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Writing Center Review Volume 21 Spring 2017
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Valley Vineyards: A Discovery in Unique Tastes, 2017
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/valley_documents/2/thumbnail.jpgBrochure highlights the history of the family-owned winery, the vineyards on the estate, Cellar Dweller brewery, wine tasting room selections and hours, and weekend cookout details.</p
Tarula Farms Wine Growers Logo
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/winerysw/13/thumbnail.jpgTarula Winery opened in 1967 as a direct consequence of an Ohio State vineyard research project held in the Southern region of the state in the early 1960s. Founded by Wistar and Ursula Marting in New Clarksville, the farm transferred to Greg and Chris Hayward, two local teachers, in the late 1970s. During this period the winery produced mainly French hybrid wines. In 1985, the couple sold the 26 acre wine farm to Lou Nebel, who started her career working for the short-lived Warren J. Sublette Winery in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati. Nebel closed the winery in 1988, acquired an additional 200 acres of land, and in 1999, reestablished the vineyard.</p
The Critical Turn: Critical Design; As A Matter Of Course
No full textDaniel Jasper, University of Minnesota
Since 1999 I have been using the formal and conceptual language of products as a means of research, and creative discovery. This mode of production falls under the rubric of “critical design”. Critical design describes a process whereby a designed artifact, its use and the process of designing it perform as an embodied critique or commentary on environment, economy, politics, culture—or design itself.
For instance, in this scenario wall paper patterns I’ve had commercially produced call in to question basic assumptions about the purpose of textile designs for domestic applications. In addition to being decorative and aesthetically pleasing can textile patterns also be emotive and consciousness-raising with regard to current topics including the United States’ drone program or casualty rates among armed service members?
Former head of the Design program at Cranbrook Academy, Kathryn McCoy said ‘Design is not a neutral, value-free process; however, we have trained a profession that feels political or social concerns are either extraneous to our work or inappropriate.’ (McCoy, 1994 p.111) McCoy alludes to a sort of tacit knowledge (and knowledge production) that became codified within the Western academy after World War II in which formal design production typically results in concrete statements couched in positive terms, which celebrate consumerism, consumer products and the munificent culture that produced them. Theorist Guy Debord characterized the psycho-philosophical underpinnings of this mediated environment in the following terms, ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’ (Debord, 1967 p.15) In this regard design (graphic, product, apparel) acts as the process by which this self-congratulatory monologue is made flesh, expressed physically in the form of what seem to be ideologically inert objects. As design educators, practitioners and scholars in a historically incurious profession one might be forgiven for asking is this all there is? Is client-based practice the only prescribed outcome for our intellectual and creative endeavors and those of our students? In addition to critical thinking and critical writing, is there room for critical design in design research, pedagogy and practice?
In one Writing Intensive graphic design course at the University of Minnesota students are asked to perform an examination of material culture—the very culture they propagate through work in their chosen profession. They critically examine their own patterns of consumer behavior within the simultaneous contexts of design, society, economy and culture. In a sequence of assignments, they express their findings not only with writing, but also the principles and practices of data visualization, using traditional 2-D computer-aided methods, or 3-D methods made more expressive through attention to materiality and physical presence. Without being expressly told to ‘make critical design’ the students nonetheless perform critical practice not as an end unto itself but simply as a method of interrogation. It is within this context that critical practice works in tandem with the traditional writing and research processes as an extension of writing. Here students are asked to place themselves, as designers, within the broader framework of design, society, economy and culture not as an ancillary consideration but as something central to their role as authors and producers of culture. Within this context, students are taught that being critical isn’t a job description for cranky elitists—it is something that should be done by designers as a matter of course.
Daniel Jasper is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
This was a Long Paper Session: Practice and Process on June 2, 2017. 10:30–12:00pm (SCI 106)</p
Improving Undergraduate STEM Visualizations Through Design Education: A NASA-funded STEAM Curriculum Initiative
No full textKatherine Hepworth, University of Nevada, Reno
An interdisciplinary computation and visualization course at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) is introducing STEM pre-majors to communication design principles, in order to improve the quality of their digital scholarship generally, and of their visualizations specifically. The undergraduate course ‘Computational Skills for Big Data: Analysis, Statistics, and Visualization’ is an example of STEAM pedagogy, which incorporates art and/or design (abbreviated into the ‘A’ in STEAM) into science, technology, engineering, and math education. Since the Rhode Island School of Design first advocated for the STEAM model less than a decade ago, it has rapidly been incorporated into education, industry, research, and policy in many countries worldwide. However, STEAM-based pedagogy has not spread rapidly in Nevada, and prior to the creation of this corse in Fall 2017 course, STEM students at UNR had little to no exposure to communication design principles and best practices, despite being required to regularly produce a wide range of visualizations for diverse audiences. The expectation that STEM students produce visualizations without any training in the principles and best practices for doing so has resulted in poor communication of STEM knowledge in student work, disadvantaging both students and the broader university community. Improving the clarity and effectiveness of scientific communication by incorporating design education into STEM curriculum is an effective, and as yet underutilized means of asserting the value of design in the academy.
This interdisciplinary collaboration between physics, math, and design faculty, funded by the NASA NV Space Consortium Curriculum Development program, was instigated to meet multiple curricular needs. As well the need to improve STEM students’ ability to produce and share scientific communication, there was also a need to teach undergraduate STEM students how to find, work with, and run basic statistical analyses on open source big data sets, such as those produced by NASA. There is a growing demand for these big data skills in government, industry, and research. The benefits of introducing undergraduates to big data skills in combination with communication design principles and best practices for visualizations include clearer communication of scientific findings across campus, and improved career prospects for students. This combination of skills is valuable generally, but particularly for addressing scientific and governmental issues in air pollution, climate change, and weather extremes.
This presentation by the design instructor for this interdisciplinary course will include a summary of how it was created, including the process of seeking and gaining curriculum development funding from NASA, and an outline of the course itself, with particular emphasis on the visualization components. Students practice implementing communication design principles — color use, composition, hierarchy, and legibility — in their visualizations within R, a widely used statistical analysis tool, thereby incorporating good design into a familiar scientific workflow. Students also learn about best practices in communication design — ensuring ethical representation, utilizing graphic conventions, and maintaining visual consistency. The presentation will also explore student outcomes, include reflection on the interdisciplinary teaching process, and offer thoughts on incorporating design education into other STEM subjects, and across other institutions.
Katherine Hepworth is a graphic design practitioner-researcher currently working as Assistant Professor of Visual Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research interests center around how graphic design artifacts mediate power relationships, with a particular focus on the power implications of data visualization across disciplines. This research focus has lead to current projects on ethical data visualization in the digital humanities, efficacy and ethics in big data visualization, and pedagogical research on improving visualization educational strategies in the sciences. Hepworth also has a broad research interest in improving communication effectiveness in higher education. In her research, teaching, and professional practise Hepworth takes a human centered approach to graphic design, prioritizing understanding of people’s lived experience of, and interaction with graphic design artifacts.
This was a Long Paper Session: STEM/STEAM on June 2, 2017. 2:30–4:00pm (SCI 108)</p
A War on Two Fronts: Critically Making Books, Museum Exhibits and Archives with Students
No full textScott Mann, Coastal Carolina University
Alli Crandell, Coastal Carolina University
Jennifer Boyle, Coastal Carolina University
This paper provides a detailed discussion of the process of creating A War on Two Fronts, a multimedia and interactive physical and virtual museum exhibit and accompanying book on African American soldiers in WWII. The project has also been adapted into a traveling exhibit. This professional level, multi-dimensional installation was conceived and executed by an entirely student-run publishing lab, The Athenaeum Press, at Coastal Carolina University. This case study offers insight into the multiple stages of digital and analog production among a select group of students who are immersed in a year-long process of collaboration and convergence across disciplinary practices. The presentation mirrors key phases of the experience. In phase one a diverse group of student makers come together under the direction of faculty drawn from disciplines across the humanities and arts and work towards a cohesive and accessible story to a given project idea. Phase two challenges students to grapple with the different design and research demands of the project and its ethos among stakeholders in the community and anticipated audiences. The final phase applies the concept of “critical making” to how students realize the final project across form and content. This model of experiential learning emerges as a space of creative reflection and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Scott Mann is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Coastal Carolina University. [email protected]
Alli Crandell is Director of Digital Initiatives at Coastal Carolina University. [email protected]
This was a Long Paper Session: Student-led Labs on June 3, 2017. 9:00–10:30am (SCI 106)</p
Community Voicebox: Capturing & Visualizing Regional Language Habits
No full textHeather Tucker, University of Notre Dame
The American English language is changing, from spelling to grammar to semantics, there is a new code for understanding one another. While this change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it has resulted in the loss of unique linguistic habits. Old or infrequently used vocabulary and phrases are becoming forgotten. Often, the only way to collect and study soon-to-be-forgotten vocabulary and phrases is by digging in textbooks, performing extensive field research, or by locating obscure or cumbersome source materials. However, what if design could help inform researchers and scholars of the language habits of regional cultures? What if there was a tool designed to collect regional linguistic data that engaged the community and visualized the data collected? A tool that revealed the layers of meaning in communication, gave justice to the richness of speech, and conveyed the dignity of culture in an organized and useful way.
From my project Community Voicebox: Capturing & Visualizing Regional Language Habits, I am proposing a methodology for collecting regional linguistic data. The approach uses visual priming and human interaction design techniques to engage community participation in the creation of a regional linguistic catalog.
To prototype this method I am creating an installation at Pack Memorial Library in Asheville, North Carolina. As a primer, I will use Mountain Talk, a poster series I created to visualize the connotation and denotations of the vocabulary, colloquialisms, slang, and folklore phrases heard in the area; like, “Sigogglin” or “A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to some bad end.” An interactive component will allow community members to add their words and phrases to the catalog.
For the Lightning Round Presentation, I will share my in-progress work, initial findings for further study.
Heather Tucker is a Visual Communication Designer pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Notre Dame. Her research has focused on the interchange of ideas between design, history, and anthropology—exploring how language shapes culture, identity, and human interaction. Previously, Heather worked as a creative lead for Auxiliary, Inc., located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This was a Lightning Round Presentation on June 3, 2017. 10:30–11:00am (SCI 106)</p
Design for Collaborative Research
No full textXinyi Li, Princeton University
Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Princeton University
As the boundaries of the design disciplines are blurring, the emphasis of design has shifted from need-driven tangible products to facilitation of the intangible exchange of information and knowledge production. Design has been desired as a method of inquiry into intellectual challenges and a tool of investigation of complex problems. Design does not have to always solve problems — it can also propose questions and probe thinking. As design always involves problematics in conjunction with other fields, this paper reflects on the merit of design in interdisciplinary collaborations including several practical examples and case-studies from in-progress Digital Humanities projects.
With the speculation of positioning design as a medium or as a tool, we call for more investigations on how to better embed design to the research process as a tool. When the professional field of design is not the central focus of the research, the role and value of design in interdisciplinary collaboration lies in the application of design thinking as a facilitative tool during the process. Design of systems and tools for learning and thinking can help make information visual, clarify ideas, and facilitate diagrammatical thinking.
By using examples of in-progress Digital Humanities projects, where collaboration between design, development, and scholarship is constantly happening, this paper investigates how design can facilitate scholarly collaboration activities with a process-oriented approach and service-based model. This paper discusses the question of ownership of interdisciplinary collaborative projects, advocates co-creation of content, and encourages instillation of design thinking to the research approach and production of synthesis. As a particular case, this paper discusses an in-process workflow for integrating design processes with software development for Digital Humanities projects. Like design, software development is an external discipline often brought to bear on digital research, and raises similar questions of ownership and co-creation. This new workflow aims to integrate the two approaches in order to make the most of what each provides: the bigger picture of communication design and user interactions alongside the discrete pieces of functionality that can be implemented and tested in software.
This paper then envisions more significant convergence of design and research by discussing transdisciplinary research methods, and possibilities of digital projects beyond current prevailing digital libraries. Designers have been unconsciously borrowing tools and methods from other disciplines, such as grounded theory and ethnographic research. This paper encourages study and adaption of methods and tools from other non-design disciplines, and brings about awareness of the limitations of oversimplified “for-designer” methods. For researchers, digital tools could be utilized to not only preserve and exhibit abundant raw materials, but also help spread scholarly work in new and more meaningful ways. Finally, it addresses the importance of visual literacy and visual epistemology, and appeals to meaningful visual production of abstract, relational, and ephemeral humanistic knowledge.
Xinyi Li is a multifaceted designer working within the realm of visual communication and interactive experience for both informative and speculative projects. She currently designs user experience and visuals for the sponsored projects of the Center for Digital Humanities. She obtained Master of Fine Arts degree in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, where she engaged in design projects, research, and teaching activities. She regards design as a method of inquiry to intellectual challenges and complex problems, and enjoys working across disciplines. She is into the precision of systematic models and embraces ambiguities of subjective experiences. She has lectured about her work at Pratt Institute, AIGA/NY’s Fresh Grad 2016, and has conducted workshops at Pratt Free School and the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. She updates her work at http://xinyi.li
Rebecca Sutton Koeser is the Lead Developer at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. Rebecca has degrees in both English Literature and Computer Science, and many years of experience with software development in an academic environment. Prior to working at Princeton, she was a senior software engineer with Emory University Libraries and IT Services, where she contributed to a diverse array of Digital Library and Digital Humanities projects and open source tools. Previous projects include Belfast Group Poetry|Networks, Serendip-o-matic (as a member of the 2013 One Week One Tool team), and Readux. In 2016 she published an article on software and scholarship in the Digital Humanities entitled Trusting Others to ‘Do the Math’; blog posts and updates are available at https://rlskoeser.github.io/ .
This was a Long Paper Session: Forming an Interdisciplinary Team on June 3, 2017. 9:00–10:30am (SCI 108)</p
Open Data as Design Medium
No full textEugene Park, University of Minnesota
Open data is the concept that public institutions across federal, state, and local levels should make government data available to all citizens. By providing access to databases from various sectors, proponents of the idea believe that it will increase government transparency, foster research and innovation, and empower more citizens for public engagement.
Despite their potential benefits, the current offerings of open data have been hindered with numerous access barriers. Many of its online portals lack the means for ordinary citizens to discover appropriate data, visitors are unable to find relevant and useful explanations about the data at hand, and there are no clear incentives for the public to explore these vast digital collections in the first place. As a result, their ambiguities and user experience issues have rendered many open data endeavors to be inaccessible for many.
Recognizing these issues, this presentation seeks to discover how designers can take advantage of open data while its implementation is still at its infancy. How can designers use these vast and ambiguous collections of data as an extension of creative and critical inquiry? Can they also expand the modes of representation of such datasets in order to promote public engagement? And what further opportunities can open data provide to the design community, particularly in education and research? This presentation first evaluates the current strengths and weaknesses of various open data portals in the United States, present student outcomes on how they were able to work with open datasets in the context of data visualization projects, and finally outline the challenges and opportunities for future endeavors.
Eugene Park is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design (Twin Cities) where he teaches courses in graphic design, interaction design, and data visualization. He has a MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in Physics from the University of California, San Diego. Combining his backgrounds in science and design, Eugene’s research interests focus on exploring the visual representation of knowledge from social and scientific datasets.
This was a Lightning Round Session on June 3, 2017. 10:30–11:00am (SCI 106)</p
Fusion Spring 2017
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