Last semester I taught a seminar course at NC State University’s College of Design where I asked the students to identify, as part of a weekly assignment, two instances: one where design thinking had thrived and another where it had failed. Towards the end of the course, students had collected a series moments that proved that only a simple nudge was required, many times at no extra cost to anyone, to set a series of problems right. Recently, I came across one such example.
Last week, due to the birth of my nephew Gonzalo, I got to spend some time in the maternity wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. It was indeed a short time, yet most of it was spent waiting for the baby to make its appearance. I had time to look around. A few things came to my attention, but this particular emergency door stood out the most out of anything else that caught my eye.
An Emergency Door in the Maternity Wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The subject in question is located on a hallway directly across from the nursery of newborns. As you can imagine, a lot of people congregate in this area. Upon further investigation, four things were of interest to me:
1) The standard, internationally used emergency exit sign; 2) An ink-jet printed sign which informs that this door does not provide access to the ground floor; 3) The familiar red sign that indicates to use this exit in case of an emergency; and 4) A photocopy which explains, in paragraphs, what to do in case of a problem.
Can you imagine what would happen, God forbid, if there was an emergency in this space? Read the rest of this entry »
Next month I will be presenting the progress of my final project at the NC State Graduate Research Symposium to be held in the McKimmon Center on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. What follows is the abstract of the submission, which is still highly speculative since visual making has only just begun.
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Alberto Rigau
Graphic Design Master’s Candidate
College of Design
Advisors: Meredith Davis / Martha Scotford
In what ways can design address consumption induced behaviors and provide a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities?
Credit cards have become an essential financial tool for individuals and families. In 2004, the Census Bureau reported that there were more than 1.4 billion credit cards for 164 million cardholders—an average of 8.5 cards per cardholder, out of which 115 million carry a balance at the end of the month. In the pre–credit card era, households used a pay–as–you–go accounting system. Today, if there is no cash to fill up the car, there is always the credit card. Such a reliance on this payment method generates experiential patterns, more than often translating into family debt. This investigation studies behaviors and patterns associated with credit card use to identify moments in which design intervention can bring about reflective thought about spending habits.
Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, in The Unmanageable Consumer, argue that our actions and experiences as consumers cannot be detached from our actions and experiences as social, political and moral agents. They claim that the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary consumption are part of the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary living. It is not the case that at one moment we act as consumers and the next as workers or as citizens, as women or men or as members of ethnic groups. We are creative composites of simultaneous social categories, with histories, presents and futures. The authors see consumers as central characters of stories, many times exhibiting varied behaviors, such as those of explorers, choosers, communicators, identity-seekers, hedonists, victims, rebels, activists, or citizens.
This research focuses on evaluating some of the ways in which design can address these consumption induced behaviors and on proposing a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities.
At the end of the fall semester I made a presentation to publicly share with classmates and professors my thoughts, process, and ideas of what I will make my final project to be.
What follows are the slides of such presentation, and the text after each slide are the notes of what I said on each one. This represents my moving forward on this final project, which I hope to conclude by the end of the semester. Read the rest of this entry »
The way the semester’s work was structured, we worked on smaller segmented explorations which lead to the final piece of interaction leading to learning. Depending on how we worked during the semester, we each ended with a complete project or with various smaller projects. In my case, I redesigned the earlier explorations to make them fit under the same umbrella. I realize that it is hard to understand what I did without undergoing the user interactions, but here I made some screenshots of the overall system which show the general aesthetics and parts.
This semester is different, quantitatively different. The 5 month experience of spending every class with 11 other points of view now mutates into a 6 person interactive boot camp with Meredith Davis and Amber Howard as our drill sergeants. As the first activity of our new found family, we had to clean the room and rearrange the furniture. This was our initial render of what the room should come to. We tried it for a few weeks and then decided to change it again. Santiago then came to the rescue with a new whiteboard to help us in our creative transition into the world of interaction and learning communities. Read the rest of this entry »
The current undergraduate graphic design curriculum at the College of Design, like others in the country, introduces its students to the field through a fundamental year of art, form, rules, exploration, and little or basic software use. As the pedagogical experience progresses into sophomore year, students move, within the timeframe of 2 months, from custom methodological ways of working within a handmade environment into an automatized, software dependent sterile digital scenario.
Design concepts are still explored through the making of artifacts, yet this very process now relies on the manipulation of software tools for their very execution. Previous experience on creative software platforms shapes many of the student’s individual experiences, some having an easier time than others. No matter the case, the commonality between all levels of expertise becomes them having to learn it.
Learning software moves to the forefront of the student’s interests. Pressure is exerted on the professors to teach the various platforms required for successful execution. Teaching strategies, ranging from in-class demos, to online tutorials, and even reference books, become a hindrance to the students, while one-to-one gesture based exchanges between them seem to provide a more stable source of growth and understanding. How can online digital tools help with this learning process? Could such tools offer a possible platform for pedagogical reinterpretation? Would a grassroots approach to software instruction lead to a flourishing of its understanding?
The last few months I’ve working around these issues. All of my projects have concentrated around the struggles of sophomore graphic design students at the College of Design as they experience the initial steps of learning software. Community, values, needs and outcomes have been studied, tested… and hopefully address. As final review gets near, now its time to polish the projects into presentable shape. More to come…
Two daily planner page designs, one for a fourth grader and the other for a college freshman.
Last semester was all about the graphic designer’s role in culture. I can’t speak for the whole class, but it would be safe to say that sometimes it would concur, even if for a moment —you can imagine how hard is to get 12 people to agree on an idea—, that owning up to the title of graphic designer not only relates to the things one can make, but also to the understanding and acceptance of one’s role as a gatekeeper of culture. You may or may not agree with this, (maybe it’s a bit too much for you to fathom… A designer is more than just pretty things?), but the following text knows that a (good) graphic designer is not dictated by what it makes, but by a combination of the artifacts with what he or she thinks. Since such is the case, shouldn’t it, then, be part of our social responsibility to design according to how we should, and not according to how we know? Read the rest of this entry »
Armando Rigau currently pursues a Master in Architecture I at Cornell University. He received his bachelor's degree in Philosophy with History and Spanish minors from Georgetown University.
