The Department of Typography and Graphic Communication was present for Donor Day 2015, held at Whiteknights campus on Saturday 25 April. Lots of people came and had a chat with Professors Sue Walker and Alison Black about the wide range of the Department’s work. We were glad to see that people were specially interested in the links between historical and archival research and our contemporary projects, such as CIDR’s work in healthcare.
Research in progress
This week marks the launch of the AKI Aware campaign, where we have been working with clinicians at Royal Berkshire Hospital to design materials that will raise awareness of and improve the process of diagnosing and treating acute kidney injury. The project is being funded by Thames Valley Strategic Clinical Network, and is being implemented in Royal Berkshire Hospital and some GP surgeries within the region.
Dates to look out for
Thursday 23 April: Chambers’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia. First year PhD student Rose Roberto will talk about the effects of printing, technology and working practices on book illustrations and encyclopaedia design.
Ljubljana, 9 April 2015 — After a day’s brainstorming, our group of about 30 participants – from neuroscientists, through computer scientists, rhetoricians and literary theorists, to designers, publishers and technical writers – formed into three groups, each taking a specific aspect of reading electronic texts to investigate in detail. We will be formulating preliminary research projects from our discussions, which we will develop over the coming months.
Research in progress
Alison Black and Sue Walker will be attending a working group meeting of the European-Union funded project E-Read (Evolution of reading in the age of digitisation) in Ljubljana. The aim of the project is to better understand the implications of digitisation on reading, and this meeting is a first step in that process. It will bring together European researchers to share the outcomes of their current research and plan future research together.
Topically, we are in the early stages of developing an e-book version of the Berkshire Healthcare Dementia Carer’s Handbook. The original handbook was developed for the family carers of people diagnosed with dementia, but its success has led to requests for wider distribution and, hence, Health Education Thames Valley are funding this new development which we will be working on over the next few months.
We are delighted to welcome Jeanne-Louise Moys to her new post in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication and as research colleague in CIDR. Jeanne-Louise, who has considerable professional and teaching experience, was a PhD student here until 2012. She has subsequently taught as a sessional lecturer within the Department, where she now has a full-time lectureship. So although it feels that she is member of our team already, today is her first day in her new post.
Jeanne-Louise is particularly interested in research methods for user testing, complex texts and how typographic presentation influences readers’ judgments and experience of information across different genres and platforms.
Research in progress
– Southampton City CCG will be launching the campaign to reduce medicines waste Open up about medicines which we have developed for them with the help of many patients, GPs and community and hospital pharmacists. Our engagement with the project will continue as the CCG will be measuring the impact of the intervention.
– We are also drawing to a close our project with Royal Berkshire Hospital on the design of care bundles to improve detection and treatment of acute kidney injury in hospital and in the community.
– And we are attending our first meeting to develop an ebook version of the Dementia Carers Handbook, which we researched and developed with Royal Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust.
Dates to look out for
Postgraduate seminars by first year postgraduate students:
– Thursday 19 March: Sara Copetti Klohn will talk about her preliminary research on the design of symbols
– Thursday 26 March: Marie Leahy will talk on ‘Reading with early stage Alzheimer’s disease: what are the issues?’
Sue Walker will be attending the All Parliamentary Design in Innovation Group’s Design, Innovation and Technology event at Shoreditch Town Hall.
Research in prospect
Jeanne-Louise Moys is meeting with members of the team behind News24’s Election Maps to find out more about customising information and developing regional maps for South African voters. The app recently won gold at the 2015 Bookmark awards in Johannesburg.
Research in progress
Two of our design intervention projects are drawing to a close and we are working with our collaborators to embed the practical application of the research
– Alison Black will be filming a communications video with Southampton City CCG to support the launch of their medicines waste campaign, which will go live mid-March.
– Josefina Bravo Burnier is finalising communications material to support the launch of the new care bundle for management of acute kidney injury at Royal Berkshire Hospital Foundation Trust.
Dates to look out for
Thursday 5 March: Design Star PhD student, Andrew McIlwraith, will be presenting his research at our postgraduate seminar series. His paper is entitled ‘What makes museum maps different?’
Museum wayfinding was the subject of a recent Information Design Association talk by Marijn van Oosten who recently designed an innovative 3-D map for the newly refurbished Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Josefina is our new research and administration assistant. Back in Chile, she worked as a graphic designer for six years, before coming to the UK in 2013 to do her MA in Information Design at University of Reading. Her current focus at CIDR is the completion of our project with Royal Berkshire Hospital on the design of care bundles for Acute Kidney Injury.
Simulation testing of redesigned AKI care bundle forms at Royal Berkshire Hospital
Research in progress
– We are completing user feedback interviews with carers who have been using the Berkshire Dementia Carers Handbook, and drawing the project to a close.
– We’re continuing our work on communication materials to reduce medicines waste with Southampton City CCG, and Alison Black will be talking with GPs about the implications of the project.
– Our work with Royal Berkshire hospital on the communication of care bundles for acute kidney injury (AKI) continues, following successful simulation trials (see picture above) of a proposed redesign of the forms used to initiate AKI treatment.
Dates to look out for
Wednesday 14 Jan: Design Star Collider Workshop at the Open University, Camden. For all postgraduate students funded under the AHRC Design Star scheme. Camden, London
Thursday 15 Jan: Postgraduate lunch time seminar. Andrew Barker will present an update of his research on wayfinding behaviour in print, on-screen and in three-dimensional contexts. Agriculture Building, room 1L08, 1 pm
Thinking, testing, making…
These words appear on the front page of the new ‘Manifesto for Design‘ produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group (APDIG) and tie in very much with our approach in the Centre for Information Design Research.
We were involved in the drafting of the report and were pleased to draw attention to the fact that design is about planning, organizing and problem-solving, as well as highlighting one of Typography’s REF case studies, ‘Enriching communities of literacy’, in a section about higher education as an example of the value that design can add to policy engagement and making a real difference to people’s lives.
We particularly appreciate the emphasis the manifesto places on education:
Design thinking is a tool that can make a major contribution across educational projects drawing on a variety of disciplines. Greater opportunities should be created for designers and the design industry to collaborate with schools colleges and universities to embed designing thinking and design practices and help address the challenges of equipping students with the skills they will need for their working life.
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