Assistant Professor John Delacruz, Advertising, School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC), hosted Design Colloquium 4.1 for the Design Incubation group, Saturday, September 30. Design Incubation is a venue for educators and practitioners of visual communication design to discuss design research and practice. Their aim is to create a community where designers can assess creative work through a lens of scholarly activity and academic review.

“The aim of the Design Incubation group is to foster collaboration, promote development, encourage discourse, cultivate theoretical frameworks, challenge notions, offer criticism, and review processes within the design community,” says Professor Delacruz. “That is why we included designers across experience levels and backgrounds – practicing designers, graduate students, adjunct and tenure-track faculty to distinguished professors.”

In the past, Design Colloquium has primarily been held on the east coast. JMC’s Design Colloquium was the first held on the west coast and brought 30 educators from the fields of advertising and creative design from a wide range of United States institutions. The participants were mainly from the west coast, but some traveled as far as New Jersey and Minnesota. At the Colloquium, Professor Delacruz presented a case study where advertising students worked with the City of San José to create an awareness campaign around the illegal dumping of household items – high impact service learning. Assistant Professor Tina Korani, JMC Media, and Professor Andrea English, Design, also presented at the conference.