Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the past three decades, designers have adopted an innovative position as practitioner- researchers in universities by conducting academic research through their creative practice. Many scholars have acknowledged and discussed the will to communicate through creative means. Such endeavours have always been part of the learning and teaching in Graphic Design but how practice-led research sits within university institutions at the undergraduate level requires further investigation. This article offers insights into five design practitioners developing research projects led by the practice, of academics at Auckland University of Technology, in Auckland, New Zealand. These undergraduate candidates are undertaking research by creative practice in the broad field of Visual Communication Design. These new practitioners/researchers to the academic space feel profound and unsettled tensions, for whom traditional research approaches seem too ordered to capture the dynamism of the inquiry process, which lies at the heart of their creative practice. They seek an approach that can offer high levels of interdisciplinarity and focus on skill and competence to produce insights into a socio-material iterative design process. The article presents, with a commentary on practice, five projects operating in the context of complex problems young designers face and their understanding of the design work as it relates to practice and research. The article contributes to advancing a shift in higher design education towards creative practice as an approach to research, promoting the social and the cultural rather than design that is industrially driven. While working within this scope, it is envisaged that some arguments and inferences will have applicability beyond the Aotearoa and for other creative practices, practitioners and researchers.

This article discusses a graphic design project about unsustainable habits around the home and their effects on climate change. The article reflects on practice-led design research, asking: How can graphic design be used to provoke young adults to make positive changes towards their unsustainable consumer habits in their homes? The design project entitled: Second Nature - is an awareness campaign that combines the researcher’s passion for environmental sustainability and creative practice as a way of expression through graphic design conventions. The project responded to the research question with a communication campaign, consisting of a series of design artefacts, including a poster series, a zine set, social media presence and a website. The artefacts allow the audience to consider the negative impact their habits cause, providing ways to make small changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle. In conducting the study, reflective and heuristic enquiry was utilised as an approach to problem-solving. In the enquiry, the project employed methods such as contextual review of knowledge, mind mapping, sketching and mock-ups to ideate, reflect and test. The article adopts a commentary on practice and evidences the design decisions to the context, including how the artefacts engage with the audience. The research contributes to the current discourses about climate change in a world dominated by consumerism, proposing and unpacking how an awareness campaign can be used as a tool to combat the depletion of our greater home, earth.

This article will discuss concepts of cultural dislocation and belonging through a practice-led worldbuilding design project called Arjun. Arjun is a creative exploration of storytelling through a designed publication that uses diagrams, notations, and photographic manipulations to explore a character’s experience in a foreign land. The publication presents a polyphonic story from the perspective of Arjun who is hired by the fictional corporation Federation (F.E.D.R) to explore a land where both familiar and unfamiliar takes place. Arjun searches for his sense of purpose and identity, in a self-dialogue with his own dislocation. Established within the tenants of Hinduism, this research project stimulates speculative meanings through worldbuilding design as means to discuss my cultural dislocation with my own Fijian Indian ancestry. Conceptually, the project is concerned with the philosophical principles of Hindu reincarnation, its relationships to the subconscious mind (Callander & Cummings, 2021) and liminality (Turner, 1969; Ipomoea, 2015). The article will discuss how practice emerged both conceptually and visually through a synthesis between theory and making in its creation and conceptualisation. Reflective processes and self-search methodologies are utilised to access personal experiences and prominent levels of exploration with materials through the methods of notation, journaling, copywriting, image processing and prototyping.

This article presents a practice-led artistic research project focused on the creative process of a scripted and illustrated graphic novel that draws from autoethnographic methods to engage with high levels of originality. The project: Breakthrough: An illustrated autoethnographic narrative into professional identity and storytelling responds to a rhetorical question that asks: How can one express personal identity in the form of a graphic novel? The design outcome of this project is a published graphic novel which explores ideas surrounding identity, particularly professional identity and finding or rediscovering oneself. The novel’s storyline draws upon the researcher’s journey as an artist and illustrator, the experiences of losing and regaining creative passions and stimulus. The graphic novel’s creative process employs creative expression skills to conceptualise and visualise the narrative. The design outcome is intended to resonate with others studying or working in creative industries and inspire young creatives in their journeys. The research project contributes to discourses about using ethnographic methods to engage originality in producing visual communication design outcomes underpinned by personal novelties and meaning. Additionally, it contributes to understanding practice-led research methodologies and the exegetical writing that supports a design artefact.

This article explores contextual research and creative design methodologies to understand the relationship between the researcher’s embodied approach and the produced artefact. The question of: ‘How might I honestly depict my own embodied textural world to awaken others?’ frames the project in a way which allows the designer/researcher to produce work organically and honestly. Encompassing different navigational directions and frameworks of information allows personal understanding to pervade through. The ideas of place, nostalgia, storytelling and texture are explored throughout the physical artefacts of a textural archival book ‘Awaken’ and a series of posters. The methodology of a heuristic-led enquiry activated by embodiment enabled the translation into something more significant than an abstract thought. Exploring the contextual knowledge of texture and its multi-sensory ability, nostalgia and embodiment, frames the project in the broader context allowing for a critical work commentary.

How might a volcanic material imaginary — particularly of the basalt scoria volcanic field that underlies Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand — provide ways for people to see themselves collectively? Our surroundings shape a sense of identity, and spatial interactions organize our experience in the city. ’Scoria Field’ is a spatial design research inquiry into place-making; investigating the potential for material experiences of a volcanic landscape to produce public space along the coast of Takapuna, on Tāmaki’s North Shore. Through imaginative engagement with volcanic rock, this research explores abstract and tangible ways to unfold a narrative of matter. Through a practice of drawing and artisanal material explorations, the research engages with geographical, cultural, and social aspects of scoria and the volcanic landscape of Tāmaki Makaurau. The project culminates with a proposal to refurbish an existing car park as a public space that offers a new way for people to see each other collectively by engaging with their volcanic terrain.

In recent years, creative work and its potential relationships to scholarly research are increasing in influence and introducing critical vitality to Universities, opening new approaches for collaboration, interdisciplinarity and community engagement. For practitioners, it offers a research approach that merges personal experience into the designer practice, skill set and design artefact. [...]

  

As a result of the health emergency due to COVID-19 that Ecuador and the world went through, education suffered a severe blow, for which the institutions involved sought alternatives to continue with their tasks in the midst of the crisis. In this context, higher education was forced to take measures that involved bringing professional instruction to the virtual environment. This change was taken in different ways by the actors involved in the formation of the design. In this article we explore these aspects in the case of the graphic design teaching process in the virtual classes of the Visual Communication subject of the Graphic Design career at the Technical University of Cotopaxi (UTC), during the period May-September 2020. This inquiry was carried out through interviews and analysis of documents, bibliography and results of the chair. Their findings show that teachers had to unexpectedly adapt to new modes of teaching and communication, and that students developed modes of learning such as autonomous work with teacher guidance. Thus, the opportunities and limitations of an environment in which the design and its contents had to adjust to the realities of an unprecedented moment are observed.

El presente artículo pretende, por un lado, impulsar el posicionamiento del taller de diseño como un instrumento didáctico relevante para el aprendizaje significativo entre los estudiantes de nivel superior y de posgrado que participan en él y, por otro lado, poner sobre la mesa dos variables que, de acuerdo con la experiencia de un grupo de trabajo especializado, inciden de manera importante en su desempeño y en las implicaciones respecto a la generación de conocimientos, habilidades y competencias de los estudiantes participantes: la articulación interna y la vinculación estratégica con el entorno. En la parte final, el artículo pondera al taller de diseño como un instrumento didáctico relevante no sólo para impulsar el aprendizaje significativo, sino además para asumirlo como un instrumento de evaluación del aprendizaje en programas educativos de nivel superior y de posgrado no necesariamente relacionados con el arte, el diseño o la arquitectura. Su contenido tiene como fundamento una revisión documental de la experiencia de un grupo de trabajo académico, de gestión y de investigación que desde hace 5 años ha implementado procesos de colaboración transversal entre programas de licenciatura y de posgrado (UDG) para promover un modelo de trabajo multidisciplinario e interdisciplinario. Se expone además, que lejos de ser un espacio de trabajo propio de programas educativos relacionados con disciplinas vinculadas al arte, al diseño o la arquitectura, el taller de diseño es una construcción pedagógica con implicaciones positivas para el desarrollo de habilidades y competencias entre los involucrados en él.