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College of Design
Graphic Design | College of Design

Faculty Research Activity

Helen Armstrong, Professor

  • Research
    • Armstrong explores how machine learning might be leveraged through interface design to support decision making, lower barriers to access, and grant agency to users. 
    • Recent collaborations: SAS, Redhat, IBM, Sealed Air, WebAssign, Advance Auto Parts The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences

Kermit Bailey, Associate Professor

  • Research/Practice
    • Graphic design for community engagement and collaborative design processes (e.g. Mapping a Cultural Legacy in South Park East Raleigh knowledge maps)
    • “On Place, a Framework for Multidisciplinary Place-based Narratives,” (Co-investigator)

Dr. Russell Flinchum, Associate Professor

  • Research/Scholarship
    • Design history from the Industrial Revolution to present
    • 19th & 20th Century European and American architecture
    • 19th & 20th Century European and American painting and sculpture
  • Author
    • Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (Rizzoli, 1997)
    • American Design (5 Continents/MoMA, 2008)

Jarrett Fuller, Assistant Professor

Jarrett Fuller
  • Author/Designer
    • Scratching the Surface, a podcast about design, theory, and creative practice
    • Designer and co-editor of Culture is Not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer, published by MIT Press in 2018
    • Edited 1, 10, 100 Years: Form, Typography, and Interaction at Parsons, a forthcoming book on the history of the Parsons School of Design’s Communication Design program.
    • Launched readings.design, a free online library of design texts.
    • His work and writing has been featured in Eye Magazine, Architectural Digest, Curbed, The Architect’s Newspaper, and Design Observer.

Denise Gonzales Crisp, Professor (emeritus)

  • Scholarship/Creative Production
    • Typography and typographic tools
    • Improvisational pedagogy
    • Situational curation
    • Ornament in graphic design (DecoRational)
    • Alternative design writing
  • Author/Designer
    • Graphic Design in Context: Typography (Thames & Hudson, 2012)
  • Co-curator
    • Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern, (CAM Raleigh NC, 2012)
    • DesignInquiry: Futurespective (ICA MECA, Portland ME, 2019)

Dr. Deborah Littlejohn, Associate Professor

  • Research
    • Design pedagogy and curriculum, especially within online learning environments
    • Interdisciplinary collaboration
    • Multidimensional (2D, 3D, 4D) interface strategies for visualizing multivariate data, including the visual translation of scientific research for non-specialists
    • Design-based teaching and learning
  • Founding Editorial Board Member
    • Dialectic (AIGA)
  • Review Editor
    • Communication Design (Taylor & Francis)

David Oh, Assistant Professor

Dr. Matthew Peterson, Associate Professor

Matthew Peterson
  • Research
    • Co-Principal Investigator on Virtual Reality to Improve Students’ Understanding of the Extremes of Scale in STEM, funded by the National Science Foundation, with PI Karen Chen and Co-PI Cesar Delgado. This project is developing and testing an educational virtual environment — Scale Worlds — that allows students to grow up to the size of the unobservable universe or shrink down to the Planck length, as they learn about scale and improve their numeracy.
    • Theory development, visual analysis, empirical investigation, and production of complex visual displays for STEM education.
    • Theory development and empirical investigation of visual metaphor in advertising.
    • Classification and evaluation of visual representations in multimedia.
  • Author
    • “Design Exploration as a Research Discovery Phase: Integrating the Graduate Design Thesis with Research in the Social Sciences,” published in AIGA’s academic journal Dialectic (2022).
    • “A Taxonomy of Cognitive Image Functions for Science Curriculum Materials: Identifying and Creating ‘Performative’ Visual Displays,” International Journal of Science Education (2021), with co-authors Delgado, Tang, Bordas, and Norville. 
    • “Anticipating Gaze-Based HCI Applications with the Tech Receptivity Interval: Eye Tracking as Input,” Visible Language (2020), with co-authors Tober, Littlejohn, and Hill.
    • “Aspects of Visual Metaphor: An Operational Typology of Visual Rhetoric for Research in Advertising,” International Journal of Advertising (2019).

Scott Townsend, Professor (emeritus)

  • Website: http://www.imaginarycountry.org/
  • Creative Production
    • Audience interaction and visual storytelling on issues of borders, traditional culture, diaspora, and effects on communities in transition
  • Scholarship
    • Participatory design
    • Design and social innovation
    • Public sociology