Design

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/27709

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Open Access
Re-envisioning Graphic Design as a Dialogic Practice: An Investigation into the Constructive Potential of Disruption within Aesthetic Practices
(2014-07-28) Hebert, Marie-Noelle; Gabriele, Sandra
The aesthetic dimension of graphic design is often considered an “added-value” to the content, which determines the importance of the piece. As a result, the critical potential of form is often overlooked and involvement in content production and selection serves as the primary way to engage in critical discourse. This thesis however highlights the dialogic dimension of aesthetics by focusing on disruption as a constructive tool for disciplinary inquiry. It uses disruptions to the conventional norms of professional practice as a way to reconcile design’s critical potential and its commercial reality. Form-making is considered a form of écriture with the capability to initiate both disciplinary and socio-cultural discourse. Semiotic theory is used as a framework for investigation. As such, the thesis includes an analysis of the effect of disruption to the pragmatic, syntactic and semantic dimensions of design works, including examples from the field as well as the results of personal visual exploration.
Open Access
Handcraft as a Rhetorical Prop: An Investigation into What Handcraft Techniques Offer the Discipline of Graphic Design
(2014-07-28) Van Kampen, Saskia Gabriella; Cabianca, David
This thesis paper examines how handcraft (making an item by analog means using specific materials) can be a compelling rhetorical tool for graphic designers to harness. Contrasting handcraft techniques with computer graphics software “unsettles” rote graphic design practices. The meaning that lies in the physical act of making, the materials that are used and the contexts with which particular handcrafts are associated can support, as well as carry, visual rhetoric in design works. An analysis of the unconventional handcraft work produced by Stefan Sagmeister (USA), Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag of M/M (Paris) (France), Marian Bantjes (Canada), and by this author (specifically, a design book produced in tandem with this paper) is used to demonstrate how complex meanings contained within handcrafts can be revealed and used in graphic design. The combination of handcraft and digital techniques enables designers to interweave the disparate social, physical and material qualities of the two processes into their work. In this way the work engages in disciplinary and societal discourse.
Open Access
Wanderland: Exploring Experimentation in Design Theory to Find New Ways of Working, Understanding and Interpreting Process and Outcomes
(2014-07-28) Fan, Michael Andrew Kar-Ho; Gabriele, Sandra
This paper examines experimentation in graphic design to understand how a designer might uncover new ways of working apart from the conventional solution-based approach in professional practice. Particular attention is focused on alternative design experimentation. The thesis opens up a debate about the relationship of process and professionalism in design practice. In contemporary practice, designers learn to embrace the mistakes which occur during the design process. These mistakes or ‘failures’ have guided designers to definite solutions using effective and efficient strategies and techniques, and have also offered spaces for alternative approaches to emerge when a designer emphasizes his own creative purposes. The paper proposes failure and an adaptation of ideas by feminist researcher and queer theorist Judith Halberstam, for designers to consider as a new approach to creative design that provides not only a new methodology, but also a new way of understanding how experimentation works.
Open Access
Pedal off the Metal: An Investigation into Global Design and the Politics of Consumption
(2015-08-28) Tsumura, Emmie; Wong, Wendy Siuyi
The research presented in this thesis is an investigation into global design and the politics of consumption. The aim of the research is to provide a survey of seventy-nine key global design events held in 2014 and present the results of an empirical study of the key components witnessed in the staging of a global design event. The second aim of the study is to discuss the role that global design events play in perpetuating global inequalities as cities are further shaped by creative economic policy. The written research component of this thesis is used to inform my creative projects and communication design practice.
Open Access
Seeking the Magic in Design: An Inquiry into Defamiliarizing the Everyday
(2015-08-28) Soin, Malika; Cabianca, David
This thesis project explores the application of the artistic and literary genre of magical realism to graphic design. The goal is to use the genre’s ability to defamiliarize everyday Indian cultural objects in order to reveal the magical in the mundane. Apart from a discourse on design and its role in the everyday, the research also focuses on making an audience conscious of their habitual responses to quotidian life through graphic design. Using magical realist graphic design, everyday Indian cultural objects are morphed into objects worthy of notice and appreciation. These transformed objects challenge an audience to recognize the ideologies perpetuated in a culture through everyday objects. The objects are chosen as a result of the author’s nostalgia experienced due to a displaced cultural context from India to Canada. The projects made during this thesis, “Pigment,” “Paper Cones” and “Clay” constitute an away-from-home “survival kit.”
Open Access
Exploring Materiality in Graphic Design Through Creative Play
(2015-08-28) Beno, Nicole Mariette; Gelb, David H.
Graphic design can be investigated through the process of creative play where thinking and making are connected through materiality. This thesis explores three different methods of creative play that can be used by designers to generate concepts and challenge established ways of working. A research study on materiality and affect was conducted in the first phase of the thesis in order to locate a starting point for the visual explorations. From here, the process was divided into three different categories: improvisational, structured, and interactive play. Improvisational play can foster an understanding of materials and involves an intuitive way of working, without having a specific content in mind. Structured play focuses on how materiality can be manipulated to reflect content where materiality is used as a rhetorical device. Interactive play involves eliciting tactile engagement, where physical materials are implemented into the final design artifact and encourage engagement through touch.
Open Access
Strange Encounters: An Investigation of Graphic Design-Produced Artifacts that Discuss Hybrid Embodiment of Indo-Canadian Identity
(2015-08-28) Balakrishnan, Krishna Krishnapalan; Cabianca, David
Postmodernism has been important in acknowledging the many forms of “otherness” that emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender, race, class, temporal and spatial geographic location and dislocation. This has become a topic of interest among graphic designers as they explore design’s relationship with culture. This thesis explores the use of graphic design to produce visual artifacts that discuss hybrid embodiment of Indo-Canadian identity. Cultural identities are represented as competing against one another, which results in recognizing one another as strangers. Multiculturalism and the migrant perspective are always constructed by proximity between strangers. Using hybridity, Homi Bhabha’s (1994) concept of a “third space” identifies a metaphor for the space in which cultures meet. Where communication, negotiation, and translation bridge societies, a new space emerges. This thesis employs the interventions of “the third space” to negotiate a meeting space with strangers. The project prepared during this thesis, The Avatars, represents an alternative way of seeing migrant perceptions of displacement, temporality and belonging.
Open Access
Listen to your Body: Designing for Type 2 Diabetes Management
(2015-08-28) Snow, Nancy L.; Gabriele, Sandra
This study informed the design of several components of a digital application to support education and strategies for the management of type 2 diabetes. This tool allows individuals to track food intake, activities, and blood glucose readings, creating visual representations of the relationship among individual's actions, choices, and their body’s response. The study helped identify the needs of those with diabetes and their healthcare providers through expert interviews. Scenarios and Requirements were used to generate key components for a prototype digital application. A usability study was conducted with healthcare providers to evaluate content and design, with results informing recommendations for the next iteration to be tested with those living with diabetes. This study revealed the value of designing for information need. Further studies could include user testing with individuals with type 2 diabetes to collect their perceptions and needs in the context of using a digital interface and self-care strategies.
Open Access
Negotiations in the Third Space: Visualization of the Complexity of an Iranian Woman's Identity
(2015-08-29) Nasirzadeh, Bahar; Hadlaw, Janin
Iranian female identity is typically represented as static and fixed, either portraying women as ‘modern’ or ‘victims’ (from the Western perspective) or ‘Westoxified’ or ‘modest’ (from the Islamic state’s perspective). Utilizing Foucault’s theorization of subjectivity and disciplinary power and Bhabha’s Third Space theory, I draw attention to the disciplinary institutions, such as family, school, urban space, government, and national and foreign media, and the ways that Iranian women resist and challenge these regimes of ‘regularization.’ I propose that through these contestations, ‘hybrid’ forms of Iranian gendered identity emerge as a result of creative borrowing and blending of Islamic, Iranian, and Western paradigms as the three dominant paradigms of modern Iran. My thesis project is a visual autobiography, titled Bahar's Story: Negotiations in the Third Space, which examines my experiences of being a female during my growing up in Iran, in order to visualize the complexity of Iranian women's gendered identities.
Open Access
Conceptual Constraints and the Graphic Design Process: An Investigation into Creativity and How Self-imposed Conceptual Constraints Can Affect Banal Information
(2015-12-16) Jean, Philippe; Gabriele, Sandra
The discipline of graphic design has an important role to play in developing how information is conveyed and consumed. This thesis has focused on uncovering how including self-imposed conceptual constraints in the design process can encourage creativity. Using weather data, I explored how such constraints can be used to liberate banal information from its structured, restrictive and mass consumed context, and ultimately participate in developing alternative meanings. Thus, through an exploratory approach to design practice, this investigation examined how conceptual constraints under three "creative operations" (combination, analogy, mutation) structured my work to allow for richer visual interpretations of banal information. Furthermore, by juxtaposing conceptual constraints with the "creative operations," I generated different visual propositions in order to disrupt routine processes in design and promote new and different designs. This research demonstrated how rules and conceptual constraints are viewed inside the context of graphic design. It also demonstrated how this framework for exploration can contribute to my own practice by allowing me to develop alternative design processes, and, ultimately, richer visual propositions for a given design problem.
Open Access
Investigating the "Blurry" Territory of Graphic Design: A Look at the Simultaneous Realities of Illusions Within the Moire Effect
(2016-09-20) Chiou, Christine Ling; Norwood, Angela D.
This thesis examines how designed artifacts can present two simultaneous realities within static and motion typography through an investigation of motion and depth perceptual phenomena. The deceptive nature of optical illusions revolves around conflicting realities, inducing a sense of ambiguity. This thesis incorporates the ambiguous nature of illusions in the mediation of visual messages within graphic design practice. The research constitutes the employment of optical illusions in visual arts, specifically in Optical Art, and graphic design. Particular focus is placed on the moir effect and its applications, which hugely inspires the visual investigation. Each of the projects establishes a parallel with the contradictory state of illusions, forming a visual rhetoric in the depiction of multiple realities within elusive truths. These blurry territories within graphic design present a self-reflexive tool for both designers and their audience in becoming observers of themselves and a conscious awareness of how they perceive the world.
Open Access
Studying the Cultural Duality of Young Iranian Women Through Semantic Differential and Visual Representation
(2016-09-20) Nasseri, Seyedeh Afarin; Scadding, David R.
A study of the daily lives of todays young Iranian women shows significant difference between their public and private lives. According to a number of studies on modern and contemporary Iranian history, this can be attributed to several historical issues as well as the tension and suppression experienced by Iranian women during the rule of the Islamic Republic. The aim of this study is to use the statistics generated by semantic differential questionnaires, historical and sociological analyses, examination of the researchers personal experiences as a young Iranian woman and present them using graphic design inspired by contemporary Iranian art and design and the modern Persian poetry of Forough Farrokhzad. The results confirmed the initial theory that several factors have caused a form of cultural duality in the lives of todays Iranian women and these results were presented in a series of posters designed with the aforementioned inspirations.
Open Access
Visible Cities: Exploring Local Citizenship Through Public Exhibition
(2016-09-20) Campbell, Trevor Alexander; Won, Wendy Siuyi
In this thesis, design was used in public exhibition to critique modern city branding practices and explore accessible, affordable, and temporary methods for visualizing locality in public space. This was demonstrated through five speculative case studies which situate first-person narrative in urban space in order to visualize aspects of locale and create a canvas for subsequent future narrative. The public exhibition of this work created a temporary public commons that acted as a site of discourse for this work and its extensions. This thesis interrogated two crises of modern urban citizenship: the ways in which identity, experience, and locality are appropriated by visual manifestations of capitalist urban narratives, and how this action devalues and impedes unique, dynamic citizenship. Located at the intersection of design, sociology, and urban theory, its work explored how localities can activate personal narrative through public design.
Open Access
Encouraging Ethical Behaviour through Design
(2016-11-25) Alamoudi, Mallaa Ali; Scadding, David R.
The phrase social responsibility appears with the word design because of the visual power of design to publicize information and knowledge. Design and social responsibility is a controversial topic in the filed of graphic design because some designers prefer to stay neutral toward social topics around them while other designers encourage utilizing the visual power of design to solve and promote social issues for the purpose of change. Above all, Design and social responsibility is usually limited by three areas: green design, designing for charitable organizations and reframing from designing for companies that either through the process or from their final product do harm to people. In my design work, supported by the investigation of the operational terms of the problem, the articulation of the research question and objectives, the introductory sketching phase, the visual research, the design approaches and the user testing feedback demonstrate a design process that can be utilized by others in the practice of design to be more socially responsible. The findings and outcomes of this research aim to create a practical guide for designers, design students and individuals interested in the filed of design and social responsibility.
Open Access
Damn Right Design: A Proposal of a Creative Platform to Facilitate Socially Responsible Graphic Design
(2017-07-27) Fernandez-Magnou, Mariana; Wong, Wendy Siuyi
This thesis argues that the discipline of graphic design still lacks awareness of the significant role it plays in addressing social problems. In social (graphic) design projects, designers move away from the more conventional design practice that takes place within an advertising agency or design firm, to work together with different organizations to address diverse social issues by contributing with their skills skills that are much more than make things look nice. I claim that designers havent realized the importance of their visual skills to help in such causes. Through Damn Right Design, this thesis proposes a creative, graphic design focused platform that aims at helping graphic designers to understand how they can be of use in addressing projects for communities or social organizations. Its goal is also guiding designers to ponder over their attitudes, and how to implement design thinking tools in mindful ways.
Open Access
Reviving Craft in a Context of Design: Physical Practice in a Digital Culture
(2017-07-27) Grzeskowiak, Julia; Cabianca, David
In the pursuit of speed and efficiency, contemporary visual communication eradicates the essence of the individual in favour of certainty. Mass production and the rational thought processes that steer Western Culture have caused much of the human relationship with the physical world to deteriorate. This graphic design research employs craft processes and theories of the discipline to explore the irregularities engendered by the human hand. It does so by merging production methods involving both analogue and digital operations. The unique vagaries of handcraft inform aesthetic experience by enriching communication culture with the haptic qualities of the individual. By combining strategies of risk and certainty, handcraft procedures complement the work of mechanical production and serves as a potential cultural instrument. Together these production methods culminate in a richer means of communication that reveals an ontological relationship between form and representation, one which affirms and counters the alienation of a modern world.
Open Access
The Design of Dissent: Graphic Design for Socio-Political Engagement
(2017-07-27) Rudnicki, Justine Caroline; Cabianca, David
Design engages with the political and expresses resistance to hegemonic institutions and ideologies when it employs disruptive visual communication. In a context of contemporary visual communication, images often lack a theoretical and practical framework to create inquiry and social change. Informed by activism, visual rhetoric, political theory, and design criticism, this thesis offers strategies and practices for socio-political engagement by melding these approaches into the discipline of graphic design. This thesis makes the claim that graphic designs relationship with the public interest is one that should not be undervalued. It studies the implications of perception of graphic design work as a means of social change to demonstrate the efficacy of visual communication. This thesis asks designers to evaluate the way we as communicators and citizens express desires, beliefs, and critiques, demonstrating how contestational design exists as socio-political action.
Open Access
The Web Browser as a Tool: A Programmatic Approach to Graphic Design on the Web
(2018-03-01) Benoit, Francis Philippe; Gelb, David H.
In recent years, the web browsers rendering capabilities have grown considerably. However, it remains a window through which design is seen rather than being used as a tool. This thesis seeks to develop a programmatic method that questions the web browsers original role as a display and redefines it by investigating its alternative role as a tool in the graphic design process. Through exploratory work, this research demonstrates that the web browser can be a fertile space for visual experimentation. This thesis demonstrates that graphic designers can benefit from a more pragmatic and logical approach to creation and invites them to adopt a process similar to a programmers process using the web browser as a tool.
Open Access
Empowering Airbrush Design for Social Innovation: Building a Micro-Community Based Creative Platform
(2019-07-02) Zhang, Frank Jing; Wong, Wendy Siuyi
Airbrush is a mechanical painting tool using compressed air to spray paint onto various surfaces. Since its introduction with the first patent in 1876, commercial artists and illustrators applied its seamless color blending effects in a wide range of creative areas, and the medium reached its peak in popularity between the 1950s and late 1980s. Now, the medium is facing the challenge of being marginalized in the mainstream design industry due to the advancement of digital technology. To begin a critical inquiry of this situation, French art critic Nicolas Bourriauds concept of Relational Aesthetics will be the main theoretical reference for this thesis. Viewing the medium as a relational art form, this thesis connects Italian design theorist Ezio Manzinis Bottom-to-Top design methodology to facilitate the delivery of a community-based Airbrush Design platform. This platform will act as a catalyst to empower people to use the medium for social recognition and to mediate between individual (private) and institutional (public) spaces.
Open Access
Systematizing Studio Practice: Working with the Known to Generate the Unknown
(2019-07-02) Sokolov, Egor; Gelb, David H.
The following investigation examines the use of systematized methods to experiment with new ways of graphic design production. The research is informed by research through design (RtD), multiples as variation, conditional design, and practice-based research. This thesis offers strategies and practices for systematic methods of studio practice, asking designers to evaluate the way they work in the studio and critique the use of systemized methods when it comes to graphic design production.