pivot Conference in Phoenix included a bevy of inspiring designers: Katie Salen, Chip Kidd, Terry Irwin, Karl Heiselman, Allan Chochinov and many, many more. Here are some memorable ideas from my time at the conference regarding the future of design:

“From things to experiences
From style to purpose
From finished to beta
From silo to ecosystem
From craft to business”

—Karl Heiselman , CEO of Wolff-Olins

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“Beauty is still something to aspire to. The joy of that can give meaning”

“Bombard yourself with different juxtapositions.”

“Make an internal catalog of what matters.”

“Study things. Look for patterns around you.”

—Jakob Trollback, Trollback + Company

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Advice from Terry Irwin, Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon:

” —slow down
—live in and design for place (locality)
—focus on relationships not things
—ask how much is enough
—think in longer horizons of time
—mindful relation to other
—learn to connect the dots
—adopt new postures”

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“Deep play is rigorous and structured.”

—Katie Salen, game designer and Prof of Games and Digital Media at DePaul University

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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 a matter of minutes.

Miami design students experimented with this new phenomenon in my typography class this semester. Each student chose a favorite classic novel that fell in the public domain, downloaded it from Project Gutenberg and then created his/her own custom edition.

Questions raised by the project were two-fold:

1) How can designers—or any member of the public for that matter—take advantage of this new text accessibility? What does it mean to publication design when each reader can produce their own custom layout?

2) What is the future of the book? If the majority of texts move to a digital form, how will physical books be redefined? Will they become treasured artifacts? What unique opportunities do physical materials like paper and ink provide a designer?

Sample Student Work:

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, design by Katie Stewart

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, design by Erik Seyferth

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Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, design by Jarrett Bowling

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Grimm Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm, designed by Sam Childs

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Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, designed by Colleen Griffiths

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Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, design by Andrea Fiegel

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Check out the rest of the projects  here.

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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 writer located in New York City. His new book Designing for Social Change: Strategies for Community-Based Graphic Design will be out this fall. He is going to do a workshop with seniors in Peg’s class to help formulate thesis concepts. He’ll also give a lecture about the general topic of designing for social change and, hopefully, be inspirational to all.

In the spring we have two fantastic critics coming.

The first is Mike Weikert. Mike is director of the MICA’s MA in Social Design and Center for Design Practice and a graphic designer with a thriving professional practice. He runs Weikert Design, a graphic design studio, as well as Small Roar, a line of graphic baby shirts, with his wife Stephanie. He is also partner of Piece Studio, a socially focused design initiative. The previous co-chair of the College’s graphic design department, Weikert was creative director at Atlanta-based Iconologic and served as a design consultant to the International Olympic Committee. Mike is also a Miami University graphic design alum.

Mike will serve as midterm critic for thesis projects. He will bring with him a wide range of experiences to share and, just as importantly, he is lots of fun.

The final thesis critic will be Ellen Lupton. She is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at MICA. An author of numerous books and articles on design, she is a public-minded critic, frequent lecturer, and AIGA Gold Medalist.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ellen, she is one of the top designers/writers/critics in the country. She will critique final projects and give a lecture for all the design/art students.

We are all excited to get this year started!

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