Applied Design Research Across Communication Contexts: Media, Organizations and Public Engagement
This panel shares the work of faculty and graduate students in the Journalism and Communication Studies departments, especially in Communication and Media Studies, where design intersects with communication in a variety of settings.
Lin Chen
Student, MS in Media Innovation & Data Communication
Interdisciplinary Design & Media PhD Student, CAMD
Associate Professor, Journalism, CAMD
Teaching Professor, Art + Design & Communication Studies, CAMD
Professor & Chair, Communication Studies, CAMD
Professor of the Practice, Journalism, CAMD
Playing with Mobile Gaming’s History
This event introduces workshop participants to the Retro Mobile Gaming Project and consists of two parts: an interactive workshop and a guided tour of the Retro Mobile Gaming collection.
Participants are invited to explore the guiding rationale for this project: Designing a comprehensive resource that develops and preserves an yet-to-be-known history of mobile games. Presenters will outline a “playful” approach to uncovering this unknown history, which included building and iterating from a database as a minimum viable product, crowd-sourcing valuable but error-prone data, and learning to locate yet-to-be-known information through inference.
Workshop attendees can anticipate learning strategies for how to design from a single, unrefined idea into a comprehensive and publicly-engaging resource. After experiencing the Retro Mobile Gaming Project and playing with gaming devices at the Center for Design, participants will be invited to a guided tour of the Retro Mobile Gaming collection at Snell Library, where they will be able to contribute their own ideas and creative approaches for future iterations of the project.
Director, Michigan Research and Discovery Scholars, University of Michigan
Professor, Communication Studies, CAMD; Director, Center for Transformative Media
Interdisciplinary Design & Media PhD Student, CAMD
Photos by Claire Ogden.
Modeling Time & Temporality & Change
This workshop introduces participants to thinking about time and temporality in the context of design practice; in particular with the problem of change in systems. Tracing different senses of temporal change to their theological and anthropological roots and problematizing the various senses of time at play in participatory design, design futuring, and speculative and critical design, participants have some fun modeling different models of change and discovering them at play in reality.
Industry Associate Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Photos by Asher Ben-Dashan.
The Human in the Data: Beyond the Loop
CfD Founding Director Paolo Ciuccarelli gave a pop-up lecture at Mighty Squirrel Taproom in Fenway, as part of Binge Thinking’s event series.
Design is not about making things look nice. It’s about shaping technologies, products, services, and policies so they actually make sense, for the right people, in the right context, for the right purpose. That’s a research practice, not a styling exercise. We like to think data is cold, objective, scientific, but every dataset is a human choice: what to count, what to ignore and who gets to decide. Data is a construction, not a mirror. AI and algorithms didn’t fix this — they made it impossible to ignore. Bias, uncertainty and blind spots are baked in from the start, and they’re starting to show. From visualizing deeply personal human experiences to building interactive explainers that open up how AI models actually work, information design is the practice of making that visible, honest about the mess, accountable to context and useful to real people. Because right now, most interfaces between humans, data and algorithms are still failing us. Design can help do better, and it starts by putting the human back where it always was: at the center.
Professor, Art + Design, CAMD; Founding Director, Center for Design