Designing Across Divides

Iworked in collaboration with Kelly Murdoch-Kitt (at the University of Michigan) and Denielle Emans (at VCUarts Qatar) this past Fall 2018, to engage students in co-creating tools for community change, an initiative tied to the Designing Across Divides Conference at WVU. As part of the conference call, graphic designers were invited to design a pair of banners to illustrate how to bridge or address a divide, in a format that would be positioned to the left and the right of a light pole. Selected work would be hung on the streets of Morgantown (West Virginia) during the month of the conference (held March 28-30, 2019), and would be made into a catalog post conference.

We were excited about this opportunity to bring our research in intercultural collaboration to the fore with students enrolled in our respective Typography courses in Doha and Ann Arbor. For three weeks, our students collaborated virtually via video-conferencing, messaging, and other digital communication tools. The aim was to address critical challenges and opportunities facing their communities, with the diptych banners raising awareness about the range of sociocultural divides that had personal meaning to the design teams. We were thrilled when we heard that two student teams were chosen for inclusion!

We are also thrilled to announce that this project has also made it into the TypeCon 2019/ Type & Design Education Forum which takes place August 28th-September 1st in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Our amazing students with their work:

(Shima Aeinehdar, Izza Alyssa & Najla Al-Khalifa and Zainab AlShibani)