Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty

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.

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 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.