AIGA DEC

Assistant Professors Christensen and Hussaini presented together at the AIGA DEC Lens 2023 Symposium in New York City, as part of the AIGA National Design Conference. The AIGA DEC hosted Lens as a one-day symposium featuring peer-reviewed papers, panels, posters, and other work from educators, graduate students, and industry professionals that address ideas and topics connected to the theme LENS. Christensen and Hussaini introduced their work integrating a social justice lens into curricular development for visual communication design courses, specifically in relation to multimodal storytelling for two courses: the experimental Visual Storytelling elective class Christensen has introduced, and Research and Writing in Design, the core major requirement course Hussaini has re-envisioned. The presentation shared best practices formulated from these two case studies for pedagogical approaches to create politically engaged, community-focused classroom learning communities. 

The AIGA DEC Symposium Lens 2023 took place this October 12 in New York City, within the AIGA National Conference. Assistant Professor Omar Sosa-Tzec participated in the panel "Making Space for Graphic Designers as Visual Essayists." In this panel, Dr. Sosa-Tzec discussed the notion of the visual essay as a multimodal argument and outcome of research-through-design and the application of poetics, semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics as critical approaches to peer-review the visual essay in graphic design academia. Sosa-Tzec also discussed sketchnoting as a form of pre-writing and content for visual essays. Accompanying Dr. Sosa-Tzec were Patricia Childers (CUNY/CityTech/Pratt), Heather Corcoran (Washington University in St. Louis), and Joshua Unikel (University of Houston). All the professors were AIGA DEC Design + Writing Fellowship members in 2022. This panel and their work from the fellowship seek to legitimize the visual essay as a research product in graphic design academia and pluralize and diversify its voices. 

Ellen Christensen and Omar Sosa-Tzec, Assistant Professors of Visual Communication Design, have developed a rubric to evaluate the presentation and communication of design projects by undergraduate design students. The two professors will present this rubric at the Surface, the 2022 AIGA Design Educators Community Mini-Conference, which takes place as one of the events within the National AIGA Design Conference of this year.

Christensen and Sosa-Tzec developed this rubric by assessing work from students of the School of Design and using experiential knowledge, design pedagogy scholarship, and the communication rubric elaborated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. They engaged in this project as part of the Core Competency and GE Assessment Program of the SFSU Undergraduate Education and Academic Planning division, intending to help students become more articulate in their project presentations and strategic regarding the use of writing, imagery, and even non-verbal communication or any possible mode of communication to stand out and be persuasive.

• Christensen and Sosa-Tzec invite everyone in the School of Design to utilize this rubric.

This rubric comprises six communication design dimensions: 

• Design Situation - the student's ability to describe the problem to address through design
• Design Process - the student's ability to describe the different phases and iterations that led to the design solution
• Design Rationale - the student's ability to describe the effectiveness of the design outcome
• Design Language and Vocabulary - the student's ability to describe discipline-specific concepts that informed the design process
• Design Evidence - the student's ability to provide significant visual or multimodal content that shows design work and process
• Design Writing - the student's ability to provide written content that explains design work and process
• Design Competency and Knowledge - the student's ability to describe the learning and takeaways from carrying out the design process

Each dimension is scored as follows:

• Beginning - 1 point
• Developing - 2 points
• Competent - 3 points
• Accomplished - 4 points

The AIGA Design Educators Community (DEC) introduced a new design and writing fellowship for 2022. Assistant Professor Omar Sosa-Tzec was selected along with another 15 design faculty across the United States to form this fellowship's first cohort. From January to June, these design faculty worked individually and collaboratively to discuss and investigate the visual essay. Dr. Sosa-Tzec utilized sketchnoting to reflect on the nature of visual essays and explore theoretical approaches that could facilitate their production and peer-review––namely, poetics, semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics. 

Posters showcasing the fellows' projects will be exhibited at Surface––the AIGA DEC Mini-Conference––which takes place during the events of the 2022 AIGA Design Conference. Below is Prof. Sosa-Tzec's poster.