Graphic Design Professor Presents Community Engagement and Global Teaching Experiences
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design Samira ShiriDevich will make conference presentations on three consecutive weekends this month, highlighting her experiences with community-engaged design and global teaching.
ShiriDevich begins her conference whirlwind with the virtual 2024 AIGA Design Conference, October 10-12, in which she will present in the session, “Design for Equity: Empowering Marginalized Voices through Design.” In the three-person panel discussion, ShiriDevich will speak about her efforts to engage local communities directly in the design process and utilize digital platforms to extend their impact and ensure sustainable empowerment. In this “horizontal” design approach, “stakeholders are equal partners and actively involved in every stage of the design process, ensuring that their voices and needs shape the outcome, collectively generating ideas and solutions,” ShiriDevich says.
Collaborating with communities will also be the topic of “Empowering Voices: Co-Design and Community Engagement in Graphic Narratives,” her presentation at SECAC 2024 in Atlanta, October 24-26. SECAC (formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference) is a longstanding non-profit organization that promotes the study and practice of the visual arts in higher education on a national basis. The 2024 conference is its 80th annual event.
For the conference CUMULUS 2024, “Design Across Borders: United in Creativity,” to be held October 16-18 in Monterrey, Mexico, ShiriDevich will reflect on her teaching experience through the International Student Exchange Program/American Higher Education Alliance Academy. In the spring of 2023, ShiriDevich was one of 20 professors nationwide to be selected to participate in the ISEP-AHEA Academy. After attending a two-month training, she was matched with an architecture professor in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the two professors taught a class that virtually joined 15 graphic design students from UNC Charlotte with architecture students in Guadalajara. The combined international cohort completed a project together in which the architecture students designed a building, and the graphic design students designed the branding for it. That experience will be discussed in the presentation “Global Collaboration for Sustainability: An Innovative Educational Approach.”
In April, ShiriDevich will further explore the horizontal design methodology in her presentation, “Horizontalidad as a Cultural Rhetorics Theory and Practice” at the annual convention of the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) in Baltimore.
ShiriDevich is an Iranian designer and entrepreneur who joined the faculty in the Department of Art & Art History in 2022. Her work and research have been featured in national and international conferences, exhibitions, and publications.