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Teaching Resources

Noopur Agarwal
In Community with Type: A Found Type Project

This is a 'found type' project, for an introductory typography course within an undergraduate graphic design program. Students are asked to curate their own unique collections of typography in order to explore local or even personal community-based histories and design traditions—narratives often underrepresented in mainstream art and design records. Students will conduct research, photograph, and assemble a collection of type examples. Following this, students will design an editorial piece to document and communicate their findings. The goal is for students to begin to critically examine typographic culture in their own surroundings and to develop the understanding needed to represent it respectfully. Project planning and research guides provided as well as recommended readings help make this 4-6 week assignment accessible to the beginner student.

Jude Agboada
You Are Here [Place. Person. Object]

This assignment works to connect research and making for young designers and sets to use the format of postcards as a medium. The goal of the project is to use an existing or new archive to work on place-based research and tell a story of a place, person or object that is relevant to the history of a location. The assignment seeks to have students engage in interviews and research that can cover the timeline or history from a perspective that is not often known.

Danielle Aubert
Printing and Labor Assignment

This teaching resource is an assignment that invites students to choose a publication printed in Chicago and to examine how it came to be — they’ll look closely at its material production and its content and determine who the intended audience was, who designed, printed, produced, and funded it, and, if possible what the labor conditions were for those workers who brought it into existence. They’ll use their research as the content for a booklet of their own design.

J. Dakota Brown
Labor in Print at the Newberry Library

This annotated list covers items on view during my Chicago Designs workshop session on labor history in the archive of design history. It includes canonical pieces like the Kelmscott Press’s Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (see above), but also mass-media publications, labor movement publications, and marketing materials that targeted designers and publishers. This resource is also intended to introduce students and researchers to the range of materials held by the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library.

Chris Dingwall
Graphic Artifact Analysis Worksheet

I made this worksheet to acquaint undergraduates with the method and ethos of archive-based research. Although I based the worksheet on a similar exercises developed for history majors, I tailored this exercise for the students in my graduate design history course — mostly majors in Communication Design and a few majors and minors in Art History — and for the kinds of artifacts they are likely to encounter in their archival research, e.g., advertising ephemera, art books, magazines, newspapers, and other print media. The challenge and the fun of it is the notion that one could research, analyze, and write a caption for a graphic artifact in half an hour — a process that could take days or weeks (or years) for a professional curator. Yet in a short span students learn serious lessons about the importance of provenance, the discipline of careful looking, and the power of active describing in discovering information and raising questions about an artifact. At the end you can correctly say that students have created knowledge about the history of design that has never existed before.

Joshua Duttweiler
Community Independent Publication Design

Inspired by community-focused newspapers produced during the Chicano movement and other advocacy groups throughout the civil rights movement in the United States, the goal of this project is to develop and design a contemporary independent publication for a chosen community and highlight social justice concerns.

Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson
Chicago Spring Break Field Trip Plan for MCAD Undergraduates in Art and the Cities 

As enrichment for Art in the Cites, a 15-week undergraduate Liberal Arts course at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the Spring Semester, this course resource proposes an itinerary for a week long field trip to Chicago. Over Spring Break students will explore community based art and design practices and sites and visit Chicago museums and archives. Assignment deliverables are photo essays based on student’s impressions and responses to assigned questions for each day, to be compiled into a revised and complete Chicago Journal for the week as a final assignment.

Jenna Hamed
Design Research IRL

Students will be exploring design research methods in relation to themselves, their locale, and institutional archives/special collections. The goal of this series of exercises is to get students familiar with different resources, to deepen, enrich and inform research and development of their thesis projects. This resource can be applied across undergraduate levels, but it is particularly useful for students who are working towards selecting topics for their thesis.

Amira Hegazy
Exploring Community as Archive

This is an assignment handout that directs students on how to investigate their own community or neighborhood as a site of archive. It places an emphasis on visual elements of a place as a way to learn about the people and history of that locale. It has three steps: observation, recording, and analysis that lead to a mapped out route with their recorded observations drawn onto it. This visualization is paired with an analysis of what those elements could indicate individually and what they say about the neighborhood when considered as a collection. 

Esther Yeunhee Kang
(Un)packing Innovation: Histories of Social Design and Civic Design in Practice

This teaching resource outlines a seven-week course that serves two purposes: 1) introduce early career graduate students to the histories of social design and civic design, and 2) equip them with basic tools that they can apply to their studio practice. The intention is to provide students with a space to critically examine industry standards in the subfields of social design and civic design as they develop as a practitioner.

Kathy Mueller
Short Duration Course Syllabus (Philadelphia)

A sample syllabus for a short-duration intensive course that explores Philadelphia's diverse community histories through the artifacts of media and communication. Students will delve into the narratives of social movements, historical industries, and marginalized communities that have shaped the city's identity. This course includes five days of in-person visits to museums, archives, and community sites to view collections and meet with guest speakers. Complementary readings contextualize each visit. Students will develop independent final projects focused on community histories, culminating in project presentations during finals week.

Dave Pabellon
Alt Identity Guidelines

A module project that introduces identity guidelines through the lens of a personal narrative. Week 1, via lecture and online references students are introduced to corporate brand guidelines gathered and curated by the instructor. Students are then prompted to locate, document, and identify 7-10 symbols/signals/marks relevant to their identity through the guidance of a worksheet assignment. Week 2, students present their marks and the associated research to the class. Based on class feedback, students narrow their study to 3 symbols/signals/marks to move forward with. In week 3, students expand the narrative by building out/gathering rules about each of the 3 symbols/signals/marks. They then take their research, writing, and visual documentation and design a sample spread of each narrowed mark with accompanying guidelines. Upon completion, students and peers now have a personal investment and understanding of building identity guidelines.

Federico Rita
Unconventional Sources

A proposal for a Visual Communication Culture course explores unconventional sources and pluralizing perspectives in design education. It shifts from a historical to an anthropological focus, integrating digital ethnography and community-driven visual archives. Students engage in identifying and analyzing online collections, fostering discussions on their cultural impact and potential real-world applications. This approach challenges traditional design narratives, encouraging students to gain new insights about our lives and the worlds of others.

Elisa Soto Sanchez
Art of Partnership: Museums and Nonprofits for Social Good

A quick guide designed to help museums partner with local nonprofits to create programming that addresses community needs. By working together, museums and other nonprofits can enhance community engagement and drive positive social change.

Julie Sayo
Research Project: Uncovering Local Printing History

This teaching resource is a series of activities introducing students to collections  in museums, libraries and archives as resources for research. Each activity has an accompanying deliverable and culminates with a final research essay.

Angelica Sibrian
Packaging as a Form of Mapping Local Histories

An outline of an 8-week packaging design assignment focused on local histories in a rural/agricultural area, with an outcome of a design for a hypothetical local business. Students choose a topic of interest and follow a worksheet with guiding questions for documentation and research based on local archives and locations. They will be asked to translate these findings into visuals. Students will learn to use Special Collections as a resource for research and content development. They will examine local histories, experience local neighborhoods, and design packaging that embraces community.

Bess Williamson
Alt-Text for Designers

This exercise teaches participants to write alt-text for images in their portfolio or that they are studying. Alt-text is a practice that makes visual images accessible for screen readers, used by blind, low vision, and other disabled people. The exercise adapts prompts from Alt-Text as Poetry by Finnegan Shannon & Bojana Coklyat to a shorter format that can be used in a college class. I suggest adapting it to the class: use images from students’ own work or works you are studying. The lesson can also be extended by working with a local organization, gallery, or artist’s group to assign students images to describe for online posting.

Level: Any (undergrad, grad, non-degree); Duration: 2 hour workshop (or less)

Tian Yao
Bridging Community History Through Interactive Media

A project designed to immerse students in the history and culture of Iowa farms. This project involves a series of activities where students explore the Living History Farms museum, create archives, and design interactive experiences. By gathering community narratives and utilizing digital media, students develop a comprehensive understanding of local historical agricultural practices, making history tangible and relatable. The project will also include community engagement and feedback. This project will help students build research, digital literacy, story-telling, and presentation skills. Students will develop interactive media projects drawn from museum/archives materials.

Agustine Zegers
Interspecies Community Markings

An assignment designed to generate connections with the interspecies webs existing at the localities of different participants through typographic engagement. An exercise designed to decenter anthropocentric visuality and mark-making as part of broader engagements with ecologically focused design.

The Chicago Designs workshop is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

We also acknowledge the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the institutional host of this program for 2024.