Typothesis: A Study of Warde\u27s Crystal Goblet, Leeuwen\u27s Typographic Meaning and How it Relates to the Bible

The way readers interpret the written word is changing. We look for information almost as much in between the lines as we do in the words themselves. The internet and its tools offer ways for readers to engage the text like never before — can the printed word keep up? This thesis will look at the history of print through the eyes of typography and decide if multimodal methods of arranging type are appropriate or even possible in the modern book. Specifically, it will look at the Christian Bible and it’s already present use of multimodalism. This study will bring awareness to the possibility for a new method of meaning in Biblical typography

Designing as Interpretation

The paper suggests an interpretative approach to the empirical study of design processes. Design processes are conceived as social processes of interpretation and construction of meaning, and potentially of context generation. In contrast to models which conceive designing as a goal-directed process, an interpretative approach suggests a methodological reorientation. It assumes that design goals are more or less incomplete and vague at the beginning of a design process and are interpreted in contexts and in part are created by designers in the design process on the basis of their experience, embodied skills, and practices. The interpretative paradigm in design research seeks to observe, investigate, and describe practices that designers use in the process. Rather than attempting to determine and prescribe how practitioners ought to do their work, the research question is on how work is actually done - how interpretation is achieved by designers in particular design processes. An extract is analysed in some detail in the paper. These data are taken from the transcript of a case study of a design process in practice. Sociological and socio-linguistic (‘sensitizing’) concepts such as frames and contexts are adopted to describe and analyze some practices observed in the episodes. The paper focuses on an aspect of designing – various forms of involvement and stances designers’ take on in the meaning making process of interpretative design work. Interpretative analysis takes into account designers’ alignments which constitute “participation frameworks” and ground designers’ multimodal practices in different media (language, drawing, gesture). Goffman’s (1981) concept of “footing” is used to reveal more subtle shifts in stances that designers take in designing. Investigation of referential practices designers use in some utterances in the observed design conversation suggests that designers step into, displace, and position themselves in transformed, “keyed” situations to experience the solicitations of design situations more directly and to take the role of others as well as the role of objects. These practices appear to be part of designers’ ability to construct meaning by establishing perspectives and getting “maximal grip” on design situations so as to exert their skills. Analysis of types of stances designers take in an observed design process, some of which addressed in the paper, may provide a way to describe an aspect of designers’ artistry and to characterize the particularities of unique design processes. The suggested approach is intended to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of designing and to the methodology of design research as an ‘epistemology of practice’. Interpretative analysis also aims to provide description of designers’ practices which may, as its practical benefits, contribute to ‘the reflective turn’ in design research. Keywords: Design Research Methodology; Design Practices; Framing; Case Study</p

Teaching with infographics: practising new digital competencies and visual literacies

This position paper examines the use of infographics as a teaching assignment in the online college classroom. It argues for the benefits of adopting this type of creative assignment for teaching and learning, and considers the pedagogic and technical challenges that may arise in doing so. Data and insights are drawn from two case studies, both from the communications field, one online class and a blended one, taught at two different institutions. The paper demonstrates how incorporating a research-based graphic design assignment into coursework challenges and encourages students' visual digital literacies. The paper includes practical insights and identifies best practices emerging from the authors' classroom experience with the infographic assignment, and from student feedback. The paper suggests that this kind of creative assignment requires students to practice exactly those digital competencies required to participate in an increasingly visual digital culture

The Art of Engaging: Implications for Computer Music Systems

The art of engaging with computer music systems is multifaceted. This paper will provide an overview of the issues of interface between musician and computer, cognitive aspects of engagement as involvement, and metaphysical understandings of engagement as proximity. Finally, this paper will examine implications for the design of computer music systems when these issues are taken into account

LayoutDETR: Detection Transformer Is a Good Multimodal Layout Designer

Graphic layout designs play an essential role in visual communication. Yet handcrafting layout designs is skill-demanding, time-consuming, and non-scalable to batch production. Generative models emerge to make design automation scalable but it remains non-trivial to produce designs that comply with designers' multimodal desires, i.e., constrained by background images and driven by foreground content. We propose LayoutDETR that inherits the high quality and realism from generative modeling, while reformulating content-aware requirements as a detection problem: we learn to detect in a background image the reasonable locations, scales, and spatial relations for multimodal foreground elements in a layout. Our solution sets a new state-of-the-art performance for layout generation on public benchmarks and on our newly-curated ad banner dataset. We integrate our solution into a graphical system that facilitates user studies, and show that users prefer our designs over baselines by significant margins. Our code, models, dataset, graphical system, and demos are available at https://github.com/salesforce/LayoutDETR

The textbook in a changing multimodal landscape

In this chapter we explore communication and learning in the contem-porary social world. Taking the textbook as a ‘case study’ we identify changes in multimodal text making – in the use of writing, image, layout and typography – and highlight their social pedagogic significance. The theoretical frame of our account is Social Semiotics. Drawing on a corpus of English, Science and Maths textbooks and digital learning resources published between 1930 and now we render visible pro-found shifts in the semiotic landscape of education. Teachers and designers of lear-ning resources have always drawn on a range of different ‘modes’ – writing and image foremost among them, yet a combination of social change and new technologies has given rise to the possibilities for an increase in the use of more modes than these, in new ‘ensembles’ of modes, and with differently distributed functions. The chapter explores what the implications of these changes are for what and how students learn. We begin the chapter by outlining the aims and background of the study, our social semiotic theoretical framework and the data and methods used. Following that we discuss changes in the modes of writing, image, typography and layout in textbooks from different eras, and explore the use of moving and dynamic image and speech in online learning resources

Multimodality, Synaesthesia and Intersemiotic Translation

No abstract

Problem-finding as a research strategy connecting undergraduate learning with staff research in contemporary education institutions

While problem-solving is defined as a research method based on a number of givens in a linear process, problem-finding is an open-ended mode of design, actively engaging participants in a reciprocal discourse. This method of learning by doing is implicit in design education. To examine problem-solving in the context of undergraduate study a collaborative staff–student research project is presented in the form of a case study. By continuing to find ‘problems’, design educators and students alike are challenged to push the boundaries of the discipline and frame it more centrally as an agent of change in society and culture. In a development of my Ph.D. and HEA Teaching Fellowship the design process is framed as a bridge between academic research and student employability. In this context I suggest that research strategies developed through doctoral study extend and substantiate teaching and learning in design