UCDA Design Education Summit: Collaborate

Helen Armstrong is an associate professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University. She has an MA in English Literature from The University of Mississippi, an MA in Publication Design from the University of Baltimore and an MFA in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been recognized by Print and HOW Magazine, and included in numerous publications in the U.S. and the UK.

At NC State she is a founding member of the Immersive Experience Lab. She was named a University Faculty Scholar in 2018.  From 2013–2015 she served as co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee, striving to build up AIGA communities of students and educators. Currently she serves on the Board of Directors of AIGA and the editorial board of Design and Culture.

Helen authored Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field  in 2009 and co-authored Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content with Zvezdana Stojmirovic in 2011. Her most recent book Digital Design Theory: Readings from the Field explores works by both designers and programmers, examining the two threads of discourse—design and computation—that have rapidly merged to define contemporary graphic design.

Currently, Helen is combining her knowledge of participatory practice with computational thinking—specifically machine learning— to explore the potential of intelligent interfaces to address the needs of individuals with disabilities. 

Art and medicine are not separable for Dr. Eric Avery, and he has found that they don’t have to be. Avery grew up with an artist mother and a physician father. After completing his own undergraduate work in visual art at University of Arizona, he found himself drawn to medical school, which offered an escape during the Vietnam War.

“I was determined to show people who believed that artists could not be doctors that they could,” Eric says.

Fortunately, he says, he had a printmaking teacher who encouraged him to try doing both. Forty years later, Eric’s world-renowned prints and installations are inextricably intertwined with his work as physician, psychiatrist, humanitarian, activist and educator.

Since receiving his MD in 1974, Eric has made prints and played in a street band on the lower East Side of New York, served as medical director at a refugee camp in Northern Somalia and with World Vision, rescuing Vietnamese fleeing into Indonesia. He has been a human rights activist with Amnesty International to refugees at the Texas-Mexico border, documented the HIV/AIDS crisis through his prints and served as an AIDS psychiatrist and faculty member at Institute for the Medical Humanities at University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston, retiring from active practice in 2012 but remaining faculty emeritus.

Through all these experiences, he has made art, to “refresh,” to illustrate, to educate and to heal.

Eric served as the 2019 ETSU Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Science. He was the juror for the 2016 FL3TCH3R Exhibition held annually in the Reece Museum. Programming with the exhibition included critique sessions with art students and a workshop with students from the College of Medicine. Eric worked with graphic design students to design and print a brochure called “Are You Depressed Or Just Sad” which has been distributed through numerous channels across the ETSU campus.

During his semester in residence at ETSU, Eric will teach two classes and present four public activities, including a collaborative exhibition at the Reece Museum, EPIDEMIC: Dr. Eric Avery & Adam DelMarcelle. His work during the semester explored intersections between visual communication and public health practice to address the opioid crisis.

Adam DelMarcelle is an adjunct professor at York College of Pennsylvania, Lebanon Valley College and Pennsylvania College of Art and Design teaching courses in graphic design, printmaking, illustration and visual communication. Adam holds a BFA from Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. DelMarcelle is featured in the book Designing Activism; 31 Designers Fighting for a Better World by What Design Can Do based in the Netherlands.

His work is in the permanent collections of The Cushing Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, Syracuse University and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The work DelMarcelle created for the “What Heroin Sounds Like” project has garnered national attention, allowing Adam to travel widely spreading awareness of the heroin and opioid crisis ravaging our communities.