Audrey Bennett

Guest Editors: Fractals inGlobalAfrica

Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves at many scales. In the context of African art and design, that simple characterization takes on profound meanings that can move across disciplines and geographic boundaries. Fractal patterns can be found in African architecture, textiles, sculpture, music, and many other places. The means by which computers generate fractal graphics, recursive loops which allow structures to “unfold” or self-generate from an initial state, find parallels in African cultural traditions that might seem distant from math or computing: stories of spiritual rebirth, trickster narratives, the social dynamics of communalism, the “repetition with revision” linking music with oral history, and other ineluctable aspects of lived experience. Rather than imposing an alien analysis from afar, the eclectic mix of contributions in this special issue allow the rich complexity of African culture, in all its global diversity, to enter into dialogue with nonlinear dynamics, complexity theory, and other mathematical and computational frameworks in which fractals occupy a central role. In her essay, textile artist Judy Bales examines the presence of fractal structure in certain traditions of African-American quilts. She begins by carefully answering critics who cast doubt on the hypothesis that these visual patterns show African cultural influence: rather than propose direct mimetic reflection—the dubious claim that these African-American quilts are reproducing specific African textile designs—she proposes that the fractal structure is the result of the more subtle improvisational aesthetic outlined by Henry Louis Gates in his investigation of African and African-American communicative practices, found broadly across speech acts, visual forms, and music in global Africa. Bales’ investigation not only offers a new perspective for the analysis of cultural practices and the propagation of African culture, but brings up questions in computational mathematics, as well: what is the relation between this culturally specific form of improvisation and the formal structures of recursive scaling, self-organization, or other means of producing fractals in the technical realm? Linguist Abdul Bangura’s essay explores a question regarding Chinua Achebe’s famous book, Things Fall Apart: does an African fractal tradition inform the text’s understanding of what constitutes “randomness” or “noise?” In Achebe’s narrative, random tragic events—bad luck—befall the ambitious protagonist. But, deeper principles of the indigenous system keep him from utter despair; it is only in the context of a colonial encounter that he commits suicide, an event portrayed as “outside” the indigenous moral frame of reference. In other words, it is as if two different kinds of “disorder” are present: one tragic but comprehensible; the other beyond redemption. But, how to analyze this spectrum of chaotic variety? Starting with a “pluridisciplinary methodology” that he traces to Cheikh Anta Diop and Jean Vercoutter, Bangura makes a case for how the divide between the sciences and the humanities has been persistently questioned in (global) African intellectual traditions. Bringing that lesson back to Achebe, he then provides Guest Editors: Fractals in Global aFrica

Usable Content in a Post-Document World

The Usable Content Project aims to develop a set of useful paradigms for the analysis, design, and testing of usable content in a post-document world. In planning work supported by the STC, we have brought together a multidisciplinary team of Rensselaer faculty and students to explore a variety of post-document exemplars and develop an over-arching framework for what makes them usable. Our suggestion is that post-documents move users from control through identity and toward community, using a process clearly different from traditional documents. As a consequence, traditional metrics of usability - efficiency, accuracy, and satisfaction - are no longer adequate for post-documents

Creatively designing socially intelligent robots

What role does creative design theory and practice play in the mechanical and technical design of socially intelligent robots? It may be true and evident that creative design theory and practice can play a variety of roles since some socially intelligent prototype robots already exist. The question then becomes: What future role(s) should creative design theory and practice play in the mass production of socially intelligent robots? In order to answer this question we may need to view socially intelligent robots not just as a mechanical amalgamation of complex scientific theories, computer programs and technical parts, but as a creative design form that in itself communicates (or will communicate) with a counterpart (that may be human) in a future time and in a predetermined or target social context. We may also need to view the process of designing socially intelligent robots as a social process that warrants audience input. Therefore, the function and form of a mass produced SIR may need to depend on the way that a multidisciplinary design team (that includes the engineers, social scientists, creative designers and especially the target audience) wants it to be aesthetically and technically designed to behave in its target social context.

Introduction: A Wicked Solution to the Global Food Problem

Whereas my previous work (Bennett, 2006) purports the rise of research in communication design, my recent review of the field (Bennett and Vulpinari, 2011) shows how communication design has fully evolved into a research discipline that contributes new knowledge to interdisciplinary knowledge, both within and outside design. Communication design educators who opt to do research for their scholarship are integrating qualitative and quantitative research methodologies into their creative problem solving process – defined here as the conceptualization of innovative solutions that take form in either new or existing communication design conventions. These researchers are investigating the varied roles communication design expertise can play in contributing understanding of what we might call a “global visual ecosystem”: the increasingly dynamic play of static and dynamic images as they communicate across social, political, and economic boundaries. This special issue examines how communication design research presented at GLIDE’12 on November 7, 2012 can offer a positive impact on the complex global food problem – by meeting its complexity with an equally complex system of solutions that facilitate interaction with visual messages both cross-culturally and across research disciplines.

Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images

The golden ratio, a mathematical relation that often arises in fractals and other scaling geometries, is known for its ability to effect visual beauty.1 As a result, communication designers have used it throughout history to compute a plethora of visual compositions. For instance, many designers use the golden rectangle, a popular compositional grid derived from the golden ratio, to organize verbal and visual information into eye-catching images. However, within the discipline’s literature, our European predecessors, primarily ancient Greece, receive most of the recognition for being the sole contributors to the use of the golden ratio. Very few references in the discipline’s literature acknowledge Africa as the one of the primary contributors to knowledge about the golden ratio. In this paper, I challenge the assumption that the golden rectangle originated solely in ancient Europe and I examine existing evidence within broader interdisciplinary discourse, which suggests that the golden rectangle is more of an outcome of interaction between African and European civilizations. Herein, I respond to Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, Kimberly Elam’s Geometry of Design, and Tim Samara’s Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop, by noting that African contributions are conspicuously absent in their accounts. My aim is to weave into the discourse other perspectives from anthropology, architecture, and mathematics, which suggest that Africa’s golden ratio exemplars predate the instances that have created the current origin story. Specifically, I introduce perspectives that suggest that the structures derived from the golden ratio, which organize typographic compositions and even structure living spaces, were also present in traditional African architecture, and that this presence extends further back than sites and artifacts in Greece. Two important examples derive from Ron Eglash’s analysis: the first is the chief ’s palace in Logone-Birni, Cameroon, a historical architectural site that has a golden ratio scaling pattern embedded in its spatial design; the second is a similar scaling pattern in the Temple of Karnak from ancient Egypt.2 These additions of African design into the story of the golden ratio need not be limited to merely correcting an incomplete history. We can use them to broaden perspectives on how the golden ratio can be used and to encourage its incorporation in the design of images that aim to communicate cross-culturally. From existing cultural artifacts and spatial designs that reflect the golden ratio and other patterns, we can extract cultural grids—a phrase I introduce to explain the phenomenon of grids found in cultural artifacts and man-made or natural spaces, which can apply to communication design practice, particularly to the printed or digital page. When used in the design of information, these cultural grids, I posit, may yield crosscultural resonance during the interpretation of images in the communication process.

Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration, by Sharon Poggenpohl and Keiichi Sato (eds)

created the opportunity for consumer empowerment via individual solar subsidies. Not only is this issue debatable, considering the aggregation of capital and resources that engendered such individual empowerment, but it also invites further comment about the role of design and engineering in helping individuals cope with the new landscape of energy consumption in an affordable way. Higgins is at her most deft when she weaves together twentiethcentury art, design, and cultural history. In “Box,” the chapter that is likely the most relevant to design historians (except for perhaps “Type”), her expertise allows for seamless transitions between examples as diverse as the history of shipping containers, Buckminster Fuller’s architecture of critical rejection, the geometry of Cezanne, Braque, and Picasso, the full-blown abstraction of Malevich and Mondrian, Sol LeWitt’s theatrical cubic constructions, Joseph Cornell’s nostalgic curations, and the playful organization of Fluxus artist George Brecht. This engaging book is a welcome addition to the cultural history of forms, and its method a suggestive one for historians of design.

When negative emotions effect positive change

This paper introduces emotive aesthetics as visual language that expresses and/or evokes an emotion or a series of emotions from the target audience for a rhetorical purpose. (e.g. persuading them to make a positive change in a life-threatening behaviorial pattern). Historically, political graphics have been popular examples of products that use emotive aesthetics to promote positive social change. However, theres a problem today with the lack of time graphic designers have to devote their skills to the continued development of polemical products. A solution lies in broadening the scope of graphic design into a research discipline by demystifying the graphic design process with a methodological view of its components.