Advanced Rhetoric and Research
400.001 - Designing for the Community
In today’s multimodal world, information comes not just from text, but from a combination of text, image, and audiovisual elements working together through intentional design. However, many small businesses and local non-profits lack the time, money, or the design skills to engage effectively in multimodal advertising, information-sharing, and outreach.
This is where you come in! In this class, you will partner with a local non-profit or small business of your choosing (either in the Ann Arbor area or in your home community), and you will create a series of designed materials for your community partner. From the first week of this class, you will not only learn but practice the foundations of effective design, exploring how to use contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, color, and typography as communicative tools to convey a particular message. After completing a handful of small practice design assignments and experimenting with design resources, you’ll be designing for real, creating materials like a brochure and a how-to guide or set of instructions for your community partner to use as they see fit. In the latter half of the class, you will conduct research on different design documents and put together a custom “media pack” portfolio for your community partner, which can include anything from business cards to Instagram reels. This class offers a rich opportunity to transition from learning in the classroom to making a potential impact in the real world.
400.002 - Field Research Methods and Ethical Design
Are you curious to step outside the classroom, form your own questions and conduct your own research to learn more about the communities and world around you? Are you interested in the ethics of field research design? Want to see how field research can be used (or misused) in creative arts-based work and fulfill an ULWR at the same time?
If so, this course might be for you! In the first half of the term, students will read examples of published field research from a wide range of disciplines and consider the possibilities and ethical issues that arise from the complex, intersectional dynamics. In the second half of the term students will practice creating their own interviews, surveys, and observation-based research. As part of a UMS course development grant, students will also attend, free of charge, the Jeremy Nedd dance performance at the Power Center which is inspired by a rapper's copyright infringement lawsuit against the video game company Fortnite.
