AIGA Design Educator Research Posters
The following research and poster design was created for the 2025 AIGA Design Educators Conference.
I contributed two posters intentionally designed to be opposites; one was created to be structurally rigid about the current job market, and the other poster was a co-creation deliberately using traditional design practices.
Poster 1: Two-Eyed Seeing
This poster was co-created as an act of communication with Tiana Aurelio, Penobscot Artists and owner of People of the Dawn Apothecary.
This work frames Two-Eyed Seeing as a humanist design approach rather than a symbolic gesture. The work intentionally mixes canonized iconographic imagery from Wabanaki tradition with visual references tied to Western scientific “advancement,” placing both within the same visual field without hierarchy or resolution.
The goal was not synthesis, but rather to spark a dialogue with design educators and students testing whether design can hold multiple epistemologies without flattening one to legitimize the other.
Poster 2: Mapping Entry Level Design Skills
The second poster takes a procedural, system-driven approach. It uses a word-search format built in Python using two overlapping grids, populated with job skills aggregated from 1,000 design-related job postings.
Viewers are invited to actively search for skills, encountering repetition, contradiction, and overload in the process. The format turns labor-market data into a tactile experience, reflecting how designers are expected to navigate unrealistic and competing expectations within rigid institutional frameworks.
Takeaway
Together, the posters function as a paired study in values-driven form-making: humanist vs. systematic, relational imagery vs. imposed structure.
They demonstrate ways which design education is able to interrogate not just what we teach, but the visual systems and real-world application we use to legitimize knowledge.
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