Jonathan Aitken is the Director of the Health Design Lab and Communication Design faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The Health Design Lab is a research centre that applies design thinking to Health Care, bringing human-centred design research methodologies to complex problems. Aitken’s education in Communication and Industrial Design help him bring an interdisciplinary focus to his work. Currently teaching in the graduate and undergraduate programs, Aitken is particularly interested in how participatory design methodologies can facilitate design research into large, complex problems.
Haig Armen is an Assistant Professor of Design and Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is the founder and creative director of Vancouver design agency, LiFT Studios. Haig has won a variety
of awards throughout his 20 year career including Webby Awards, Prix Italia for Web Arts and Drama and a Gold Medal for the Art Director’s Club of New York for his work as a producer for CBC’s Radio 3 magazine broadband website.
Adam Cristobal is a designer with a focus in digital publishing strategies, production for web UI, and user-centred research for on-screen interactivity. He received an MDes from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2014, and is currently working at IDEO Palo Alto.
Jorge Frascara is Professor Emeritus of the University of Alberta, Honorary Professor of Emily Carr University, Fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, and member of the Editorial Boards of four journals. He has held leading positions at the University of Alberta, Icograda, the ISO, the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, the Graphic Design Education Association (USA) and the Canadian Standards Council. He has published ten books and more than 50 articles internationally, and has lectured and made presentations in more than twenty-five countries. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada, and consults on information design.
Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist and designer whose work explores the role of technology in contemporary society. She is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. She has presented her work internationally and has been featured in the New York Times, the Huffington Post and the CBC. Frid-Jimenez has won numerous awards and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Bergen National Academy of Art & Design. She holds a Masters from the MIT Media Lab and has a background in visual art and philosophy..
Grant Gregson is the Coordinator of Emily Carr University’s Teaching and Learning Centre administering Emily Carr’s elearning on Moodle, Blog and Wiki platforms. Grant’s research and teaching support faculty and staff with incorporating new technologies for use in elearning, the classroom, research projects and web publishing; scholarly and pedagogical practices. Grant created ECUPS, a student media team providing filming, publishing and web-casting of events at Emily Carr. Grant serves on the Curriculum Planning + Review Committee (CPR), on the Pedagogy, eLearning and Technology Committee (PET), on the ETUG Steering Committee (SCETUG) and on the British Columbia Teaching & Learning Council (BC-TLC).
Zoë Hardisty is a an artist and a designer who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and is completing her Bachelor of Design in Interaction Design. Her interests are in playing with how people move through space and interact with objects and ideas. She also has a keen interest it technology, how it is shaped by people, and how it shapes us on a personal and societal scale.
Victoria Lee is a communication designer who focuses to intervene in social and cultural challenges through systems design. She believes that design is a powerful tool for change and thus, has been involved in a variety of community empowerment projects, especially in regards to fashion and healthcare.
Dr. Glen Lowry has a PhD in Literary Studies and has published widely on contemporary Canadian Literature and Culture — literature, photography, film, and television. His recent work investigates new forms of cultural expression and social contexts, particularly around questions of globalization and urbanization. Lowry’s work focuses on new media platforms that link scholars, artists, and audiences across cultural and geographical distances: e.g, Maraya project, connecting urban waterfronts in Vancouver and Dubai. From 2002–11, Lowry edited the cultural journal West Coast Line. Pacific Avenue (2009), his collection of poems, looks at image-based memory and geography. Lowry regularly shares ideas, images, lectures, and commentary on his blog: http://glenlowry.com.
Celeste Martin is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr. She has a background in communication design and specializes in typography. She has a BFA and MFA from the University of Iowa. Her creative work examines the forms of written language, the shapes of letters and their relationship to space. She is the editor of Current, the university’s design research journal, and a member of Emily Carr’s Research Ethics Board. As a researcher at Emily Carr’s Social and Interactive Media Centre her current design research focuses on the development of enhanced interactive ebooks.
Kristina Mok is a third year Industrial Design student at Emily Carr University. She has a strong interest in merging design with science, particularly in the areas of public health and medicine. In the near future, she would like to work in a field that combines these two disciplines together.
Guillermina Noël holds a PhD in Design Sciences from the University IUAV of Venice, Italy, and a Master of Design from the University of Alberta, Canada. She has worked on the design of materials for people with severe speech and reading impairments, interacting with neurologists, educational psychologists, and speech therapists, emphasizing the importance of user-centered design and design for users with special needs. Since 2003 her practice focuses on health related design issues. She is now an Adjunct Researcher at the Health Design Lab at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Canada.
April Piluso is a third year Interaction Design student at Emily Carr University. She has a passion for Ix/Ux and a strong interest in understanding the behaviours and needs of people. She believes that design can induce delight through the careful orchestration of systems, gestures, and feedback.
Liz Sanders joined the Design Department at The Ohio State University as an Associate Professor in 2011 after having worked as a design research consultant in industry since 1981. She has practiced participatory design research within and between all the design disciplines. Her research today focuses on generative design research, collective creativity and transdisciplinarity. Liz is also the founder of MakeTools where she works at the front end of the changes taking place today in design. Her goal is to bring participatory, human-centered design thinking and co-creation practices to the challenges we face for the future. Liz has a Ph.D. in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology and a B.A. in both Psychology and Anthropology.
Deborah Shackleton earned a BAA from Ryerson University and an MA from Royal Roads University. As an Associate Professor she teaches design research and methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Deborah’s research interests include practice-based research and learning theory for human-centred designing which she brings to projects for Emily Carr’s Health Design Lab. She is one of the founding editors of the award-winning Current, the university’s design research journal, and is the Founding Chair of the ECU Research Ethics Board. In 2010, she was awarded the Ian Wallace Teaching Award.
Cameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He also directs the School of Design’s Doctoral research program. Cameron has a background in philosophy and continues to research what designers and practice-based design researchers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies and sociologies of technology. His primary area of research is sustainable design. In particular, he focuses on the design of systems that lower societal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership – in other words, systems of shared use.
Scott Yu-Jan is a third-year Industrial Design student at Emily Carr University. With a strong passion in product development, he hopes to explore its great potential to inspire behavior change in order to generate a healthier social and environmental lifestyle.
Bonne Zabolotney is the Dean of Graduate Studies at Emily Carr. She began her career as a communication designer in Vancouver in 1993. Her most notable work can be found in the philatelic section of Canada’s National Archives, including her 1999 stamp design recognizing the formation of the Nunavut territory, along with five other stamp designs. She has worked with some of the largest arts groups in Vancouver including Vancouver Opera, Vancouver Recital Society, and Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Areas of learning and teaching include typography, design and material culture, consumerism, and the visual vernacular.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Current is the product of many conversations, meetings, hours of writing, editing, and many reviews. We could not have realized this project without the support of Dr. Ron Burnett, Dr. Maria Lantin, Jonathan Aitken and Kate Armstrong of the Research Of- fice; Bonne Zabolotney, Dean of the Faculty of Design and Dynam- ic Media; Grant Gregson, coordinator of the Teaching & Learning Center; Roxanne Toronto and Cari Bird of Communications; and Tara Wren, copy editor.
The Current team would like to thank the students in SOCS 309 F001 and F002 Design Research & Methods for their contribu- tions to issue 06. Current is grateful for the support of the Emily Carr President’s Research Fund, the Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media through the office of the dean, and our advertisers.