For many years, Jorge Frascara was kind enough to invite me to give presentations, share, and participate in conferences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He also invited me to contribute to some of the publications he authored.
Guillermina Noël
Professional competencies: Human-centered, evidence-based, and outcomes-oriented design
Dr. Guillermina Noël is a design researcher and educator. She is the new head of the Bachelor Design Management, International. She is proud to join the DMI team, a community of scholars dedicated to excellence in education for the benefit of society.
Guillermina applies a human-centered, evidence-based, and outcomes-oriented approach to design. Prior to joining the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences, Guillermina was a human-centered designer at the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta, Canada. Guillermina works with multidisciplinary health teams to improve care practices (quality improvement) or transferring and implementing health research into practice to influence everyday decisions (knowledge translation/adoption of innovation).
Guillermina is also the director of the Health Design Network, a platform that enables health design professionals to exchange knowledge. The Network is an initiative supported by the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), with headquarters in Austria. She is also a member of the editorial board of Information Design Journal, and advisory board member Master Design at Hochschule Luzern.
Guillermina believes the value of design is neither just in the methodology, nor just in the making of tools, but also in helping teams deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty helps us to actively seek understanding, we keep on looking and we keep on trying different courses of action.
Guillermina sees the design process as a continuing series of steps to gain understanding. In design, we not only iterate ideas and prototypes, but most importantly iterate understanding. She believes that in design we learn about the world through action, and through action we change it.
Jorge Frascara
Jorge Frascara was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1939. The son of a journalist and a poet/painter, he studied Fine Arts and Art Education in Buenos Aires and began his professional career as an illustrator and film animator in the early 1960s. Broad interests in culture, art, design, education, psychology, and communication, led him in different directions of enquiry during his twenties and early thirties. After almost a year of work in Guatemala in 1973, he spent the academic year 1973/74 in London—with a small grant from the British Council—doing research on graphic design education. Among the many people he met, two were of fundamental importance: one with Herbert Spencer, which prompted Frascara to adapt Spencer’s methods for field research in legibility to other areas of communication design; and another with Patrick Burke (then–editor of Icographic magazine) and Marijke Singer (then–Secretary General of Icograda), which led to a long relationship with the International Council of Graphic Design Associations.
Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Frascara organized a meeting with other colleagues and founded the first Society of Graphic Designers of Argentina. In 1974, he coordinated the public information symbols test station in Buenos Aires at the invitation of the ISO, and began to do field research in communication design. Notable was a study on children’s preferences for illustration styles, presented at the Edugraphic conference in Edmonton in July 1975, which was subsequently published in Icographic (vol. 13, 1979, pp. 2–5) and in Reading Improvement (C.J. Ladan and J. Frascara, “Three Variables Influencing the Picture Preferences of South and North American Boys and Girls,” Reading Improvement, 14/2, 1977, pp. 120–28).
In 1976, Frascara moved to Canada, accepting a one-year contract with the University of Alberta, where in 1977 he became continuing academic staff. He was elected member of the National Council of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (1979–1981), and was member of the Advisory Committee on Graphic Symbols for the Canadian Standards Council from 1979 to 1990. From 1981 to 1986, he was Chairman of the Department of Art and Design. Around the same time (1979–1983), he was convener of an ISO Working Group on Graphic Symbols for Public Information (ISO TC 145 SC1 WG2). In that capacity, he led the development of the ISO Technical Report 7239, “Visual Design Criteria for Public Information Symbols,” which for the first time established frames of reference for the sizing and placing of graphic symbols for public information in public spaces. He also served as vice-president of Icograda from 1979 to 1981, and became president elect in Dublin, in 1983, serving as president between 1985 and 1987, and serving on the board until 1989. He was associate editor of Icographic magazine (1981–1984) and fostered the development of the discourse on design education as Icograda chairman in the area, culminating his mandate two years after chairing a meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, at the Icograda 1997 Congress.
As conference organizer, his first credit is shared with Peter Kneebone and Amrik Kalsi for the Icograda/Unesco conference Design for Development, held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1987. Due to his involvement in communications for traffic safety, he then went on to be co-organizer of the Novice Driver Education Working Conference (Edmonton, 1993), and of Traffic Safety in Alberta (Edmonton, 1998). He was also co-chairman of Edmonton, 1995, Charting the Future of Graphic Design Education (Edmonton, 1995, for the Graphic Design Education Association); chairman of Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections (Edmonton, 1999), and chairman of Creating Communicational Spaces, a conference held in Edmonton in May 2003.
Frascara is a member of the editorial boards of Design Issues (Carnegie Mellon University/MIT), Information Design Journal (John Benjamins), and Tipográfica (Buenos Aires, Argentina); he is International Fellow of the Society for the Science of Design (Japan). He has also organized several international design education projects, been adviser and reviewer of several design education programs, and has lectured and made presentations in twenty-five countries.
He has published several monographs and articles on design and art and design education—fundamentally in Design Issues, the Information Design Journal, and Visible Language—and is the author of several books in English and Spanish: Diseño Gráfico y Comunicación (Infinito, Argentina, 1988), Diseño Gráfico para la Gente: Comunicaciones Masivas y Cambio Social (Infinito, Argentina, 1997), and User Centred Graphic Design, Mass Communication and Social Change (Taylor & Francis, London and Washington, 1997). He is the editor for Graphic Design, World Views, 25 years of Icograda (Kodansha, Japan, 1990), and of Design and the Social Sciences, Making Connections (Taylor & Francis, in press). He has also produced three major research reports as principal investigator: “Research and Development of Safety Symbols” (for the Standards Council of Canada, 1986); “Traffic Safety in Alberta” (for the Alberta Solicitor General and the Alberta Motor Association, 1992); and “Profiling the Alberta Driver” (Traffic Safety Summit/ Mission Possible, 1998).
He has juried many design exhibitions and competitions and has conducted research with the support of various Canadian organizations. His professional experience includes illustration, film animation, advertising, and graphic design. He now concentrates on research and development of visual communications for safety and other social concerns.