Tania Allen

Interim Department Head and Associate Professor of Media Arts, Design and Technology

919-515-8359

Bio

Tania’s research and scholarship focuses on critical cartography and critical mapping as tools for design research. Building on theories drawing from anthropology, action research, placemaking, and participatory design her works seeks to “thicken” the way that data is visualized and the stories and experiences that are at the core of data collection, cleaning, manipulation and communication. At the core of her approach to critical cartography is the reciprocal activity of encoding and decoding, bridging the etic perspective of the researcher (i.e. designer) and the emic perspective of the subject of study (i.e. the user) by using data to uncover and communicate a truth (encoding), while simultaneously evaluating the meaning of this truth (decoding).

Tania is the co-director of the design research group co-lab, which focuses on critical mapping as a participatory design research tool. Currently, co-lab’s focus is on developing a methodology for critical mapping that simultaneously embraces cartography as a powerful analytic and synthetic research tool, while also challenging the assumptions that the mapping and visualization process embeds within it.

Tania is the author Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice which was published in 2018. Along with Sara Queen, she is the author of Beyond the Map: Unpacking Critical Cartography in the Digital Humanities in Visible Language, 2015. Current publications include co-authoring a chapter on Confederate Memorialization and urban development for the forthcoming book, Empty Pedestals, edited by Kofi Boone and Elen Deming. She is also the co-director of the cross-institutional colloquium Oppressive Infrastructures: Examining Systems of (in)Equity In/Through/By Data held in Spring 2023.

Tania is a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Geospatial Analytics and a previous faculty fellow in the Office of Faculty Development where she helped to create an online faculty certificate program focused on emphasizing higher order thinking skills through critical and creative pedagogy. She has taught Design Thinking where she focuses on creative design research strategies for beginning design students. Additional topics of pedagogical and scholarly interest include creative research methods, design and rhetoric, design anthropology, data equity and thick mapping.

Tania has worked in large and small design studies in Chicago and Boston, developing branding and communications systems for such clients at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Accenture, MIT and Harvard University. Through her practice, Tania has specifically focused on design as a catalyst for community engagement, using it as a participatory and co-creative process that helps community members take ownership of core social issues, and work to make change from the ground up. Current work focuses primarily on data visualization and critical mapping as tools to interrogate assumptions about proposed design action.