Research

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. 

Prof. Hsiao-Yun Chu presented her current research entitled "Women's Work: Design on Display at the Centennial Fair" at the 2023 Design History Society Annual Conference in Matosinhos, Portugal. Her work illuminates the contributions of women designers and organizers to the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--the first world's fair in which women's work was shown in its own pavilion. 

Prof. Chu comments, "Design history is a small and rather unique field as distinct from art history or the history of science and technology in general. It's a rare treat to experience the current research of others in this field who are expanding the scope and methods of this discipline in real time."

Assistant Professor Sosa-Tzec will present an exploratory paper on delightful visualizations of screen time for smartphones at the 10th Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) Conference, which will take place in Norrköping, Sweden. This paper focuses on how to help smartphone users to attain digital wellbeing–that is, a balanced relationship with technology–through unconventional, delightful screen time visualizations. This exploratory work applies Design Delight–Prof. Sosa-Tzec's experiential framework to design for a happy and flourishing life–and sketching to conceptualize such visualizations. Through this paper, Prof. Sosa-Tzec argues that delight (in relation to digital well-being products and experiences) plays an important role in helping people attain digital wellbeing. Moreover, he urges designers to recognize sketching as a valuable activity concerning research through design.

The paper is available in the digital proceedings of the Nordes 2023 conference, published in the Design Research Society Digital Library.  

Assistant Professor Christensen will be presenting her paper "Extending the Visual Storytelling Narrative Arc through Augmented Reality" at the Digitally Engaged Learning (DEL) 2023 Conference. For over fifteen years, DEL has been a place to share, explore, and evolve our digitally engaged teaching and learning in art and design higher education. The theme of the 2023 conference is "Realities and Futures."

September 21–22, 2023
Online from: University of the Arts London

Image designed by: Yixin Cai

Assistant Professor Christensen will be presenting her paper "Spatial Narratives of the City: Growing the Local Living Archive through Student Story Mapping" at the 18th annual UCDA Design Education Summit. The 18th annual UCDA Design Education Summit is a national summit for design educators, chairs, and students, and continues an ongoing community created specifically for graphic design educators with opportunities for professional participation and development.
 

The 2023 UCDA Design Education Summit: SAME/DIFFERENCE, will highlight research and pedagogical approaches that explore accessibility, disability justice, belonging, and inclusivity toward integrative systemic change.
 

May 22–23 
Bowling Green State University (BGSU)
Bowling Green, Ohio
https://www.ucda.com/events/120/

Prof. Hsiao-Yun Chu has contributed an chapter to Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi.  Designer and sculptor Isamu Noguchi  (1904–88) visited Greece numerous times over the course of his career. This two-volume set explores the influence of Greek culture-- and Noguchi's engagement with world cultures more broadly-- on his work. This set is an extension of a research and exhibition project initiated by Objects of Common Interest with the Noguchi Museum in New York.

The 46th Annual Conference of the Semiotic Society of America took place this October 12–16. Assistant Professor Omar Sosa-Tzec participated in this virtual conference with the paper "Digital Well-being Technology through a Social Semiotic Multimodal Lens: A Case Study,"  where he applied social semiotics and multimodality to analyze the presentation and design of Little Signals a set of digital well-being objects created by Google. 

The interest in digital wellbeing–that is, attaining a balanced relationship with technology–has gained momentum as the detrimental effects of excessive screen time have become evident. Identifying resources designers apply to create effective and delightful digital well-being solutions is a central task in Dr. Sosa-Tzec's research project "Speculative Designs for Digital Well-being," which he initiated this Fall 2022 with the support of the Marcus Early Career Research Award. The paper presented at this semiotics conference results from this task and Sosa-Tzec's efforts to bring semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics together as critical and productive frameworks in design–communication design, industrial design, and user experience design. 

Abstract

The detrimental effects caused by uncontrolled technology usage and screen time have motivated designers in academia and industry to explore solutions that promote digital well-being. This paper draws on the social semiotic approach to multimodality to examine the semiotic resources applied in designing and presenting one case study concerning such solutions—Little Signals, six artifacts commissioned by Google. An analysis was performed on the project’s website’s content, paying careful attention to an introductory video and artifact gallery. Proximity, distance, focus, and analogy appear as distinctive video storytelling choices. These convey unobtrusiveness, invisibility, ephemerality, intimacy, control, and familiarity. The resources of size, shape, material, color, and motion applied to define the artifacts’ appearance, behavior, and data presentation also help reinforce it. Besides examining the relationship between these meaning potentials, resources, and digital well-being artifacts, this paper also discusses the apparent attempt to give smart-home devices a benign character.

Conference Presentation

Digital Wellbeing Technology through a Social Semiotic Multimodal Lens: A Case Study from Omar Sosa-Tzec

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.

The Marcus Early Career Research Award supports LCA faculty to work on research or creative work that addresses social issues in the U.S. and abroad. Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design Omar Sosa-Tzec is one of the recipients of this award for 2022. This award releases faculty from instructional and service responsibilities for one semester in order to support their research. Sosa-Tzec's project is concerned with designing for digital wellbeing—the notion of having a balanced relationship with everyday technology.

Research shows that uncontrolled use of technology and screen time can undermine people's wellbeing by causing anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and productivity loss, among other unfavorable effects. This situation has motivated designers in academia and industry to explore tools and solutions that promote digital wellbeing. For this project, Dr. Sosa-Tzec will engage in social semiotic multimodal analysis and design activities, including sketching and prototyping, to investigate speculative, metaphorical, delightful ways to display screen time and digital wellbeing-related information on mobile screens. By doing so, Sosa-Tzec seeks to illustrate the generative application of (metaphorical) design tension—a concept explored in his analytical research—in UI/UX design. Additionally, he urges UI/UX designers to explore deviation from conventional design patterns as a tactic to develop "design imagination" and new possibilities for mobile screen design.