Registration
Join us in Los Angeles for AIGA Converge!
Registration rates
AIGA Members: $225
Nonmembers: $275
Students: $75*
Though we urge attendees to register online, registration will be accepted onsite at the conference on a space available basis. A processing fee of $25 will be added to all registrations that are not completed online. Online registration will close on May 19, 2017 at 8pm EST (5pm PST).
*Note for student attendees: You must be both a student and a dues-paying member of AIGA to qualify for the $75 registration rate.
Cancellation policy
There will be a $20 fee for cancellations made prior to April 1. AIGA will refund 50 percent of conference fees paid for cancellations made between April 1 and May 1. No refunds will be available after May 1.
Schedule
Converge conference sessions will take place in SCI (the interactive building) within the School of Cinematic Arts. Download PDF version of the schedule here.
12:00pm (SCI Lobby)
Registration and Book Table open
1:00–2:00pm (SCI 108)
Pre-Conference Panel
Designing Archives: Towards a Vertical Interdisciplinarity
Virginia Kuhn (chair), Nike Nivar Ortiz, Maria Zalewska
1:00–3:00pm (SCI 209)
Workshop
Maps, Friendly Mapping Tools, and Open Data
David Ramos
Participants must be Converge attendees (sign-up when you complete your conference registration).
1:00–3:00pm (SCI L106)
Workshop
Making Core Memory: The Women who put Man on the Moon
Daniela Rosner, Samantha Shorey
Participants must be Converge attendees (sign-up when you complete your conference registration).
3:00–3:30pm
Break
3:30–5:30pm (SCI)
School of Cinematic Arts Research Lab Tours
Read full descriptions of the labs here, and sign up via Google Forms.
3:30–4:30pm (SCI 106)
Pre-conference Panel
Real Knowledges, Virtual Designs: A Roundtable on Conducting Practice-Based Research in Virtual Reality
Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Kate Parsons, Samantha Gorman, Luis Blackaller, Tonia Beglari
3:30–5:30pm (SCI 209)
Workshop
Using Digital Archives to teach Global Design History
Dori Griffin
Participants must be Converge attendees (sign-up when you complete your conference registration).
3:30–5:30pm (SCI L114)
Workshop
Data Visualization as Participatory Action Research Method
Andrew DeRosa
Participants must be Converge attendees (sign-up when you complete your conference registration).
3:30–5:30pm (SCI L106)
Workshop
How to Teach Design to Non-Design Students and Create Programs for Non-Designers
Joyce Walsh
Participants must be Converge attendees (sign-up when you complete your conference registration).
5:30–7:00pm (SCI Main Level)
Kickoff Reception
8:00am (SCI Lobby)
Registration and Book Table open
9:00am (SCI 106)
Opening Remarks and DEC Welcome/Introduction
9:30am (SCI 106)
Keynote: Johanna Drucker
10:30am–12pm (SCI 106)
Long Paper Session: Practice and Process
The Critical Turn: Critical Design; As A Matter Of Course
Daniel Jasper
Developing Complex Systems With Low-Fidelity Prototypes
Thomas Maiorana
Visual Thinking Methods for Understanding Each Other
Jessica Parris Westbrook, Adam Trowbridge
10:30am–12pm (SCI 108)
Long Paper Session: Data and Information
Data as Medium
Nicole Coleman
Case Study: Disease Modeling as an Interdisciplinary Practice
Courtney Marchese
12pm (SCI Lobby)
Lunch (provided) with Panel Discussion
The Work of Design Today: New Practices in Research and Creative Activity
This panel will examine how critical practices in design are changing. Johanna Drucker, John Jennings, Michael Gibson, and Keith Owens will discuss how design educators and researchers can evolve their work, and find new projects and modes of publication.
1:30–2:30pm (SCI 106)
Panel Session
Shape Of An Absence: Designing The Black Subject And The Case For Critical Race Design Studies
John Jennings (chair), Peter Fine, Stacey Robinson, Marshall Shorts, Intelligent Mischief
1:30–2:30pm (SCI 108)
Panel Session
Co-eval: Rethinking Contemporary Approaches To Collaboration And Critical Inquiry
Nathan Matteson (co-chair), Heather Snyder Quinn (co-chair), Eamon Duede, Ian Lynam, Kelly Bjork
2:30–4:00pm (SCI 106)
Long Paper Session: Print to Digital
User-centered Design and Data Visualization Techniques to Reimagine Digital Scholarly Monographs
Jessica Keup
Books, Robots, Algorithms, and Architectures
Anne Burdick
Architectonics of the Book: Form, Content and Media
Steven McCarthy
2:30–4:00pm (SCI 108)
Long Paper Session: STEM/STEAM
Design is STEM! Understanding Interdisciplinary Design Practice and Education
Hye-Jin Nae, Tim Wood
Improving Undergraduate STEM Visualizations Through Design Education: A NASA-funded STEAM Curriculum Initiative
Katherine Hepworth
4:00–4:30pm (SCI Lobby)
Poster Session and Break
User-Centered Design: Design Thinking by Developing Understanding and Empathy
MiHyun Kim
Perpetual Engagement Through Facilitated Peer Critique
Aaron Winters
Entrepreneurship-Corporate Identity Interdisciplinarity
Jan Ballard
Modes: Multi-sensory Media Experience for Stress-Reduction
Emily Verba Fischer, John Hebbeler
Digital Arts / Social Justice: Working Group And Exhibition
Camila Afanador-Llach
4:30–5:00pm (SCI 106)
Lightning Round Session
Designing an Online Collaborative Platform for Mapping Visual Media in the Classroom
Kristy H.A. Kang
Between Autonomy and the Collective
Lisa Maione
A Study Investigating the Design Learning Process in Relationship with a “Reflective Practitioner”
Rebecca Roe
Envisioning A Backer-Centered Design Approach For Crowdfunded Projects
Andrea Marks, Brad Tober
4:30–5:00pm (SCI 108)
Lightning Round Session
Designing a Theoretical Foundation for People-Centered Design Research
Pamela Napier, Terri Wada
Empowering Teachers as Designers: A Design Case on the WASH Curriculum design for Under-Resourced Schools in Papua New Guinea
Khendum Gyabak
Visualizing California’s Water System: A Transdisciplinary Convergence Of Social Sciences, Natural Sciences And Design
Barbara Sudick, Frank Armstrong
5:00pm (SCI 106)
Keynote: Erik Loyer
6:00–7:30pm (SCI Courtyard)
Courtyard Celebration
Join us for an evening outdoors with food, beverages, and a live guest music performance.
8:00am (SCI Lobby)
Registration opens
Research Development and Publication Coaching Sessions (register on-site)
Facilitated by AIGA DEC Dialectic Managing Editor Keith Owens and Producer Michael Gibson. The overarching goal of this workshop/coaching session is to immerse the participants in a learning experience that will help them “see/read their manuscripts/proposals through the eyes of an editor or a producer.” A secondary goal, which operates just behind the one above, is to help all participants improve their abilities to frame and construct their scholarship, research reports, critical analyses, etc. Starts at 8AM sharp.
9:00–10:30am (SCI 106)
Long Paper Session: Student-Led Labs
Students designing understanding: Design + Code + French = Play
Cary Staples
A War on Two Fronts: Critically Making Books, Museum Exhibits and Archives with Students
Scott Mann, Alli Crandell, Jennifer Boyle
Greenhouse Studios / Scholarly Communications Design at the University of Connecticut
Samantha Olschan
9:00–10:30am (SCI 108)
Long Paper Session: Forming an Interdisciplinary Team
Assuming Roles That Help Empathize, Translate, and Improve the Visibility of Design Research
David Wang
Collaborating across the University
Karen Zimmermann, Jennifer Nichols, Carolina Gonzalez
Design for Collaborative Research
Xinyi Li, Rebecca Sutton Koeser
10:30–11:00am (SCI 106)
Lightning Round Session
Community Voicebox: Capturing & Visualizing Regional Language Habits
Heather Tucker
Open Data as Design Medium
Eugene Park
Mycorrhizae: An Ecosystem Of Collaboration Parallels And Creative Investigation Into The Fungal Root Network Of Plant Communication
Kimberly Long Loken, Samantha Kufahl, Austin Lewer
10:30–11:00am (SCI 108)
Lightning Round Session
Understanding the role of modality and ergonomics in a large-scale interface for design presentation and review
Danielle Oprean, Peter Lusch
Ice-Time: Art-Science Expedition Field Report
Clea T. Waite
Design is Design: Interdisciplinary Collaborations Between Landscape Architecture and Graphic Design
Anthony Acock
11:00–11:30am (SCI Lobby)
Poster Session and Break
Vocal Grammatics: An innovative type design research project
Adrien Contesse
Call and Response: A collaboration between a Printmaker and a Motion Designer
Vanessa B. Cruz
Digital Aesthetic and Spatial Self
Akshita Sivakumar
Pluto: Supporting Interdisciplinary Learning in the Classroom and Beyond
Ameer Ahmed, Caspar Lam, YuJune Park
11:30am–1pm (SCI 106)
Long Paper Session: On Collaboration
Here I Am: A Collaborative Exhibition Between Technology And Art History Students Exploring Culture And Identity
Caroline McCaw, Kathleen Mahoney
The Game: An Argument for Digital Scholarship
Dennis Doordan, Brian Edlefson
11:30am–1pm (SCI 108)
Long Paper Session: Improving the Case for Designers
Elevating the Role of Design Within the Humanities, Science, and Education Scholarship
Jeremy Swanston
Quantifying the Qualitative: How to Elevate the Scholarly Merit of Collaboration
Meta Newhouse, Patricia Murphey
Elephants Everywhere: Incorporating Divisive Topics Into Design Curriculum
Audra Buck-Coleman
1:00–2:30pm (SCI 108)
Lunch (provided) with Panel Discussion (optional)
Book Table opens (SCI Lobby)
Shared Futures: Practices and Methods of Speculative Design, World Building, Design Fiction and Participatory Design
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz (panel chair), Emilia Yang, Biayna Bogosian, Laura Cechanowicz, Karl Baumann
2:30–4pm (SCI 106)
Panel Session
From Design Thinking to Divergent Thinking: How Visual Communication Design works across areas of Knowledge and Brings them Together
Yvette Shen, Xun Michael Chi, Yoshiko Burke, Chen Wang
2:30–4pm (SCI 108)
4:00–5:00pm (SCI 106)
Keynote: Casey Reas
5:00–5:30pm (SCI 106)
Closing remarks… farewell, Convergers!
About
Conference Location
School of Cinematic Arts (SCA)
University of Southern California
900 West 34th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211
Connect
converge.aiga.org
converge.aiga@gmail.com
facebook.com/groups/AIGAConverge
twitter.com/aiga_converge
#aigaconverge
Organizing Committee
Jessica Barness
Her research resides at the intersection of design, humanistic inquiry, and interactive systems, investigated through a critical, practice-based approach. She has presented and exhibited her work internationally, and has published research in Design and Culture, Dialectic, Visual Communication, and Message, among others. She recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Visible Language with Amy Papaelias entitled “Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities” (2015).
Vicki Callahan
Her research and teaching is focused on the integration of theory and practice with attention to issues in film and media history, feminist studies, digital culture, media strategies for social change, and public scholarship. She was an NEH fellow for the inaugural workshop, “Scholarship in Sound and Image,” on Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College, and in 2015 she was in residence at University College Cork, Ireland as a Fulbright Scholar with a focus on digital media praxis.
Heather Corcoran
Her work explores relationships between information and expression in collaborative projects for social impact and self-generated projects for exhibition. She was lead author on the article “Making cancer surveillance data more accessible for the public through Dataspark,” published in Visible Language in 2013, and co-principal investigator on a grant funded by the National Cancer Institute (NIH), 2009-11. An exhibition of her work, Reading Time: Visual Timelines, Texts, and Canons, opened at Gallery 360 at Northeastern University in Boston in 2014.
Sarah Lowe
Her work across technology, cultural heritage and museum studies researching the design of digital engagement with the public has led to research partnerships with The National Park Service, The US Holocaust Museum, and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. Her work has been presented at CUMULUS, NORDES and the Museum Computer Network (MCN) in addition to several DEC conferences. In 2012/13 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway, researching the design of educational technologies in relation to learning theory.
Amy Papaelias
She has presented her design research and pedagogy at Theorizing the Web, the Type Directors Club, NYC DH Week, TypeCon, and other DEC conferences. In 2013, Amy participated in One Week One Tool, an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. She co-edited a special issue of the journal Visible Language with Jessica Barness entitled “Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities” (2015). She is a founding member of Alphabettes.org.
Holly Willis
Former DEC Steering Committee co-chair, Holly works at the intersection of cinema, design, media literacy and the humanities. She co-founded and launched the practice-based Media Arts + Practice program integrating design research and critical theory/making, and is currently involved with USC’s Mellon-funded Digital Humanities Program supporting humanists in manifesting their research through media-rich experiences. She has helped organize and has presented at many previous DEC conferences, including New Contexts/New Practices, Schools of Thought III and NEXT.
Converge brand and design
Glyphix, Kent State University
Larrie King (Assistant Professor & Creative Director)
Jordan AG. Kauffman (Project Manager & Designer)
Designers: Kels Damicone, Nate Druss, Gracie Harms, Julia Holmberg, Samantha Hudak, Jenna Myler, Emily Prusak, Cory Sutter, Grant Wang
Keynote Speakers

Johanna Drucker
“Digital Projects and the Role of the Designer”
The kinds of design tasks that come up in digital projects that are extensions of but also, sometimes, very different from, what designers have done in traditional roles, particularly graphic design. What are the current boundaries for design as a profession? What pedagogical and critical issues arise in regard to the pressures on designers to understand the “back-end” technical requirements of digital platforms as well as the “front-end” user experience. And how might critical concerns about the role of design in a consumer-driven model of experience challenge the terms of efficiency on which digital design is often premised?
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliography in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She has published and lectured on a wide array of topics related to graphic design, visual epistemology, aesthetics, contemporary art, artists’ books, and digital humanities. Her most recent titles include Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2013).

Casey Reas
“ULTRACONCENTRATED: Image, Media, Software”
Gathering source material from newspapers, social media profiles, broadcast television, and YouTube searches, Casey Reas has created series of software-based collages that manifest his personal confrontations with media. Reas, an artist and educator based in Los Angeles, will speak about his work with mass media from 2012 to the present. Reas is a co-founder of the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology-related fields – and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities.

Erik Loyer
“Embodied Convergence: Personal stories of interdisciplinary collaboration and the impacts it has on the lives of the collaborators”
Erik Loyer is a digital media artist and designer who uses tactile interfaces to tell stories and make arguments. Whether original or collaborative, fiction or non-fiction, non-profit or commercial, Loyer’s apps, websites, and creative tools have received international recognition in the digital humanities, electronic literature, indie games, and digital comics fields.
Travel
Conference Location
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
900 West 34th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211
Transportation
Get around LA by car or public transit, and take advantage of some discounts for conference attendees.
The main airport is Los Angeles International (LAX).
– 17.5 miles to USC from the airport
– 6 miles to Marina del Rey from the airport
– 7.5 miles to Culver City from the airport
– 12 miles to Santa Monica from the airport
Delta Airlines is offering a two to 10 percent discount (depending on when you make your reservation and fare type selected) for CONVERGE attendees flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). When making your reservations online at delta.com, select “Book a Trip”, then “Advanced Search”, and enter meeting event code NMPHZ in the appropriate box. You can also receive the discount by calling 800-328-1111 and mentioning the same code but please note that Delta charges a fee for phone reservations.
Avis is offering reduced car rental rates for conference participants. Make your reservations online or call 800 331 1600 and mention the AWD number J770134.
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) serves the area.
The hotels in Culver City and Santa Monica are near LA’s new Metro Expo Line; the Metro fare is $1.75 one way; travel from Santa Monica is approximately 45 minutes; from Culver City, it is approximately 20 minutes. Download a Metro Expo Line map here (PDF).