Volume 36 of The Student Publication is underway. This year, a team of students will design and curate the publication under the supervision of Tania Allen through a brand new two-semester course. Already, we’ve chosen an advisory team and picked a theme.
The process of theme selection is always one of the most exciting of any publication. For our part, we brainstormed topic ideas that ranged from retro-futurism to global truth, from design simplicity to the perception of reality. Almost all of our ideas focused on an inherent duality, either between past and future or the designer and the world. Through our continued discussion, we realized what was interesting was exactly those dualities and we began to craft a theme that could expand to include many topics that affect our multi-disciplinary audience of designers.
The result is the theme for Volume 36: Form + Fiction, which will focus on the role of design and designers in defining, framing and shaping reality. Every person experiences a reality that designers have created any time they design. From purposefully creating new technology interfaces or building thresholds to adjusting typefaces to establish a mood, we hope that it will spark critical thinking about the reality created before us and the reality we create today.
If you’re interested in submitting online to The Student Publication contact our editors:
Anna Bailer or Michael Southard at design_studentpublication@ncsu.edu.