Stories

SDCT faculty and leadership to speak at SXSW 2019

Four faculty from the School of Design and Creative Technologies and College of Fine Arts Dean Doug Dempster have been chosen to present their ideas at the SXSW conference in March. Last year, SXSW had over 400,000 attendees across all events, 15,000 of which participated directly in SXSW EDU. Dates and times for each session will be announced in early 2019.

A research team that includes two faculty members from the School of Design and Creative Technologies has been selected as one of seven recipients for the President’s Award for Global Learning at The University of Texas at Austin. The team, led by Assistant Professor of Design Jiwon Park and Michael Baker, assistant professor of practice in Arts and Entertainment Technologies, will explore whether culturally grounded intervention programs, through the use of a mobile app and in-person workshops, can have an impact on people’s opinions on mental illness and suicide in South Korea.

Housed within the new School of Design and Creative Technologies, Burke will serve as an industry relations liaison showcasing the talents of students and faculty to entertainment companies, content studios and design firms.

Creative Entrepreneurship, a new 5-week, 1-credit hour course taught by Executive Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Jan Ryan, just wrapped up this October. The class, offered through the Center for Integrated Design, was the first of its kind in the College of Fine Arts and covered the essential business fundamentals for launching a new venture. We spoke with Cole Godvin, one of the Creative Entrepreneurship students, to hear about her experience.

I’m excited to share that we have an extraordinary semester planned with lots of visitors, speakers and learning opportunities for students across COFA. For those of you I haven’t yet met, my name is Jan Ryan, and I’m the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Fine Arts. This fall begins my second year of leading students through programming and curriculum designed to bring together like-minded creative students and faculty who want to change the world, embody their passion to create and challenge the status quo.

Assistant Professor of Design Jiwon Park has been awarded a Red Dot Award: Communication Design in the Brand Design category for her project, “SAIB,” which created a brand concept, logo, visual system and application for the intimate cosmetic brand SAIB & Co.

South Korea is a patriarchal, sexually conservative society where the subject of sex has traditionally been taboo. Korean women have long felt uncomfortable purchasing or openly carrying condoms, which are designed and packaged with a masculine message and arousing imagery. Being excluded from the branding and marketing of condoms has left Korean women more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy and STDs, until now. A progressive South Korean cosmetics brand is working to tackle this problem by creating products that are designed by and for women. 

Within, Above and Beyond is the recent interactive multimedia piece by multimedia artist Yulia Lanina. In the piece, Lanina interacts with projected animations of her paintings in a narrative that chronicles Lanina’s journey to find clarity amid the noise of disconcerting news, images and social media.

After a survey at Tulane University revealed startling sexual assault statistics, the senior administration hired design consultants to lead a student-centered qualitative research and design project to address campus-wide concerns. The Project IX team proposed a student-driven design thinking collaboration to address tough issues around sexual assault on campus with the goal of bringing the community together to positively change Tulane’s culture.

Looking through the lens of American psychologist Sandra Bem’s definition of androgyny, human-centered design asks participants to take an androgynous approach and to adopt the best of both masculine and feminine traits to improve problem-solving outcomes.