This SPARKS session will discuss academically under-recognized graphic design educators and designers who integrate new emerging technology in their work. Visual design education was predominately print design-centered and is deeply rooted in the Bauhaus, a German art school from 1919 to 1933 that integrated crafts and the fine arts to create rigorous and constructive design.
Bauhaus philosophy and style dominated modern academic graphic design education for over 100 years. Visual design education in the US has been rapidly decolonizing, extending, and diversifying and moving away from print-centric to design education, research, and practices that are influenced by new emerging technology.
Many graphic design educators globally are pioneers in alternative, extended, and new media-based creative graphic design practices. They are often challenged by inequities in academia including the lack of opportunities and recognition. In the past, innovative graphic designers had limited opportunities to present their works at design conferences because they typically focus on print design. Designers often have to compete with other academic areas, such as digital art and fine arts, for the ability to exhibit their work and receive competitive research opportunities.
This session will consist of five presentations by highly regarded graphic designer educators and practicing designers that pursue technically diverse visual design alternatives. They are recognized by prestigious, peer-reviewed, national, and international conferences and exhibitions in digital arts and fine arts as artists but have not been acknowledged by professional, international graphic design communities. The October SPARKS talks will discuss creative graphic design education, research, and techniques beyond print, crossing boundaries into creative coding, 3D printing, sound performance, AR/XR with sustainability, AI with social justice, etc. Please join us.
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Do we compromise any aspects of our design practice by integrating AI into the process of creating artifacts, interfaces, and experiences? Given AI’s potential to shape design directions, how heavily should we rely on it? In this talk, we will explore how designers can embrace generative AI by delving more deeply into the essence of creativity. We will touch on the opportunities and challenges AI presents, including its ability to overshadow human intuition and obfuscating the human touch in design, and will thread a series of ethical considerations through the talk that will help listeners address the tensions between human creativity and AI’s expansive capabilities.
The creative design world has progressed significantly with innovative technologies and techniques. Using 3D printing and node-based programming, designers can implement these methods in art and graphic design practices. Parametric design generates 3D geometries by rules and parameters, which often leads to diverse design solutions. This presentation showcases various design explorations that use 3D printing, parametric design, and various materials to create alternative design solutions that offer visual and tangible interaction beyond the print and digital media.
Design processes are step-by-step procedures within a set of rules to generate possibilities or solve problems. In many ways, this makes a design process an algorithm enacted by a designer and influenced by various parameters and input. What happens when programming is utilized as a key element within this process? Programming is far more than a method of production, and its use within a process allows for different forms of iteration and ideation. When playing with code instead of playing with pixels, the “what if” questions a designer explores during a creative process are very different. This talk will share projects in which visual branding solutions are developed not as a set of repeatably applied assets but as an algorithm run against sets of parameters to produce varied results and allow different access points for users of the systems.
In an era dominated by technological advancement, understanding and reclaiming agency over our digital landscape is imperative. This talk delves into the intersection of design and technology, advocating for a paradigm shift toward liberation through experimentation, hacking, and play. By embracing a mindset of curiosity and audacity, we empower ourselves to dissect, manipulate, and reimagine the intricate workings of technology. Demonstrating through projects, I highlight how playful experimentation and hacking dismantle technological gatekeeping, unveil ethical dilemmas, and help us collectively (re)define our relationship with technology. Accessible to both novices and experts, this approach and methodology help to democratize technology to support, rather than dominate, humanity, fostering more equitable and just futures for all.
As Artificial Intelligence seems poised to become a constant actor in our everyday lives, it’s imperative for designers to consider AI’s relation to design practice. This talk examines one such intersection – specifically the relationship between text and image, and machine vision technology, via the project unseen.garden. unseen.garden is a technical reenactment of NeuralTalk, an early AI model designed to derive sentences that describe images’ contents. By adapting the software for contemporary technology, the project aims to expose the limits of object recognition technologies and make explicit the unstable relation between images and their conceptual representations. In this lecture the author will briefly share about the history of NeuralTalk, and issues related to machine vision bias, as well as introduce the project in the context of Graphic Design.
Yeohyun Ahn is an award-winning digital artist and designer. She leads several projects: the interdisciplinary computational typography project TYPE+CODE Series; a multidisciplinary project to bring awareness to Asian female faculty in America titled Social Homelessness on US campuses; Evolving Graphic Design with globalization; and Hangul Project as transdisciplinary visual research between English and Korean. Ahn received the SEGD Educator Award 2022. Featured in the Washington Post, PRINT, New York Times Magazine, Creator’s Project, Designboom.com, etc., Published in Graphic Design: The New Basics, Type on Screen, and data-Driven Graphic Design; presented and exhibited at SIGGRAPH, Leonardo (MIT Press), ISEA, AIGA, Etc. She serves CAA and SEGD as committee members.
Sue Gollifer is an Honorary Fellow, of the School of Art, Design and Media, at the University of Brighton, UK. She has been teaching in Art and Design, in the UK for a number of years. She has been an attendee of SIGGRAPH since the mid 90’and was the Art Gallery Chair in 2004. She continues to work for SIGGRAPH in various capacities, including being a member of the DAC committee and previous CHAIR of the Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art Award. She regularly reviews work for the SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery. She was previously Executive Director of ISEA International Headquarters.